Claim:
The Magyars/Hungarians are the descendants of the Huns.
Rebuttal
After 453 BC the remainder of the Hun people fled to the east and soon scattered completely, thus there was no way for them to become part of the Magyar tribal alliance neither in the Carpathian basin, nor earlier.
In detail:
Because of the way nomadic tribal alliances were organised, all of these were made up of many different ethnic group and peoples. Some tribes might have split up to join different alliances, while one of these alliances might have been labelled by surrounding peoples using the name of an entity occupying the same territory earlier on. The central encampment of Attila’s Huns was indeed in the southern part of today’s Hungarian plain, but when after the death of the high king (453) their earlier allies defeated them, the Huns retreated to the east and most probably merged into the Turkic tribal alliances that followed one another, because they didn’t get to be mentioned as Huns at any later point. Thus the Magyars arriving in the Carpathian basin more than 400 years later surely couldn’t find any Huns here.
The Huns retreating to the east could only maintain a separate ethnic identity for a couple of decades. Thus when the Magyar tribes living in a Turkic tribal alliance during the 8-9th centuries got considerably stronger and started to organise their own alliance, this comprised several other ethnic groups other than Magyar-speakers, just like all similar tribal bonds, but the Huns could not be among the various peoples that joined it.
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