Attila the Hun (8 page)

Again, the argument can be made to run both ways. Sometimes folkloric information is astonishingly enduring – the Trojan war remained alive in oral accounts for centuries before Homer wrote it down. Sometimes it fades fast, especially during a long migration. I once worked with a small tribe in the Ecuadorian rainforest who had moved into their area at some indeterminate time in the past few centuries – that much is certain, because they had either never learned stone-age crafts or had forgotten them while on the move, using the stone axes made and dumped by a previous culture. The Waorani are not short of legends, but all they say about their own origins is that they came ‘from down-river, long ago’. The Mongols, too, forgot their origins: their great foundation epic,
The Secret History of the Mongols
, says only that they sprang from a wolf and a doe, and had crossed an ocean or lake to arrive in Mongolia perhaps 500 years earlier. The Huns seem to have forgotten much faster – in 250 years – recalling nothing of their forebears; nothing, at least, that anyone recorded.

Perhaps there was something more active than mere forgetfulness at work as Xiongnu turned to Hun. Once reduced from imperial grandeur to impoverished bands, perhaps the Huns became ashamed of their decline, and simply refused to mention their former greatness to their children. I have never heard of such a process being recorded; but then, it wouldn’t be, would it? One generation of taboo – ‘Don’t mention China!’ – would be enough.

In researching Hun origins we get very little help
from language. Though Attila employed interpreters and secretaries, no-one wrote Hunnish, only Latin or Greek, the languages of the dominant culture, with its inbuilt prejudice against barbarian tongues. Scholars have been free to improvise, a favourite solution being Gibbon’s, that the Huns were actually Mongols. (They weren’t: the Mongols did not move into Xiongnu territory until half a millennium after the Xiongnu had gone.) Some experts have claimed certain words as Hunnish; all are disputed; no single word that is absolutely, undoubtedly Hunnish has survived.

But we have Hun names, or think we do. First we must strip away veils of obscurity, for Huns, Goths, other Germanic tribes, even Romans all adopted names from each other’s cultures; and Hun names acquired Latin or Greek endings; and they were often spelled differently by different scribes. Still, there is behind these veils a core of names that offer clues about the language. Attila’s uncle Octar was also written Oiptagos, Accila, Occila, Optila and Uptar (
ct
shifted to
pt
in the Balkan dialect of Latin). But
öktör
means ‘powerful’ in old Turkish. A coincidence? Scholars think not. The names of other characters in this story also suggest Turkish roots: Attila’s father Mundzuk (‘Pearl’ or ‘Decoration’), his uncle Aybars (‘Moon Panther’), his senior wife Erekan (‘Beautiful Queen’), his son Ernak (‘Hero’), a shadowy king Charaton/ Kharaton (‘Black’ something, possibly ‘Clothing’). The -
kam
ending on a few names seems to recall the Turkish for ‘priest’ or ‘shaman’. Of course, names are shifty, easily absorbed from another culture, as biblical names
have been absorbed into English. But there is enough, in the words of the greatest of Hun archaeological experts, István Bóna, ‘to correct a great and widely-held error perpetrated by some modern researchers: because of some Mongoloid features in selected skulls, they confuse race with language, and turn the Huns into thorough-going Mongols’.

To tally the possible, the probable and the certain: the Huns were probably of Turkish stock, probably spoke a Turkish language (which shared roots with Mongolian), were possibly a remnant of migrating Xiongnu, had no connection with China apart from some cultural overlap, and were certainly nothing whatever to do with the Slavic and Germanic tribes into whom they so rudely barged.

I
n the evolution of the warrior nomad, there remained a vital step. To be truly effective, a bowman needs a delivery system. For this, the Scythians and Chinese developed the two-wheeled chariot: a fast, stable and manoeuvrable firing platform, always provided that you, the archer, had a driver; and always provided that your society had access to wood and carpenters, mines and skilled metalworkers. Thus they were the preserve of well-organized, semi-urbanized peoples. Nomads, riding perhaps bareback, almost certainly without stirrups, could only occasionally match the skills and resources of charioteers.

To reach a peak of effectiveness, warrior nomads had to await the arrival of the stirrup, in particular the iron stirrup, an invention that, in combination with the
saddle, was as influential as the composite bow in the development of warfare. This is a murky subject. Prevailing orthodoxy claims that stirrups developed surprisingly late and spread surprisingly slowly, perhaps because expert horsemen can manage without them, perhaps because chariots provided a partial solution to the problem of wielding a bow. The earliest stirrups, first recorded in India in the second century BC, were supposedly made of rope, as supports for the big toe. The idea was carried to China and Korea, where iron stirrups emerged in the fifth century AD. From there, iron stirrups spread westwards, the first evidence for them being dated to the early sixth century. But dig deeper, and orthodoxy vanishes in a puff. Stirrups should be older, they really should. The idea is so obvious, after all. And they really should not have come from India. A simple toe-stirrup is a help in mounting, but only if you have bare feet, which is all very well in India, but not in Central Asia, where horses were first domesticated. The combination of leather boots, iron-working and horses should have inspired the creation of the iron stirrup by 1000
BC
, along with arrowheads. Perhaps it did; but it doesn’t show up in the archaeological record until Turks came to dominate Mongolia in the sixth century. The earliest example I have seen is a reference by the great scholar Joseph Needham, in his
Science and Civilisation in China
: a pottery figure showing a Chinese horseman with stirrups, dated
AD
302. If the Chinese had stirrups, so, surely, did their enemies. Yet they do not appear in paintings of mounted archers. (There is a theory that explains this, according to which
iron stirrups were the invention of fat and lazy town-dwellers who could not leap nimbly into the saddle, namely the Chinese, at which point the nomads saw the stirrup’s advantages, and adopted it. There’s no evidence to back this. Do you believe it? I don’t.)

It’s a mystery, which deepened when Od was taking me round the Museum of Mongolian History. For there among the Xiongnu relics was an iron stirrup, not from Noyan Uul, but from a Xiongnu grave in Khovd province, in the far west. Yet from the royal graves of Noyan Uul not a single stirrup. Indeed, as Od e-mailed me, ‘We excavating a lot of graves, unfortunately we couldn’t find more [stirrups].’ This is all very strange. Perhaps the western graves were made later, when the Xiongnu had been defeated and were on the move westwards? In which case, are we to assume that the Xiongnu, iron-workers and horse-riders
par excellence
, had no stirrups when they were powerful, yet had them when they were not? And, if they had them at all, why did the idea not diffuse instantly to everyone else?

Including, of course, the Huns, who should have known about and used the stirrup, whether or not they were Xiongnu originally. Yet from Hun archaeological finds, which have produced bits, saddles and bridle ornaments, we have not a single stirrup. Nor is there any mention of them in the (admittedly inexpert) Latin and Greek sources. Yes, Huns could have ridden without stirrups, or used rope or cloth ones, but why, when they had metalworkers for arrowpoints and swords and cooking-pots, would they reject iron stirrups? The mystery remains.

In any event, by about
AD
350 the pastoral nomads of Inner Asia had an advantage over infantry, heavy cavalry and chariots. The Huns had the hardware for conquest, and could operate summer or winter, each warrior supplied with two or three remounts, each carrying his bow as his prize possession, along with dozens of arrows and arrowheads for hunting and fighting, each ready to protect wives, children and parents in wagons. They were something new in history, something with potential beyond the Xiongnu: a juggernaut that could live off the land if necessary, or by pillage. Pillage was a lot easier. Like sharks, they had become expert predators, honed to fitness by constant movement, adapted to roam the inland sea of grass, blotting up lesser tribes, until they emerged from the unknown and forced themselves onto the consciousness of the sophisticated, urbanized, oh-so-civilized Europeans. Our first view of the Huns, therefore, is from outside, and as full of loathing, prejudice and error as you might imagine.

The Greeks were appalled by the barbarian menace from the steppes, exemplified by the Scythians. The very word ‘barbarian’, said to derive from the incomprehensible
bar-bar-bar
noises these outsiders made in lieu of language, summarized a prejudice, an expression of xenophobia that buttressed the Greeks’ own sense of identity and self-worth. It was an idea that lumped all non-Greeks together in undifferentiated otherness, people who were cruel, stupid, unrefined and oppressed, and who, of all things, gave power to women. Euripides personified barbarism in Medea,
who supposedly came from the far side of the Black Sea: a domineering, passionate, child-murdering witch. Much of this was self-serving nonsense, for the Scythians developed a sophisticated, complex culture that lasted for some 700 years.

Rome inherited the same prejudices, and took action accordingly. The whole length of the imperial frontier, over 4,000 miles, was secured by roads, walls, towers, forts and ditches, from the Atlantic coast of Africa, up the Middle East, down the Euphrates, back to the Black Sea and beyond. In western Europe, Rome had the benefit of two great rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, which virtually bisect the continent from north-west to south-east. From the early years of the first millennium, the two rivers became the Roman equivalent of the Great Wall, with Dacia the Roman equivalent of the Ordos, the borderland sought by the dominant culture as a buffer zone, but from which it had been driven by the barbarians. Europe’s geography was less convenient than China’s. Rhine and Danube almost join, but their upper reaches form a right-angle north of the Alps which is hard to defend. As the empire grew stronger, successive emperors cut the corner with forts, towers and eventually a stone wall that ran for almost 500 kilometres across southern Germany, with another wall, Hadrian’s, marking the frontier against the northern barbarians. A wall also blocked the 80-kilometre corridor between the Danube and the Black Sea. The Rhine–Danube wall, though, was abandoned under the onslaught of 260, and the empire retreated again to the rivers.

In forming their view of Attila’s people, then, the Romans tapped into attitudes inherited from the Greeks. These were the vilest creatures imaginable. They came from the North, and everyone knew that the colder the climate was, the more barbaric the people were. To paraphrase Ammianus Marcellinus, who never saw a Hun himself, they were squat, with thick necks, so prodigiously ugly and bent that they might be two-legged animals, or the figures crudely carved from stumps which are seen on the parapets of bridges. There was nothing like them for cruelty and ugliness, the one accentuating the other, because they cut their baby boys’ cheeks so that, when they became men, their beards grew in patches, if they grew at all. They knew nothing of metal, had no religion and lived like savages, without fire, eating their food raw, living off roots and meat tenderized by placing it under their horses’ saddles. No buildings, of course, not so much as a reed hut; indeed, they feared the very idea of venturing under a roof. Once they had put their necks into some dingy shirt, they never took it off or changed it until it rotted. Granted, they were wonderful horsemen; but even this was an expression of barbarism, for they practically lived on horseback, eating, drinking and sleeping in the saddle. Their shoes were so shapeless, their legs so bowed that they could hardly walk. Jordanes, the Gothic historian, was no less insulting. These stunted, foul and puny tribesmen, offspring of witches and unclean spirits, ‘had, if I may say so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes’. It was amazing they could see at all, given
that ‘the light that enters the dome of the skull can hardly reach the receding eyeballs . . . Though they live in the form of men, they have the cruelty of wild beasts.’ These are judgements that have echoed down the ages. Practically everyone is happy to quote everyone else, including Gibbon, in condemning the Huns as smelly, bandy-legged, nasty, brutish and revoltingly short.

Almost all of this was nonsense.

As the Huns emerged from somewhere north of the Caspian to approach the Black Sea in the mid-fourth century, they were, in Roman eyes, at the very limit of the known world. But with spotlights borrowed from anthropologists and archaeologists it is possible to highlight a few of their defining traits. As visitors to the Huns found later, they had beards, grew crops, were perfectly capable of building houses, and included as high a proportion of handsome men and beautiful women as everyone else. Certainly, the men would have commanded respect, because they would have been formidably hardy, weather-beaten, with slab-like shoulders from daily use of their powerful bows. But, as in today’s Mongolians, there was probably enough of an admixture of other races to make some of them extremely appealing. No-one who saw the Huns face to face mentioned any children with facial scars; the men’s beards may have been thin, as Attila’s was, and some adults may have had scarred faces, but that was nothing to do with cruelties inflicted in childhood; they were self-inflicted as part of mourning rituals.