A well-known unknown writing: The Székely script

This chapter introduces the Székely script, whose known monuments are all in Hungarian but which is essentially unknown to international scholarship, and asks what it reveals about the origins of the Székelys. It describes the features the script preserves from the Aramaic script family, such as right-to-left writing and limited marking of vowels, the 34 graphemes of the historical alphabet, and the 67 known monuments: eighteen church inscriptions in Székely Land dated from the late 13th to the 17th century, and other records including a calendar written shortly after 1450, the 1515 Istanbul inscription preserved in a copy of Hans Dernschwam’s diary, and János Telegdi’s alphabet book of 1598. The church inscriptions are interpreted as signatures expressing Székely identity, comparable to graffiti tags. It traces the view of the script as Hun-Scythian heritage from the court of Matthias Corvinus to the mid-19th century, and its later cryptographic use. On its origin, it argues that the Székely alphabet rests on a Turkic alphabet closer to the eastern variants, especially the Yenisei inscriptions, than to the Western Turkic alphabets found in former Khazar, Danube Bulgar and Avar territories, a pattern explained by Dimitrij Vasil’ev’s theory of regional Turkic script variants. It also outlines the alphabet’s historical stratification and a 10th–11th-century pottery fragment from Southern Transdanubia bearing four Székely-type signs. It concludes that the script was tied to the Székely ethnicity from the earliest times, supporting the view that the Székelys joined the Hungarians as an independent ethnic group before the 10th century.