The Continuity of the "Living Tree" Symbolism: Aleppo, Arpadian Coinage and Hungarian Hieroglyphs

Aleppo (Arabic: حلب, Ḥalab) is the most significant city in Northern Syria and the country's second most populous settlement. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, having served as a vital commercial hub along the Silk Road for millennia. There is no universally accepted etymology for the city's name. It appeared as Ha-lam in the Eblaite tablets as early as the 3rd millennium BC, while the Hittites referred to it as Halpa.

 

Figures 1/a. Decorated egg from Dobronak of the "living + tree" type

 

 

Figure 1/b. Readable representation of the World Tree, its reading: Good, bright, reborn.

Figure 1/c. The "living" (élő) hieroglyph

 

Figure 1/d. Another Dobronaki decorated egg, which is also a kind of implementation of the "living + wood" representation convention

 

Figure 1/e. The Living Tree, read from right to left, the reading of the tree: Shining God

 

 

At the 2026 Easter egg exhibition in Dobronak, I noticed several decorated eggs featuring a World Tree representation alongside the "living" (élő) hieroglyph (Fig. 1). This "living" hieroglyph is identifiable with the striped half (Arpadian stripes) of the Hungarian coat of arms and the letter "l" in the Szekler-Hungarian Rovas script.

While the World Tree depictions on these eggs vary, they can all be deciphered using the system of Hungarian hieroglyphs. The tradition of "readable" World Trees composed of Hungarian word-signs can be traced back to the Paleolithic across numerous points in Eurasia and the Americas. 

Easter eggs that combine these two units (the "living" hieroglyph and the tree) belong to the "living + tree" (élő + fa) typological convention. This convention is present not only on Hungarian decorated eggs (Fig. 1/a) but also on coinage from the Arpadian era (Fig. 2/c). These examples answer the question of whether the term "Tree of Life" (életfa) is an original designation or a recent academic invention. Based on Hungarian variants, this is not a modern scholarly term but a linguistic usage preserved from antiquity. Other designations (Sky-high Tree, World Tree, Sacred Tree, etc.) all evoke the same Milky Way (tree, world pillar, celestial river) identified with God.

Figure 2/a. Hittite/Luvian "city" sign as the World Pillar.

 

 

Figure 2/b. Sarmatian deer from Filippovka with similar hieroglyphs.

The Hittite Halpa origin of the name Aleppo allows us to glimpse how ancient this designation is and what it truly signifies. Our attention is drawn to the Hittites because the Hittite (Luvian) hieroglyphic script contains a logogram for "settlement/city" (Fig. 2/a) that resembles the "living" sign found on Easter eggs, the Arpadian stripes, and the Szekler letter "l." However, the use of the "living" sign was not restricted to a single people. Its widespread nature is illustrated by its presence in the Indus Valley script, alongside approximately 40 other signs identical to Hungarian characters (Fig. 2/d).

Sarmatian usage points to one possible historical link through which the "living" sign may have entered the Carpathian Basin (Fig. 2/b). The Sarmatians (descendants of the Medes and Mitanni) inhabited the Carpathian Basin even before the Roman era, and large masses of them became part of the modern Hungarian population. Of course, the character set of Hungarian hieroglyphic writing was already generally known and widespread from the Pyrenees to America during the Stone Age. Nevertheless, specific layers of usage and conventions—such as this "living + tree" composition—can be isolated and tracked, allowing for the identification of specific ethnicities or cultural influences.

For a long time, the acrophony of the "l" Rovas sign was debated, as the readings él (to live), élő (living), or élet (life) did not seem reconcilable with the "settlement/city" meaning of the Hittite logogram. Ultimately, the Halpa variant of Aleppo and the Dobronak Easter egg provided the answer: 

The prefix hal- in the city's name is cognate with the name of the Greek sun god Helios, which hides the equivalent of our word élő (living). This is also related to the name Allah and the word Elohim (gods). Such correspondences between divine names and the Hungarian word élő are not isolated cases. It is a widespread phenomenon that common words in the Hungarian language are cognate with the divine names of foreign peoples. This massive linguistic and paleo-religious correlation justifies the historical conclusion that, at the end of the Paleolithic, Hungarian or a culture closely related to it exerted a significant influence on its environment. 

The suffix -pa in the city's name, meaning "tree" (fa), can be approached through the name of Jaffa (formerly Joppe, meaning "Good Tree" / Jó fa – VG) and the polis - falu correspondence. The ancestor of the word polis was likely adopted by the Greeks from the Sabirs (Hurrians) in Anatolia. The name Jaffa also dates back several millennia; for instance, it is mentioned as Yapu in 15th-century BC Egyptian records, showing a p-f sound shift at the beginning of the word.

These three words (Alpa, Yapu, polis) testify to the strong connection of settlement names to the Milky Way and the World Tree identified with God. The connection of the "tree" to God can be inferred from the fact that both élő (living) and jó (good) are epithets of the God of the Hungarians, from which divine names evolved in the Bronze Age and Antiquity. Thus, Bronze Age settlements were most notable for the "tree cult" practiced there at the time of their foundation.

The name of the city Assur ("ancient stem/lineage" or "ancient lord" / ős szár, ősúr) is also tied to this tree cult, as evidenced by Assyrian World Tree depictions. This usage of words and signs, and this paleo-religious worldview, is thanks to the pre-Sumerian Sabirs (also known as Hurrians), who formed the core population of Assyria. Notably, according to the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the ancient name of the Hungarians was Sabir (Savartoi asphaloi).

Simo Parpola attributes great significance to the Assyrian World Tree, viewing it as the foundation of European and Jewish culture. This is supported by the archaeological framework established by Kornél Bakay regarding a once-existent Hungarian or Hungarian-related culture. 

The sign usage of this Bronze Age tree cult has been preserved in Hungarian Easter eggs (Fig. 1/a) and Arpadian-era coins (Fig. 2/c). Through Hungarian hieroglyphic usage, a compound word expressing this paleo-religious association has survived—the same one that created the name of Aleppo ("Living Tree") some five thousand years ago.

 

 Figure 2/c. Arpadian denarius with the reading "Lyukó, the very great radiant living lord".

 

Figure 2/d. Indus Valley sign depicting the world pillar supporting the sky.

Notes

(1) Simo Parpola (2007) writes: "To date, I have systematically reviewed approximately 75 percent of the Sumerian vocabulary and identified more than 1,700 words and morphemes that can be reasonably associated with Uralic and/or Altaic etymologies, allowing for systematic sound shifts and semantic shifts. Somewhat surprisingly, the words of potential Altaic etymology represent only a small minority (about seven percent) of the total, and it is unlikely that this picture will change substantially by the time the project is completed. While a close relationship between Sumerian and the Altaic family as a whole thus appears excluded, a genetic link with Turkic seems possible, as most of the correspondences are with Turkic languages, and these are core words and grammatical morphemes also found in Uralic languages.

Virtually all the compared items are thus Uralic, mostly Finno-Ugric. Most of them are found in at least one major Uralic branch besides Finnish, so they are certainly very ancient, dating back to at least 3000 BC. A large proportion of the words are known only from the Finnish language, but this does not prevent them from being ancient as well, as they lack [other] etymologies and are largely words common to all eight Finnic languages.

This collection of words covers the full spectrum of the Sumerian vocabulary (Fig. 5) and includes 478 common verbs of all possible types, such as verbs of being, bodily processes, sensory perception, emotion, creation, communication, motion, etc.; body parts, kinship terms, natural phenomena, animals, plants, weapons, tools, and various technical terms reflecting the cultural level of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods (in the fields of agriculture, food production, animal husbandry, weaving, metallurgy, building technology, etc.). I emphasize that the majority of the words in question are basic words, and 75 percent of them show very good formal and semantic agreement. ...

The question may arise as to why these numerous lexical correspondences with the Uralic language were not discovered earlier. The explanation is simple. A good knowledge of Uralic languages, as well as an understanding of the intricacies of Sumerian phonology and the cuneiform writing system, is necessary to recognize Sumerian-Uralic connections, and such a combination of expertise is rare. Very few Assyriologists know Uralic languages, and experts in Uralic studies know no Sumerian. Naturally, alongside the necessary specialized expertise, the will to seriously study the question would also be required—and this will has been entirely absent from Assyriology for the last 120 years. ...

The Sumerians thus arrived in Mesopotamia from the north, where the Uralic language family is located. ... I would not rule out that their homeland can be identified with the Maykop culture of the North Caucasus, which flourished between 3700 and 2900 BC and was in commercial contact with the Late Uruk culture. Placing the Sumerian homeland in this area would help explain the non-Uralic features of Sumerian, as the Kartvelian languages spoken to the south are ergative and have a verbal prefix system similar to Sumerian. The Sumerian words for 'wheel' and 'harness for draft animals,' shared with Uralic, show that its separation from Uralic occurred after the invention of wheeled vehicles, which have been known in the Maykop culture since approximately 3500 BC."

The territory of the Maykop culture became Sabir a thousand years later, meaning the Sumerians emerged from among the Sabirs. However, phenomena indicating linguistic affinity are not limited to the Sumerians but can be detected more broadly—for instance, in the naming of cities and gods. Based on the occurrences of the Sabir ancestral sentence-sign, this larger area is linked to the Sabirs. Similar conclusions regarding the once-significant influence of Hungarian or a Hungarian-related culture can also be formulated based on the archaeological horizon.

Archaeologist Kornél Bakay summarizes the uncovered processes of Hungarian prehistory as follows (Archaeological Sources of Our Prehistory, Vol. III): "the so-called Pre-Scythian ancestral population including the ancient Hungarians (which, according to our hypothesis, was not an Indo-Iranian speaking population!) migrated continuously from the Upper Paleolithic from the south, in various waves, towards the north, reaching the Ural region, the Minusinsk Basin, and the territory of Western Siberia mostly through the Caucasus and Central Asia (the eastern side of the Caspian Sea) and the current North Chinese region. This vast landscape already possessed extremely favorable conditions four to five thousand years ago, both ecologically and in other respects." (Bakay, ibid., p. 141). "N.L. Chlenova clearly saw and attempted to prove with archaeological methods that from the end of the 3rd millennium BC, a massive unified region was established from the Pacific Ocean, China, and the Ordos region all the way to Central Europe, with a common material culture (arrowheads, daggers, knives, horse tack, ceramics, stone box graves) and a common spirituality, whose defining archaeological cultures were the Seima-Turbino, Karasuk, and Tagar cultures." (Bakay, ibid., pp. 149–150).

 

 

Bibliography

Bakay Kornél (1993): Őstörténetünk régészeti forrásai III. kötet [Archaeological Sources of Our Prehistory, Vol. III].

Parpola, Simo (1993): The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Mysticism and Greek Philosophy. In: Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 52(3): 161–208.

Parpola, Simo (2016): Etymological Dictionary of the Sumerian Language. Winona Lake, Indiana: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project. Pp. xliv + 426; xxviii + 436.

Parpola, Simo (2007): Sumerian: A Uralic Language (I). In: L. Kogan et al. (eds.), Language in the Ancient Near East. Proceedings of the 53rd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Vol. I, Pt. 2 (Babel und Bibel 4/2, Winona Lake, Indiana): 181–210.

Bundschuh, Manfred: Excerpt from Simo Parpola: The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy (academia.edu).

Varga Géza (2017): Magyar hieroglif írás [Hungarian Hieroglyphic Writing]. Institute for the History of Writing, Budapest.

Varga Géza (2018): Az égig érő fa ábrázolásai [Representations of the Sky-high Tree].

Varga Géza (2019): A filippovkai szarmata szarvas jelei [Signs of the Sarmatian Deer from Filippovka].

Varga Géza (2019): Közszavak és istennevek [Common Words and Divine Names].

Varga Géza (2024): Világfa az ősmagyar korból [World Tree from the Ancient Hungarian Era].

Varga, Géza (2024): A legkorábbi világfa ábrázolások [The Earliest World Tree Representations].

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Varga Géza (2025): Az Ősúr olvasatú asszír életfák Assur isten nevét őrzik [Assyrian Trees of Life with the Reading Ősúr 'Ancient Lord' Preserve the Name of the God Assur].

Varga Géza (2026): Answering Simo Parpola's Question on the Sabir Origin of the Assyrian World Tree.

Varga Géza (2026): Deciphering the Meaning of the Arpadian Stripes with the Help of an Indus Valley Sign and a Shingle from Velemér.

Varga Géza: A világfa vita [The World Tree Debate].

Varga Géza: Árpád kori érmek hieroglifikus szövegei [Hieroglyphic Texts of Arpadian-era Coins].

Varga Géza: Szarmata tartalom [Sarmatian Content].

 

 

 

Varga Géza