Michael Nogrady BUDA: ITS ORIGIN AND MEANING Represented by the Sumerian cross with two horizontal bars in the Hungarian coat of arms Paper read at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences on May 25, 2002, University of Toronto. Last update May 2020 ABSTRACT: It is proposed that the Hungarian proper name Buda was a title in antiquity and may have originated in the Sumerian language. The root bud matches with the Sumerian bad 'rod, scepter' the perpetual symbol of high office. The word-final element -a is identified as an old suffix that formed nouns and adjectives in both Sumerian and the Magyar language. The onomastic argument is substantiated by comparing the Hungarian coat of arms to Sumerian pictographs and cuneiform signs of a tree that has four branches. The symbol of the tree similarly depicted a ruler in both ancient Sumerian and Magyar society. The Magyars This paper differentiates between the ethnonym Hungarian and Magyar. The appellation Hungarian denotes the Turkic speaking group that conquered the Carpathian Basin in 896 C.E. The ethnonym Magyar denotes both the subjugated people in the Carpathian Basin and their language which is unique to every language in the surrounding area. The uniqueness of their language suggest that they may be autochthon to the area. Sir John Bowring (1792-1872) British philologist and statesman, whose translations, and anthologies of poetry from Oriental and European languages are highly regarded, supported this hypothesis in his Poetry of the Magyars. The Magyar language stands afar off and alone. The study of other tongues will be found of exceedingly little use towards its right understanding. It is moulded in a form essentially its own, and its construction and composition may be safely referred to an epoch when most of the living tongues of Europe either had no existence, or no influence on the Hungarian region (Bowring 1830: vi). Endre Neparáczki, faculty member of the Department of Genetics at the University of Szeged, examined the genetic composition of the conquering Hungarians of 896 C.E. in his Ph.D. thesis. The data obtained from sequencing of whole mtDNA samples substantiates that the conquering Hungarians were not Magyars.