It is doubtful whether the linguistic evidence can be used as historical data for "establishing" a Magyar homeland in the lands between the Middle Volga and the Ural Mountains. However, both the self-designation and the modern Hungarian language clearly point to the territory between the Ural and Kama Rivers known as Bashkiria (present-day Bashkortostan and the neighboring regions) as the background for the earliest phases of known Magyar history. To be sure, an Arabic geographic tradition, going back to the work of al-Balhi (d. 934), consistently uses "Bashkirs" (Bashjirt) to refer to the people otherwise known as Magyars. This ethnic name of Bulgar origin is also employed by Ibn Fadlan in his famous account of his 921-922 journey to the Volga Bulgars. Despite differences in terminology, both traditions of Arabic descriptions of the geography of Eastern Europe distinguish between two main groups of Magyars: one located between the (Volga) Bulgars and the Pechenegs; the other nomadizing in the steppe north of the Black Sea, between the Don and the Danube. The Bashkirian Magyars were at the origin of much of the literature on the Magyar ethnogenesis, mainly because of the fact that a Dominican mission sent in the 1230s to the East by the Hungarian prince (later King Béla IV) made the discovery of a group of Hungarian-speaking people in the Middle Volga region. On the basis of this account, scholars have imagined the thirteenth-century eastern Magyars as descendants of the "old" Hungarians who chose to stay in the homeland when others began their trek to the west that eventually resulted in the creation of the Hungarian kingdom.
Florin CurtaSource:
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