Page - 245 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

245The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum As a matter of fact, the same works also include—sometimes very lengthy— accounts of the peoples of the steppe, or Scythia, “an immensely large country occupying one-third of Asia,” from where the Magyars had also once departed in search of a better land and where “even today, entire nations move around by the thousands because of the barrenness of the soil.”121 They live mostly as nomadic shepherds—thus in a stage more advanced than the Sámi—and are also acknowledged to be bloodthirsty warriors. However, though the Greeks and Romans may have regarded them as barbarians, it is very true of the Scythians that they achieved more good by relying on nature than the Greeks by all the learned instruction of their philoso- phers […]. In addition, this people never bowed to a foreign nation, they even founded the Parthian and Bactrian empire, they defeated Cyrus and Darius, they put Alexander the Great to nothing, and the Romans never dared to attack them. Contradicting some earlier claims, it is stated that though they are pagans, like some other nations in this world, they never had any idol either cast or carved, they respected marital life, they culti- vated the art of war, and many of them did not eschew the sciences ei- ther; they even had philosophers, studied the rules of justice, and many other laudable things were found among them, for which reason the Apostle Paul distinguishes them from the barbarians, Col. 3:11.122 In these descriptions, in which the standard international knowledge on the subject was recycled for Hungarian audiences, we thus meet savages and bar- barians, both of whom have some potential to be recognized as “noble.” With regard to the reception and uses of this knowledge, because of the ideological aspects mentioned earlier, there was a strong presumption in favor of accentu- ating this potential in the case of “Scythians,” and against the same in the case of the Sámi—even without the provocation of the Demonstratio. To pre-empt and counter this, Hell resorted, among other things, to a bizarre etymology of Carjelia (or Karjelia), supposedly derived from karjel: the Hungarian com- pound jel(es) kar (i.e., “illustrious arm”); and to lend further support to the rep- resentation of the “Lapps” of “Karjelia” as heroic warriors, he included the 121 Vetsei, Magyar Geografiája, 355, 357. 122 Vetsei, Magyar Geografiája, 360 (wrong pagination: properly 356).