The Siberian

The Siberian origin of Hungarians was long hypothesized by European scholars. Here, Sigismund von Herberstein's 1549 map of Moscovia shows "Yugra from where the Hungarians originated" (Iuhra inde ungaroru origo), east of the Ob River. The Ural Mountains in the middle of the maps are labeled Montes dicti Cingulus Terræ ("The mountains called the Girdle of the Earth").The name "Uralic" refers to the suggested Urheimat (original homeland) of the Uralic family, which is often located in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, as the modern languages are spoken on both sides of this mountain range. Finno-Ugric is now sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic, though historically Finno-Ugric had been understood to exclude the Samoyedic languages.In recent times, linguists often place the Urheimat, (German: original homeland), of the Proto-Uralic language in the vicinity of the Volga River, west of the Urals, close to the Urheimat of the Indo-European languages, or to the east and southeast of the Urals. Gyula László places its origin in the forest zone between the Oka River and central Poland. E.N. Setälä and M. Zsirai place it between the Volga and Kama Rivers. According to E. Itkonen, the ancestral area extended to the Baltic Sea. P. Hajdu has suggested a homeland in western and northwestern Siberia. The first mention of a Uralic people is in Tacitus's Germania mentioning the Fenni (usually interpreted as referring to the Sami) and two other possibly Uralic tribes living in the farthest reaches of Scandinavia. In the late 15th century, European scholars noted the resemblance of the names Hungaria and Yugria, the names of settlements east of the Ural. They assumed a connection, but did not seek linguistic evidence.