Although commonly seen as part of the Turkic family, the Cumans were probably ethnically diverse even before they entered Hungary. Scholar Simon Szyszman highlights this aspect by noting that "marriages between Cumans and other peoples were frequent." Archeologist Silviu Oța describes Cuman society as comprising "bits and pieces of previously destroyed tribes, whose collective memory of tribal origin had been preserved by the simple class of warriors." It is thus probable that before 1200 Cumans had acculturated a mass of the Kipchaks, which were also Turkic. Lyublyanovics describes the original Cumans as a loose confederation of various ethnic backgrounds, noting that they were "only brought together by the need to escape the Mongols." Their partial ethnogenesis began upon their arrival to the Great Plain: "the new social and economic environment they faced was so different from the one they were used to in their previous home on the steppe that the differences among the numerous Cuman clans might have appeared unimportant compared to the differences between them and the sedentary inhabitants of their new homeland."