The origin of the Avars

The European history of the Avars started in 558 AD when a delegation of never-before-seen people arrived at the imperial court in Constantinople. "At the same time, the strange race of the so-called Avars reached Byzantium, and everyone in the city thronged to gaze at them, as they had never seen such a people. They wore their hair very long at the back, tied with ribbons and plaited. The rest of their dress was like that of the other Huns.” (Theophanes: Chronicle). The Avars originate from the territory of today’s Mongolia in Inner Asia, where a large group set off towards the west in context with the decline of the Juan-Juan Empire and the emergence of the Turks. According to the report of the Turk legates, who arrived in Constantinople ‘in search of their runaway slaves’, a part of the Avars has remained under Turkic rule, while the runaway group counted about 20,000 people.
On their way towards the west, the Avars arrived first into the steppe region north of the Caucasus and the Black Sea, where they spent about a decade and, as the allies of Constantinople, subjugated several local nomadic tribes. The Avar population arriving in the Carpathian Basin in 568 AD was already admixed with these diverse steppe peoples; they quickly overthrew the Gepid and Langobard kingdoms. The peoples of the Avar alliance, led by the khagan, settled amongst the persisting remains of the local population; communities with a Gepid material culture and identity lived on in the Tisza Region and Transylvania, while ones continuing with Langobard and Late Antique traditions in Tansdanubia under the new rule.
The first sixty years of the history of the Avar Khaganate were about clashes and peace treaties with the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople sent annuities and gifts, of which the allies and subordinates of the Avars also benefited. This status quo ended with the unsuccessful siege of Constantinople in 626 AD. After that, the Avars practically disappear from Byzantine sources; they are mentioned more frequently again at the end of the 8th century AD, in context with the military campaigns of Charlemagne.
Besides historical sources, archaeological evidence and anthropological and archaeogenetical results have proven that a large population arrived in the Carpathian Basin from the east at the end of the 6th century AD. In the following period, horse burials and partial horse burials (where only the hide of the animal with the leg bones and skulls was interred) became relatively frequent. The graves were often furnished with weaponry and armour reflecting the steppe nomadic warfare, as well as the insignia of the elite, the types of which also indicate that politically and culturally, at the time of the Avar Khaganate, the Eurasian steppe world included the Carpathian Basin.
The clans, families, and other groups (often also in kinship) settled in the central zone of the Khaganate, while their non-Avar allies occupied the surrounding regions. Accordingly, the archaeological traces of the persisting local population and the groups immigrating from diverse parts of Europe (including Slavic peoples) appear isolated between the dwellings of Avars and on the peripheries of the Khaganate.