Attila the Hun (7 page)

Next morning we were off, heading north in a solid Russian UAZ 4 X 4. There were six of us: the driver, two hardy Australian women along for the experience, the two Mongolian academics and me. After two hours, we were off what passes for a surfaced road and on a track, heading up the valley of the Sujekht river, rolling like a dinghy in a swell towards the forested ridges of the Noyan Uul mountains.

The rutted, boggy track rose through stands of birch and knee-high shrubs, grasses, and yellow flowers. The track was well worn – by hunters, I suggested. ‘Golddiggers!’ shouted Erigtse, over the engine. Of course – the man who found the graves had been a gold-miner. They were not the only ones. The track levelled out, and there was a truckload of Russian and Mongolian scientists, their vehicle parked wheel-deep in shrubs. They were an expedition come to study plant successions. In this borderland, they wanted to know: was the steppe moving north, or the forests south? The answer might reveal interesting things about climate change – but also, if they could collect some peat samples from deeper down, about the past, and why this place was chosen as a royal burial site.

Where were the graves, the mounds?

Erigtse pointed to a grove of birch trees.

I couldn’t see anything but trees. It was like trying to recognize someone hidden by a duvet.

‘Before, there were no trees,’ said Erigtse. ‘These are maybe thirty years old. There are fires, people cut.’

It struck me that, seen in an action replay over decades, this wilderness was not a wilderness at all. It
was a flickering series of woodlands and glades, their comings and goings regulated by hunters, woodcutters, looters and now archaeologists and botanists, and perhaps soon the occasional tourist. Old trees were rarities – the only one in view, a gnarled and fire-blackened fir, nothing out of the ordinary, had been honoured with pieces of blue silk, as if this mere centenarian were a Methuselah of trees.

Hidden by the slender birches and a blanket of shrubs was a circular mound, and in the other side of the mound was a hole. This – Kozlov’s tomb no. 1 – looked like an overgrown and abandoned well, a square pit lined with decaying timbers. No-one but Erigtse could have seen through the plant cover to point out where Kozlov’s men had cut through the mound and revealed the entrance-path, where the coffin had been carried and the goods placed in reverence, before slaves had reburied it all, and built the burial mound, and left the place to be found by looters.

There were other mounds dotted through the woodlands, all practically invisible. You simply wouldn’t know they were there, but in a half-hour walk we came across dozens of them – Erigtse knew of 100 or so – mostly only a metre or two high, and 10 metres apart. Some were bigger. One, no. 24, was a crater that must have taken weeks to excavate. It is still 6 metres deep and a stone’s throw across, with the entrance-road running into it much as Kozlov’s team had dug it, like an ancient sunken lane. The monarch of no. 24 had had a lavish send-off.

It was not the mounds that set me thinking so much
as the site. I had been on the mountain where most Mongolians and most scholars believe Genghis is buried. The Xiongnu came from north and west of UB, the Mongol homeland was to the east, and the two cultures were separated by over 1,000 years. But I would bet on a connection. Burkhan Khaldun, 200 kilometres to the east in the Khenti mountains, and Noyan Uul have this in common: they are impressive mountains, but easily accessible for people on horseback (it’s no good having a holy mountain too remote and difficult to get to); they are on the borderline between northern forests and southern steppes; the burial sites are at the head of a river valley and up on a flat place, before the going gets tough to the summit; and both proclaim a sense of belonging: this is ours, and here we lie, for ever. Are these coincidences? I think not. It seems likely that the Mongols, as they rose to unity and then to empire under Genghis, would have known of these tombs, maybe even knew their contents, and said to themselves: Aha,
that’s
how you bury kings!

But what of the possible link
westward
?

‘Erigtse,’ I asked, as we prepared to lumber down over the grasslands and onto the road back to UB. ‘Do you think the Huns were the Xiongnu?’

‘Oh yes. We say Hun-nu.’ He pronounced the
h
like a Scottish
ch
, as in
loch
, usually transliterated as
kh
. ‘
Khun
is, you know, our word for “man”, “person”. I think they used the same word as we do. They were the enemies of China, so our word
khun
became
xiong
in Chinese.’ (It sounds like
shung
, which is not too far
from
khun
.) ‘It means “bad”. And
nu
means “slave”. Xiongnu – Bad Slaves.’

If the Xiongnu were indeed the Huns, Noyan Uul is part of what Attila’s forefathers left behind. They forgot about holy mountains and royal burials on hills, for after two centuries of wandering there would have been no sense of belonging anywhere. They had become less than the first Xiongnu. They had become rootless nomads.

F
or 150 years the Xiongnu remained unsapped by Chinese luxuries and untamed by Chinese princesses. Eventually the Han wearied of Xiongnu demands, and started a long-drawn-out series of campaigns to defeat them. A brief revival of Xiongnu fortunes in the first century AD ended with a north-south split, the southerners joining the Han, the northerners retaining their independence in Mongolia, where in
AD
87 a diverse group of clans from Manchuria, the Hsien-pi, seized the Xiongnu chief and skinned him, taking the skin as a trophy. A final battle scattered the northerners in 89. By the mid-second century they were all gone, drifting westward, as many vanquished tribes did, into the void of Central Asia and beyond, towards some new source of wealth. From Rome’s point of view, according to which inland Eurasia was divided into arcs of increasing barbarism, marked off by the frontier, rivers, tribes and trade areas, they would emerge from the outer darkness; but to nature the stripes are horizontal, marked by forest, grassland and desert. Mountains and inland seas distort the bands,
forcing the grassy highway to meander or cutting it briefly. But the Xiongnu knew the way: along the Gansu Corridor between the Gobi and the Tibetan highlands, then north-west where the railway line now runs to Ürümqi, and out of the reach of China through the Dzungarian Gap between the Altai and Tien Shan. The journey had its dangers, both from other tribes and from nature. The Dzungarian Gap is notorious for its brutal wind, the
buran
,
¹
remarked by later travellers braving the same 80-kilometre corridor of corrugated badlands. Friar William of Rubrouck noted its dangers on his way to meet the Mongol khan in 1253. Douglas Carruthers, British explorer and travel writer, passed through in 1910. ‘At night we heard a distant roar as the imprisoned winds of the Djungarian deserts escaped through this narrow defile,’ he wrote in
Unknown Mongolia
. ‘Great cloud-banks swept through the “straits” as if rushing through some gigantic funnel.’ A winter
buran
could flip yurts from their moorings, deep-freezing their inhabitants with a wind-chill factor that takes the temperature down to – 50˚C.

A tough journey, but one that had been done before many times by tribes moving west, and would be done again, by herds and wagon-trains alike. It was on the far end of these steppelands that Friar William saw the Mongols’ tent-bearing wagons 10 metres across, with axles like masts, hauled by teams of up to 22 oxen, riding the prairies like galleons. The Xiongnu did not
have similar resources, but they were just as competent. They would surely have come through in the summer, with their flocks well fattened by spring pastures, before putting them to graze on the 2,000-kilometre steppe of Kazakhstan.

T
wo hundred years later, as de Guignes noted, there emerged from the far end of Central Asia a tribe, much degraded by comparison, but with a similar lifestyle – nomads, tent-dwellers with wagons, mounted archers – and a vaguely similar name. That was enough for de Guignes, and for his successors, the weightiest of whom was Edward Gibbon in his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. In Gibbon, de Guignes found magisterial backing. The Huns who threatened Rome were descendants of the tribe that threatened China, made ‘formidable by the matchless dexterity with which they managed their bows and their horses; by their hardy patience in supporting the inclemency of the weather; and by the incredible speed of their march, which was seldom checked by torrents or precipices, by the deepest rivers, or by the most lofty mountains’. Gibbon used words and phrases as artillery, blasting doubt before it had a chance to grow. For the next two centuries, it was taken as a matter of fact that the Huns were the Xiongnu, reborn in poverty. The 1911 edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
relies on the carelessly misspelt ‘de Guiques’. Experts like the French historian René Grousset and the American William McGovern, both writing in the 1930s, simply referred to the Xiongnu as the Huns, period, without bothering to
argue the case. Albert Herrmann’s
Historical Atlas of China
of 1935 has a spread on the ‘Hsiung-Nu or Huns’. About the same time, it occurred to more sceptical scholars that there was absolutely no evidence to bridge the gap between the two. Indeed, the difference between the sophisticated nobility buried in Noyan Uul and Attila’s impoverished hordes is striking. The theory fell into limbo. As Edward Thompson, onetime Professor of Classics at Nottingham University, baldly wrote in his 1948 book on the Huns, ‘This view has now been exploded and abandoned.’

But it has recently regained lost ground. The two tribes were briefly so close in time and space that it is hard to believe they were separate. The remnants of the Xiongnu, fleeing along trade routes that led through the Ili valley in southern Kazakhstan in about 100, reached the Syrdar’ya river by about 120. In round figures, that’s 2,800 kilometres in 30 years, or a mere 90 kilometres a year. In 160, the Greek polymath Ptolemy mentions the ‘Khoinoi’, commonly equated with the Chuni, the initial
ch
sounded as in the Scottish
loch
, which makes them sound pretty much like ‘Huns’. These people he placed between two other tribes, the most distant of which, the Roxelani, probably lived on the Don, thus putting the Huns just north of the Sea of Azov – the ‘Maeotic marshes’ mentioned later by Roman authors. The gap has narrowed to 2,000 kilometres and 40 years – a gap easily crossed at the slow pace of 50 kilometres a year.

There is a further piece of evidence for the link. In 1986 a joint Russian–Mongolian expedition excavated
a grave site in the far west of Mongolia, in the Altai mountains. Their report refers to the find as a ‘Hun’ site, reflecting the Mongolian eagerness to equate Xiongnu and Hun, but it is clearly Xiongnu. The five graves were remarkable because they had not been thoroughly vandalized. All contained wooden coffins, and four of the five held the remains of bows: bits of bone or horn, which were used as ‘ears’ at the end of the limbs and to reinforce the central section. From the end-bits, which were of different lengths, the authors concluded that the bows were asymmetrical, the upper limb being longer than the lower limb. Later Hun bows were asymmetrical; indeed, it was their most obvious trait, for reasons that remain obscure. The end-bits themselves – the ‘ears’ – also suggest a link with the Huns, because the later Hun bows had highly developed ones.
²

The mystery would have been soluble if the Altai graves had contained the bows themselves. But they didn’t. Perhaps they had simply rotted away? That doesn’t seem right: wooden coffins surviving for some 2,000 years, and bits of birch-bark in one of them, but no wooden bows? It gets odder. The four graves had in turn three ears, three ears, two ears and four ears, and each grave also contained a varying number of the horn strips used to reinforce a bow’s wooden body. Many bits, no complete bows. In fact, no complete bow has ever been found in a Hun grave or cache. Even when a pair of apparently matching bone laminations was found – at a fourth-century site near Tashkent – a close
look revealed that the two long bone strips had been carved by different makers, for different bows. There can be only one conclusion: the bits found in graves do not belong together, or to any particular bow. As one of the greatest of experts on the Huns, Otto Maenchen-Helfen, concluded: ‘The people buried the dead warrior with a sham bow.’ Once suggested, the idea is obvious.
Of course
they buried sham bows, or broken ones. Bows took expert bowyers years to make. In many cultures loyal subjects buried goods with their kings reflecting their royal status; but bows, which everyone had to have, were not high-status objects. The graves in western Mongolia were for lower-ranking officials, who would have wished to pass on their prize possessions to their surviving relatives. Who in their grieving families would waste such a precious, life-and-death object by burying anything but a few unused bits and pieces?

Perhaps, then, what we see in Xiongnu graves is a Hunnish bow in the process of evolution; and this, if true, would argue for a direct link between Hun and Xiongnu.

I
f Hun and Xiongnu are not quite joined by archaeology, what about folklore? If there was a link, isn’t it odd that the Huns did not seem to have a folk memory of it? The Xiongnu’s Turkish successors in Mongolia were happy to claim them as ancestors until they, too, were driven westwards in the eighth century; but Attila, much closer to the Xiongnu in time, apparently never did. He had his bards, but no eye-witness recorded them singing of conquering forebears.