A legkorábbi világfa ábrázolások
I address the
question posed by Éva Pócs, namely whether the concept of the world tree
existed among the Hungarian conquerors and whether this can be proven, in a
series of articles entitled The World Tree Debate. In the articles entitled Definition
of the world tree, Unique hieroglyphs depicting the world tree and Types of conventions for depicting the world tree, I defined
the world tree and listed its characteristics. I also presented examples from
the earliest ones, through the world trees of the ancient Hungarian crown and the
conquest era, to the world trees of today's folk art. The identical
use of symbols, conventions of representation and language use prove that the
tradition of representing the world tree, which has been valid across a wide
geographical area for thousands of years, developed and spread under the
influence of a unified and continuous ancient religion. This use of symbols,
which has left its mark on the world's known writing systems, but has remained
in its most untouched form in Hungarian hieroglyphic writing and
Székely writing, is identical to the use of symbols in the Stone Age religion.
In this article, I examine where and when this tradition may have developed.
Figure 1. Spain, hieroglyphs from
the Stone Age Marbella sentence reminiscent of the world tree, read as Zsendülő Dana ragyog(j) (left), and at the bottom right of the figure, the
Székely writing "r" (ragyog), "d" (Dana) and
"zs" (zsenge "to blossom, to rise, to be reborn")
Saak Tarontsi, based on rock
carvings preserved from the last 40,000 years in the former Hurrian, Sabir
and areas, concludes: "As can be seen from the tens of thousands of
scattered pictograms (rock drawings) in the geographical and historical area of
the Armenian Highlands, pre-civilisation people were extremely successful in
creating an ingenious visual system, which was in fact the first fundamental
principle, the prototype of all subsequent historical writing systems" (Tarontsi/2024/17).
Based on
acrophony reconstructions carried out in the 1990s (which I report on in the
volume Magyar hieroglif írás [Hungarian
Hieroglyphic Writing]), these word signs, which originated in the Eden region of the Near East and spread
from the Pyrenees to America as early as the Stone Age, served from the
beginning to record words in Hungarian or languages related to Hungarian.
There are
linguistic phenomena that support the Hungarian and ancient religious origins
of the world tree concept. One such phenomenon is the similarity between Hungarian common words and the names of gods of
foreign peoples. Another example is that the name
Eden resembles the Hungarian word edény (vessel), while the archaic
decoration of our vessels, which can be read as in Hungarian, evokes Eden.
This result is consistent with the findings of László Götz (1994), Simo Parpola
(2007) and others, who have concluded that the Sumerian
and Hungarian languages are related. István Tóth (2025) adds to
the above with research findings supporting the relationship between the Hurrian/ , Sabir
, Hungarian and Penuti languages. This is why, during the acrophony
reconstructions carried out in the late 1990s, we were able to identify the
Hurrian word ushu "copper" (Varga/2017/286) as the ancestor of
the Székely runic letter "u/ú" just as the Armenian word waske "iron"
and the Hungarian word vas (and the related runic letter "v")
are genetically related to these. Because, it seems, the ancient religious sign
system only changes with blood.
Kornél Bakay
reports on the existence of an archaeological culture of the same nature that
existed at the end of the Palaeolithic period and for thousands of years
thereafter, covering large areas of Eurasia (Bakay/2005).
The results of
Zoltán Juhász's (2014) research into folk music have proven that Hungarian folk
music has unique connections with other folk music on the Eurasian continent
and even in America. According to his findings, Hungarian folk music occupies a
central place in this system of folk music connections. I might add that the
ancient layer of our folk music, like the world tree, was originally an element
of ancient religious rituals.
All of this
suggests that the world tree, which can be read in Hungarian, is a product of
the ancient Hungarian religion that developed and spread widely during the
Palaeolithic period, and a legacy that has survived in continuous use to this
day. There is no reason to doubt Genevieve von Petzinger's assertion that this
seemingly uniform set of cave symbols, found all over the world, including
Africa, developed at least 100,000 years ago. Contrary to Éva Pócs's position, which betrays a lack of knowledge of rovology, we did not have to adopt the use of symbols related
to the world tree from others after the conquest of the Carpathian Basin (1).
Figure 2. The reading of the left half of the
seemingly incomplete hieroglyphic text on the wall of the El Castillo cave in
Spain: Great Sky Stem (in modern Hungarian: Great Sky Lord), the
complete reading is approx. Great Sky Lord in the sky ... in the sky,
photogram Based on
Genevieve
Figure 3. In
the table of
15,000-year-old Hungarian-identifiable signs from Mas d'Azil (Pyrenees), I have marked in red those that depict the world tree
Figure 5. The
7500-year-old cow statue from Szentgyörgyvölgy (above), with the hieroglyphs for stem, ten, sar(ok) and sky in
the middle row, and below them the corresponding "sz",
"nt/tn", "s" and "g" runes, of which szár means
"plant stem, lord", ten means "life, god" and
"g" (sky) represents the world tree
Figure 6. The
7,000-year-old Tordos pottery object Roska from the site of , similar to the Hungarian coat of arms,
depicts the world tree standing on a triple mound in a pictorial, god-evoking
montage, which reads: Ten's heavenly kingdom shines (?), shone (?)
The European cave sign set discovered by Genevieve von
Petzinger (Figure 4) and the Tepe Yahya sign set (Figure 8) are of particular
importance to our article examining the origins of the world tree because both
contain a punctuation mark depicting the world tree, i.e. a characteristic
ligature depicting the world tree.
Among Petzinger's European symbols, the Shining Sky punctuation mark depicts the world tree (the third symbol in the first row, Figure 4).
Among the Tepe Yahya signs, the Dana zsen (Dana zsendül/reborn) punctuation mark is also a representation of the world tree, the lowest ligature on the right among the signs marked in red (Figure 8). These ancient signs are still in use today. This is related to the old Szabír (szavartü aszfalü) name of the Magyars, as well as the Sumerian-Hungarian language relationship demonstrated by Simo Parpola and László Götz. For example, the elements of a stove tile montage from Kalotaszeg record several hieroglyphic sentences, including the sentence sign Dana zsen "Dana, the reborn". The most important symbols of the Kalotaszeg world tree enable the reading of the phrase Dana ős zsen ten (in modern Hungarian: Dana ős zsendülő isten, meaning "Dana, the ancient reborn god"). The past six thousand years have changed almost nothing in the use of symbols. Considering that there is no trace of the use of this sentence symbol among neighbouring peoples (Slovaks, Romanians, Czechs, Croats, Austrians, Serbs, etc.), this points to the continuity of Hungarian symbol usage and dismisses Éva Pócs's 2023 idea as a misconception.
A similar structure (a sentence sign consisting of
word signs) can be found in the sentence sign depicting the world tree standing
on a mountain on the Neolithic pottery from Liège, Ten sar (in modern
Hungarian: Ten úr) (Figure 7).
- The sentence sign Lyukó szár (in modern Hungarian: Lyukó úr), found on the Kőalja hilltop in Ózd, is also a sentence sign composed of word signs (Figure 13).
- The same tradition of representation is represented by the 4,000-year-old BMAC culture's Ten sar "Ten úr" sentence sign, which evokes the world tree, and its Hun-era counterpart from Várhegy in Tusnád (Figure 16).
The latter anthropomorphic sign montages also identify the world tree (the Milky Way) with the god. This interpretation also determines the ancient religious ideology of later world tree depictions. In other words, the depictions of the world tree are documents of a unified ancient religious belief system spanning several millennia and great geographical distances, which have been preserved by the steppe peoples. There is no reason to believe that the Hungarian folk depictions of the world tree are not the heirs of the Scythian, Hun, Avar and Hungarian world trees. Nor do the facts allow us to attribute the short sentences formed from these Hungarian symbols and readable in Hungarian to foreign origins. These are elements of the Hungarian ancient religion's symbol system, which was already widespread from the Pyrenees to America in the Stone Age.
The latter claim (the spread of Hungarian symbols in America) is supported by the symbols and short texts of the Native American folk symbol system (Figure 17).
The Stone Age ligatures shown consist of Hungarian-identical word signs and are prototypes of later sentence signs with a similar structure depicting the world tree.
Figure 12. Altay, detail
of a rock painting in the Khovd Valley (circa 2500 BC, based on A. A. Kovalev and Ch.
Munkhbayar), reading of the anthropomorphic punctuation mark: Dana szár zsen
(in modern Hungarian: Mr Dana zsendül/rises/is reborn), on the
right-hand side of the image, from bottom to top, are the Székely script
characters for "plant stem, lord", "d" (Dana "name
of a god") and "zs" (zsenge, zsendülő "rising,
reborn")
Figure 13. Altay, detail
of a rock painting in the Khovd Valley (from around 2500 BC, according to A. A. Kovalev and Ch. Munkhbayar), a representation of the world tree read as Lyukó
sar ős ten (in modern Hungarian: Lyukó úristen), with the Székely
script "ly" (Lyukó), "s" (sar "corner,
lord"), ős and ten signs from the bottom to the top on the
right edge of the figure
Figure 14. Altay, the branch shining in the sky (in modern Hungarian: Lord shining in the sky) sentence mark from the Karakol cemetery in Altay, a symbol of God written in Hungarian characters, identical to the world tree, readable in Hungarian (based on Jetatyerina Devlet and Marianna Devlet), at the bottom right of the figure, the Székely script signs "g" (sky) and "r" (shining), as well as the hieroglyph for "Lord" from a plate from Magyarszombatfa (the hieroglyphic version of the Székely letter "sz")
Figure 15. Ózd Kőalja-tető Late Copper Age, approx. 3000 BC. The hieroglyphs on the pottery fragment (based on Tünde Horváth) record the phrase Ragyogó Lyukó szár (in modern Hungarian: Ragyogó Lyukó úr) (photograph)
Figure 16. The 4000-year-old anthropomorphic sar Ten (in modern
Hungarian: Mr. Ten) sentence sign (left) and the Tusnád
Vártető Hun-era sar ős ten (in modern Hungarian: Lord God) sentence sign are representatives of the same millennia-old
steppe sign tradition, both symbolising God as the world tree standing on the
mountain.
The Hopi inscription in Figure 17, depicting a tulip-like world tree standing on a mountain, is recent, but based on widespread views about the peopling of America, the Indian sign system itself may be 10-30,000 years old.
Figure 18. The High
Stone, a "decorated stone" dating from around 3000 BC, can be
seen at on the
Welsh Anglesey. with the words "good, shining lord" inscribed on it, from
which the ligature of the shining lord (in modern Hungarian, ragyogó
úr) is known from other occurrences as a representation of the world tree.
Figure 21. Assyrian tree of life no. 338, ligature of the hieroglyphs for ancestor (below) and stem (above) (image of the Assyrian tree of life based on Simo Parpola), on the right edge of the figure, a plate stem from Magyarszombatfa, below it the Székely script ancestor sign
Figure 24. Krisztián Turovszki published the image on the left side of the
figure on a social
networking site, with the comment "Black-topped painted pottery Naqada I. (3900-3650 BC) culture, Egypt",
with the ligature depicting the world tree in the middle, and the Székely
script "g" (sky), tprus (tapar ancestor "szabír ancestor")
and ancestor signs from the bottom right to the top.
The
multi-branched world tree depicted in Figure 24 records the text tapar,
or tapar ancestor "szabír ancestor". Below it is the
sky (one of the conventions of depicting the "tree holding up the
sky"), above it is the ancestor, possibly the hieroglyph for
zsen "to rise, to resurrect, to be reborn" (due to the worn
condition of the image, the reading is uncertain). The reading of these three
signs is: Sky tapar ancestor zsen (in modern Hungarian: The heavenly
szabír ancestor zsendül "rises/is reborn"). In other words, the
influence of Subartu reached Egypt. This seems to confirm the position
expressed by János Borbola in his book Az egyiptomi ősmagyar nyelv (The
Ancient Hungarian Language of Egypt), according to which the earliest Egyptian
language was related to Hungarian.
Figure 25. The Székely equivalents
(top left) of the symbols on the Anau
seal (centre,
photogram) dating from
around 4500 BC and the
ligature zsen Ten (in modern Hungarian: zsendülő Isten,
"resurrecting God") on a Kaitag carpet (top right).
For this
chapter, the second symbol from the left in Figure 25, the ligature zsen ten
"rising/resurrecting god", is the most interesting. This is
because both signs in this ligature represent the world tree. Together, they
remind us of the moment at Christmas when the Sun is reborn in the gap of the
Milky Way (the world tree, which is identical with God).
The spindle
whorl in Figure 26 is a spatial model of the world composed of symbols
reminiscent of Eden. In the centre, in accordance with the rules of the world
model, is the divine source from which four sacred rivers flow to the four
corners of the world. The four trees and four rivers are also depicted on the
"corners" and "side dividers". The hieroglyphs for Lyukó,
zsen and "river" are highlighted on the left side of the figure.
The corresponding Székely hieroglyphs "ly" (hole, Lyukó),
"zs" (zsen "resurrecting", "reborn"), Ak
"stream, Heracles" and ügy "river" can be read
from top to bottom on the right edge of the illustration.
Notes
(1) In theory,
it is also conceivable that the word signs were pronounced differently in other
languages and had different meanings, but there is no evidence for this as yet.
It is characteristic of the state of research that Genevieve von Petzinger does
not mention the Hungarian identity of more than half of the signs and, in her
opinion, the meaning of the Stone Age signs has been forgotten. According to
Harald Haarmann, based on correspondence with him, the Székely script is a
great mystery. He obviously noticed but could not find an explanation for the
large number of formal similarities between the Vincsa signs and the Székely
signs.
In contrast,
thanks to our acrophony reconstruction carried out in the 1990s, we have been
able to approximate the former sound and meaning of our Stone Age word signs.
With the help of these reconstructed word signs, we can read a series of
meaningful Stone and Bronze Age sentences. This result could be refuted,
modified or confirmed by starting from another writing system. In this way, it
might be possible to arrive at a different sound form and meaning for the early
writing monuments examined. Such other writings could be Chinese writing or the
folk signs used by American Indians. These possible checks will presumably
provide information that will allow for clarification of the same widespread
Stone Age primitive religious sign usage.
Summary
Based on the
examples presented in this article and in the referenced writings, the Stone
Age primitive religion that used Hungarian hieroglyphic symbols to represent
the most important images of primitive religion may have developed in Africa.
The set of symbols and the associated ancient religious belief system may have
been completed in the area of Eden, at least 100,000 to 50,000 years
ago. I published a description of this hieroglyphic writing system in a volume
entitled Magyar hieroglif írás (Hungarian
Hieroglyphic Writing), illustrated with approximately 1,000 figures, in 2017,
and supplemented it with nearly 1,500 additional examples in the blog of writing historian Géza Varga.
The smaller
group of symbols discovered by Genevieve von Petzinger in caves on different
continents around the world may be similar because they originated in Africa at
least 100,000 years ago. About 50,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens
sapiens scattered from the area of Eden took with them a more extensive
set of symbols, more similar to the Székely script, to the continents they
populated.
Several of the
elementary symbols in the resulting sign set depict the world tree, which was
identified with God, as this was the most important theme of the ancient
religion (Figures 1-7). Sentence signs depicting the world tree, formed from
word signs, were already developed in the Stone Age (Figures 6-20), and this
structure (the process of forming pictorial sentence signs from word signs) is
still in use today. The triple mound and double cross of the Hungarian coat of
arms also depict a world tree. A country is a
"country of God" sentence sign, the 7,000-year-old prototype of which is known from Tordos. The common
signs were incorporated into later writing systems in new areas and survived in
the sign sets of folk art and religions. For example, the tulip is the favourite flower of the Hungarian people because for thousands of years they have used the
image of the tulip as a symbol of the world tree, which is identified with God (Figure
10).
Literature
Asko Parpola
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from the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus, Budapest, ISBN 963 03 9613 0
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www.newscientist.com
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Varga Géza (2018): Sumerian-Hungarian sign parallels
Varga Géza (2018): Is the word Eden related to our word for vessel?
Varga Géza (2018): Tordos-Vincsa
idol with the hieroglyphic phrase "Good Lord"
Varga Géza (2018): Early formal variants of the phrase "tprus" (tapar us
"Szabír ancestor")
Varga Géza (2019): Anthropomorphic "Lord Ten" sentence sign from the 4000-year-old BMAC culture
Varga Géza (2019): Nearly thirty Hungarian-like signs in the pre-Sumerian Tepe Yahya sign set
Varga Géza (2019): Hungarian-like signs on an Anau seal dating from around 4500 BC
Varga Géza (2020): Hopi bowl with
the phrase Ogur
Varga Géza (2021): Most of the European cave symbols published by Genevieve in are identical to the Székely symbols
Varga Géza (2021): Kalotaszeg stove tile with the hieroglyphic phrase "Good Ancestor"
Varga Géza
(2022): Welsh stone
circle with legible symbols from around 3000 BC
Varga Géza
(2023): Szabírok, i.e.
Hungarians
Varga Géza (2024): Neolithic pottery from the site in Liège, Belgium, with the phrase "The Reborn
Lord"
Varga Géza (2024): The World Tree Debate
Varga Géza (2024): The World Tree from the Ancient Hungarian Era
Varga Géza (2024): The world tree in the age of the Hungarian conquest
Varga Géza (2024): Folk depictions of the world tree
Varga Géza (2024): Unique hieroglyphs depicting the world tree
Varga Géza (2024): Types of Conventions for Depicting the World Tree
Varga Géza (2024): The Ragyogó
Lyukó szár sentence on Tünde Horváth's Late Copper Age pottery
Varga Géza (2025): Reading American Indian folk writings with the help of Hungarian
hieroglyphic writing
Varga Géza (2025): The definition of the world tree
Varga Géza (2025): The definition and characteristics of the world tree
Varga Géza (2025): Hungarian sentences on Altai Bronze Age deer stones published by A.A. Kovalev and Ch.
Munkhbayar
Varga Géza (2025): Assyrian trees of life bearing the name of the god Assur, read as Ősúr
Varga Géza (2025): The Minoan-influenced jug from Kalkani near Mycenae with the ligature of
God
Varga Géza (2025): World tree depicting a tulip
Varga Géza: Reading the hieroglyphs on the 7,000-year-old clay object excavated by
Márton Roska in Tordos
Varga Géza (2025): The Dana ligature from Marbella depicts the world
tree, which is identical with God
Varga Géza (2025): Hieroglyphic text depicting the world tree on a Mayan
jade face from Guatemala
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