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There is a tendency among historians writing in English to restrict the use of the name "Magyars" to the first generation of steppe warriors that settled in the Middle Danube region shortly before 900 C.E. and eventually established the medieval state known as Hungary. However, both the terms "Magyars" and "Hungarians" were in use at the same time, although not by the same people. In a letter to Dado, bishop of Verdun, which must be dated some time before 923, the unknown sender, who most likely spoke a Germanic language, explained that the "Hungri" were called so because of a terrible famine that they had once withstood. The word "Ungri" appears in the earliest works in Old Church Slavonic, the Lives of Saints Constantine and Methodius. Similar forms derived from the Turkic word Onoghur appear in tenth-century Jewish sources, such as the Sepher Yosippon written in Italy ca. 940, or the letter sent from Spain by Hasdai ibn Shaprut to the king of the Khazars at some point between 955 and 962. An important group of geographic works in Arabic containing details about the peoples of Eastern Europe derives from a now lost treatise written by al-Jayhani, the vizier of the Samanid emir Nasr ibn Ahmad (914-943). This treatise inspired the work of Ibn Rusta (who wrote ca. 930); the treatise known as Hudūd al-Ālam written in 982/3; and the work of Gardīzī (writing between 1050 and 1053). All these authors employ the ethnic name Majagar (Majgar). The word is most likely the Magyar self-designation and has been explained linguistically as a combination of two other ethnic names, both of Finno-Ugrian origin. One of them was very similar to the modern self-designation of the Voguls (Manshi, meaning "the people"). The other was Er, a name recorded by tenth-century Arabic geographers and currently used by Tatars, Chuvash, and Cheremis to refer to the Udmurts. This has been further interpreted as evidence for the Magyars coming into being as a merger of two Finno-Ugrian groups. Florin CurtaSource:
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