Béla III, the Turk

With a hat-tip to Davidski, the Árpád(ide) Dynasty may have been Irano-Turk. Péter L. Nagy and his team have tested King Béla III's genome.

The base stock of Pannonia is Central European, as of Late Antiquity mostly Slavic. This extension of the Eurasian steppe took on a Eurasian elite during the Dark Ages, from the Urals. The Khanty/Mansi stock was sufficient to change the language as had not happened, for instance, in Bronze Age Aquitaine.

But the Hungarian elite entered modernity convinced that they were Turks. It took a long time over the 1800s to convince the Magyar scholar that his language was related to Finnish. I'd always attributed the Turk "myth" in Magyar high society to its chivalric tradition; like the Turks were chivalric. The two tribes' similarities derive from a mere accident of geography and from the needs of the horse. To borrow from the biologists, their cultures were paraphyletic.

Turns out the old Magyar elite knew better than I do: Béla belongs to R-Z2123, like the Bashkirs of 2500 BC. So, that's from Álmos and his son Árpád.

What we're dealing with is like Mongols leading Turks into battle; here, it was one Central Asian family leading a nobility of Finno-Ugric north Eurasians.