2
NO-ONE KNEW WHERE ATTILA’S PEOPLE CAME FROM. People said they had once lived somewhere beyond the edge of the known world, east of the Maeotic marshes – the shallow and silty Sea of Azov – the other side of the Kerch straits that links this inland sea to its parent, the Black Sea. Why and when had they come there? Why and when did they start their march to the west? All was a blank, filled by folklore.
Once upon a time, Goth and Hun were neighbours, divided by the Kerch straits. Since they lived either side of the straits, the Goths in Crimea on the western side, the Huns over the way on the flat lands north of the Caucasus mountains, they were unaware of each other. One day a Hun heifer, stung by a gadfly, fled through the marshy waters across the straits. A cowherd, in pursuit across the marshes, found land, returned, and told the rest of the tribe, which promptly went on the warpath westward. It is a story that explains nothing, for many tribes and cultures depicted their origins in terms of an animal guide. A suspiciously similar tale had long been told of Io, a priestess changed into a heifer by her lover Zeus. Io, as heifer, was driven out of Inner Asia by a gadfly sting, crossing these very straits, swimming over seas, via Greece, where the Ionian islands were named after her, until she arrived at last in Egypt; and it was as a bull that Zeus carried Io’s descendant Europa off to establish civilization in the continent named after her. So such tales about the Huns satisfied no-one. To fill the gap, western writers came up with a dozen equally wild speculations. The Huns were sent by God as a punishment. They had fought with Achilles in the Trojan war. They were any of the Asian tribes named by ancient authors, ‘Scythian’ being the most popular option, since the epithet was widely applied to any barbarian tribe. The fact is that no-one knew – but no-one liked to admit his ignorance. It was important, too, for authors to show off their knowledge of the classics, for, as every literate person knew, it was literature that marked the civilized from the barbarian. If as a Roman you mentioned Scythians or Massegetae, at least you knew your Herodotus, even if the Huns were a blank.
The Huns’ tribal victims were no better informed. According to the Gothic historian Jordanes, a Gothic king had discovered some witches, whom he expelled into the depths of Asia. There they mated with evil spirits, producing a ‘stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance to human speech’. They started on their rampage when huntsmen pursued a doe (no heifer, gadfly or cowherd in this version) across the Straits of Kerch, and thus came upon the unfortunate Goths.
Academics don’t like holes like this, and come the Enlightenment a French Sinologist, Joseph de Guignes, tried to fill it. De Guignes – as he is in most catalogues; or Deguines, as he himself spelled his name – is a name that usually appears in academic footnotes, if anywhere. He deserves more, because his theory about Hun origins has been a matter of controversy ever since. At present, it’s making a comeback. It may even be true.
Born in 1721, de Guignes was still in his twenties when he was appointed ‘interpreter’ for oriental languages at the Royal Library in Paris, Chinese being his particular forte. He at once embarked upon the monumental work that made his name. News of this brilliant young polymath spread across the Channel. In 1751, at the age of 29, he was elected to the Royal Society in London – one of the youngest members ever, and a foreigner to boot. He owed this honour to a draft displaying, as the citation remarks, ‘everything that one might expect from a book so considerable, which he has ready for the press’. Well, not quite. It took him another five years to get his work on the press, and a further two to get it off; his Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs et des Mogolswas published in five volumes between 1756 and 1758. The gentlemen of the Royal Society would have forgiven the delay, for de Guignes seemed about to emerge as a shining example of the Enlightenment scholar. He should have become a major contributor to the cross-Channel exchange of knowledge and criticism that led to the translation of Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia in the 1740s and its extension under the editorship of Denis Diderot into the great Encyclopédie, the first volume of which was published in the year of de Guignes’ election to the Royal Society. In fact, de Guignes never escaped the confines of his library, never matched the critical spirit of his contemporaries. His big idea was to prove that all eastern peoples – Chinese, Turks, Mongols, Huns – were actually descendants of Noah, who had wandered eastwards after the Flood. This became an obsession, and the subject of his next book, which sparked a sharp riposte from sceptics, followed by an anti-riposte from the impervious de Guignes. He remained impervious up to his death almost 50 years later. His history was never translated into English.
But one aspect of his theory took root, and flourished. Attila’s Huns, he said, were descendants of the tribe variously known as the ‘Hiong-nou’ or Hsiung-Nu, now spelled Xiongnu, a non-Chinese tribe, probably of Turkish stock. After unrecorded centuries of small-time raiding, these people founded a nomadic empire based in what is now Mongolia in 209 BC (long before the Mongols came on the scene). He does not argue his case, simply stating as a fact that the ‘Hiong-nou’ were the Huns, period. ‘First Book,’ he starts: ‘History of the Ancient Huns.’ At one unproven stroke, he had vastly extended the range of his subject by several centuries and several thousand kilometres.
It was an attractive theory, because something at least was known about these people in the eighteenth century, to which a good deal more has since been added; so much, indeed, that it is worth looking more deeply at the Xiongnu to see what the Huns may have lacked and may have wished to regain as they trekked westward to a new source of wealth.
The Xiongnu were the first tribe to build an empire beyond China’s Inner Asian frontier, the first to exploit on a grand scale a way of life that was relatively new in human history. For 90 per cent of our 100,000 years as true humans, we have been hunter-gatherers, organizing our existence around seasonal variations in the environment, following the movements of animals and the natural flourishing of plants. Then, about 10,000 years ago, the last great ice sheets withdrew and social life began to change, relatively rapidly, giving rise to two new systems. One was agriculture, from which cascaded the attributes that came to define today’s world – population growth, wealth, leisure, cities, art, literature, industry, large-scale war, government: most of the things that static, urban societies equate with civilization. But agriculture also provided tractable domestic animals, with which non-farmers could develop another lifestyle entirely, one of wandering herders – pastoral nomadism, as it is called. For these herders a new world beckoned: the sea of grass, or steppe, which spans Eurasia for over 6,000 kilometres from Manchuria to Hungary. Herders had to learn how best to use the pastures, guiding camels and sheep away from wetter areas, seeking limey soils for horses, making sure that cattle and horses got to long grass before sheep and goats, which nibble down to the roots.
The key to the wealth of the grasslands was the horse, tamed and bred in the course of 1,000 years to create a new sub-species – a stocky, shaggy, tough and tractable animal that became invaluable for transport, herding, hunting and warfare. Herdsmen were now free to roam the grasslands and exploit them by raising other domestic animals – sheep, goats, camels, cattle, yaks. From them came meat, hair, skins, dung for fuel, felt for clothing and tents, and 150 different types of milk product, including the herdsman’s main drink, a mildly fermented mare’s-milk beer. On this foundation, pastoral nomads could in theory live their self-contained and self-reliant lives indefinitely, not wandering randomly, as outsiders sometimes think, but exploiting familiar pastures season by season.
Pastoral nomads were also warriors, armed with a formidable weapon. The composite recurved bow, similar in design across all Eurasia, ranks with the Roman sword and the machine-gun as a weapon that changed the world. The steppe-dwellers had all the necessary elements – horn, wood, sinew, glue – to hand (though they sometimes made bows entirely of horn), and over time they learned how to combine them for optimum effectiveness. Into a wooden base the maker would splice horn, which resists compression, and forms the bow’s inside face. Sinews resist extension, and are laid along the outside. The three elements are welded together with glue boiled from tendons or fish. This quick recipe gives no hint of the skills needed to make a good bow. It takes years to master the materials, the widths, the lengths, the thicknesses, the taperings, the temperatures, the time to set the shape, the countless minor adjustments. When this expertise is applied correctly with skill and patience – it takes a year or more to make a composite bow – the result is an object of remarkable qualities.
When forced out of its reverse curve and strung, a powerful bow stores astonishing energy. The earliest known Mongol inscription, dated 1225, records that a nephew of Genghis Khan shot at a target of some unspecified kind and hit it at a distance of some 500 metres; and, with modern materials and specially designed carbon arrows, today’s hand-held composite bows fire almost three-quarters of a mile. Over that kind of distance, of course, an arrow on a high, curving flight loses much of its force. At close range, say 50–100 metres, the right kind of arrowhead despatched from a ‘heavy’ bow can outperform many types of bullet in penetrative power, slamming through half an inch of wood or an iron breastplate.
Arrowheads had their own sub-technology. Bone served well enough for hunting, but warfare demanded points of metal – bronze or iron – with two or three fins, which would slot onto the arrow. The method for mass-producing socketed bronze arrowheads from reusable stone moulds was probably invented in the steppes around 1000 BC, making it possible for a rider to carry dozens of standard-sized arrows with a range of metal heads. To produce metal arrowheads pastoral nomadic groups had metallurgists, who knew how to smelt iron from rock, and smiths with the tools and skills to cast and forge: both specialists who would work best from fixed bases and who, during migration, needed wagons to transport their equipment.
Thus, towards the end of the first millennium BC, steppeland pastoral nomadism was evolving into a sophisticated new way of life, supporting herders, some of whom doubled as artisans – carpenters and weavers as well as smiths – and most of whom, women included, doubled as fighters. As opposed to the static, agricultural societies south and east of the great deserts of Central Asia, these were people committed to mobility. Expertise with horses, pastures, animals, bows and metallurgy threw up leaders of a new type who could control the flow of animals and access to the best pastures, and thus marshal the resources for conquest. As their steppeland economies flourished, these leaders welded together intertribal alliances, armies and, finally, from about 300 BC, several empires. But this evolution produced a different type of society. Empires gather wealth and have to be administered. They need headquarters – a capital – and other smaller towns, all forming an urbanized stratum on top of traditional nomadic roots. Among these empires, the first and possibly the greatest before the rise of the Mongol empire was that of the Xiongnu.
* * *
The Xiongnu originally lived in the great northern loop of the Yellow River, in the area known today as the Ordos, in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. They might have been little more than one of the many troublesome but transitory barbarian kingdoms that rose and fell in Inner Asia, had it not been for a peculiarly ruthless proto-Attila named Motun (also spelled Modun or Mao-dun), whose rise in 209 BC was recorded by the first major Chinese historian, Ssu-ma Ch’ien. Motun had been given as a hostage to a neighbouring tribe by his father, Tumen (a name, incidentally, that in Mongol means ‘ten thousand’, in particular a unit of 10,000 soldiers: apparently the Xiongnu spoke some sort of proto-Mongol-Turkish, before the two languages began to evolve separately). Ssu-ma Ch’ien, writing in the following century, tells the story of what happened next, slipping out of his usual staid style and drawing, perhaps, on some Xiongnu foundation epic sung by bards to explain their nation’s rise. Tumen favoured another heir and wished Motun dead. He therefore attacked his neighbours, expecting that Motun would be killed. But the prince staged a dramatic escape, stealing a horse to gallop back to his father, who greeted him with forced smiles and the gift of his own troops, as befitted his status. This was Motun’s chance to take his revenge on his father. Planning to make every one of his men guilty of regicide, he drilled them into total obedience. ‘Shoot wherever you see my whistling arrow strike!’ he ordered. ‘Anyone who fails to shoot will be cut down!’ Then he took his band hunting. Every animal he aimed at became a target for his men. Then he aimed at one of his best horses. The horse died in a hail of arrows; but some had hesitated, and they were executed. Next he took aim at his favourite wife. She died, and so did those who wavered. Then Motun shot at one of his father’s finest horses. More arrows, another death, and this time no waverers. Now Motun knew all his men could be trusted. Finally, ‘on a hunting expedition, he shot a whistling arrow at his father and every one of his followers aimed their arrows in the same direction and shot the chief dead’, filling him so full of arrows that there was no room for another. Next in line was a neighbouring ruler, whose skull became Motun’s goblet, the usual symbol of power for nomadic rulers.
Now the Xiongnu had a solid base on which to build a steppe empire that eventually reached 1,000 kilo-metres north to Lake Baikal and almost 4,000 kilometres westward to the Aral Sea. Furs came from Siberia, metals for arrowheads and scaled armour from the Altai mountains, and of course a stream of silk, wine and grain from north China’s Han rulers, who were happy to trade and provide gifts if that was what it took to keep the peace. On the firm foundation of Motun’s 35-year reign, the Xiongnu elite built a rich and varied life in the valleys of northern Mongolia and southern Siberia. Ivolga, just south-west of Ulan-Ude, was then a well-fortified Xiongnu town, with carpenters, masons, farmers, iron-workers and jewellers among its residents. Some of the houses had underfloor heating, Roman-style. To the west, in today’s Kansu and Sinkiang, the Xiongnu controlled 30 or so walled city-states, one of which had 80,000 inhabitants. Trade, tribute, slaves and hostages all flowed towards the centre, Motun’s capital, west of Ulaanbaatar, not far from the old Mongol capital of Karakorum. Here came the envoys and tribal leaders, in three great annual ceremonies, complete with games like those held at today’s national festival in Mongolia.
To administer all this, Motun used officials who wrote Chinese. The Chinese historian Pan Ku recorded several of his letters. In one, Motun actually seems to suggest a marriage of political convenience with the Han emperor’s mother, Lü. ‘I am a lonely widowed ruler, born amidst the marshes and brought up on the wild steppes,’ he moaned in mock-mournful style. ‘Your majesty is also a widowed ruler living a life of solitude. Both of us are without pleasures and lack any way to amuse ourselves. It is my hope that we can exchange that which we have for that which we are lacking.’ Empress Lü told him he must be joking. ‘My age is advanced and my vitality weakening. Both my hair and teeth are falling out, and I cannot even walk steadily. The shan-yü [as the Xiongnu emperor was known] must have heard exaggerated reports.’ Motun sent an envoy to apologize. So much for the Xiongnu being nothing but crude barbarians.
Motun’s success was something new in the long history of China’s dealings with the northern barbarians. In response, the first emperor of the Jin dynasty, which ruled from 221 to 206 BC, joined up several local walls to create the first Great Wall, not so much as a defence against invasion as to define the area of Chinese control over peasants, trade and soldiery. This was the outward and visible sign of the division that had arisen between herder and farmer, mobile and settled, civilized and barbarian. Indeed, from then on the Wall would define the very essence of Chinese culture in Chinese eyes. Today the remains of its several manifestations still loom across northern China, running through desert or dividing wheat-fields, mostly eroded stumps except today’s Great Wall, built of stone in the sixteenth century, the last assertion of an ancient prejudice. In the words of Ssu-ma Ch’ien, inside the Wall ‘are those who don the cap and girdle, outside are the Barbarians’. The nomads were literally ‘beyond the pale’, the wrong side of civilization’s palisade.
In 1912, a Mongolian mining engineer named Ballod was surveying the pine-covered Noyan Uul hills 100 kilometres north of the Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar – or Urga, as it was in those pre-revolutionary times. He came across a mound that had been opened some time in the past. Thinking these were old gold-workings, he dug further, and found a few bits of metal, wood and fabric. He realized he had found not a mine, but a kurgan, a burial mound. He sent some of his bits to the museum in Irkutsk – and then nothing happened for twelve years, which was not surprising, given the First World War and revolution in both Russia and Mongolia. Ballod died; his find remained in limbo. Then, early in 1924, the famous Russian explorer Petr Kozlov arrived in Ulaanbaatar with an expedition returning from Tibet. The times being harsh, Ballod’s widow sold the remaining bits of her husband’s trove to Kozlov. Intrigued, Kozlov despatched a colleague, S. A. Kondratiev, to check out the site. It was February and the ground frozen, but Kondratiev’s workers hacked into Ballod’s mound and found a timber-lined shaft. Kozlov changed his plans. By March he knew he had a major discovery: these hills were one huge Xiongnu burial site covering 10 square kilometres, with 212 tumuli. A few test shafts revealed that the graves had been robbed, but had then become waterlogged and subsequently deep-frozen – which was fortunate, because everything the robbers had not taken had been deep-frozen as well. Kozlov’s team excavated eight mounds. Removing a 9-metre-deep overburden of rocks and earth, they found sloping approaches to 2-metre-high rooms made of pine logs, carpeted with embroidered wool or felt. Inside each was a tomb of pine logs, and inside that a silk-lined coffin of larch. The construction of the rooms was superb, with silk-covered wooden beams neatly inlaid into side walls and supports set in well-made footings. A piece of decorated pottery from kurgan no. 6 revealed when at least one grave was made: it listed both the maker and the painter, and was dated ‘September of the fifth year of the Chien-ping’ (corresponding to 2 BC).
Every grave was a mess, with treasure troves of objects, over 500 in all (most of them now in St Petersburg), all strewn about by the robbers among human and animal bones: not a single skeleton had been left intact. The remains are not up to Tutankhamen standards, because almost all the gold had been taken, but enough had been left to show that these were wealthy people, who had more on their minds than war and the next lambing season. They loved handicrafts, of the easily carried and durable sort, and their community had the time and skills to produce them. Here are some of the things they admired: patterned felt, lacquered wooden bottles, bronze pots, spoons of horn, knee-length underpants of wool and silk, silk socks, Chinese- and Mongolian-style wraparound robes, buckles, silk caps, fur hats, jade decorations, bronze bridle decorations, fly-whisks, axle-caps, fire-sticks (they made fire by friction, rubbing a round stick on a board), clay pots, bronze pestles, horse decorations, bronze staff-ends, golden jewellery, seals, silver plates with yaks and deer in bas-relief, felt carpets embroidered with animal motifs (some interwoven with silk), silk flags, and many tapestries wonderfully embroidered with turtles, birds and fish, and men’s portraits, and horsemen, and Chinese lions. The women did their hair in plaits – for the plaits were still there, bound up just as they were when they were cut off and thrown onto the floors and sloping entrance corridors in the rituals of mourning.
Of course, many of these products of leisure and wealth would have been won by force, or the threat of it. Power sprang from bowstrings and hooves. Ssu-ma Ch’ien tells of a Chinese eunuch who, having fled to join the Xiongnu, put things bluntly to his former countrymen: ‘Just make sure that the silks and grain-stuffs are the right measure and quality, that’s all . . . If there is any deficiency or the quality is no good, then when the autumn harvest comes we will take our horses and trample all over your crops.’ But the transfer was not all one way. The Xiongnu may have been experts in extracting golden eggs, but they took care not to kill the goose. Trade flourished. The Chinese needed horses and camels from the steppes, sable and fox furs from the Siberian forests, jade and metals from the Altai mountains. Trade, moreover, was only one way of ensuring peace: the Chinese tried everything else as well. Motun was given a royal bride in the hope that he would produce compliant heirs. ‘Whoever heard of a grandson trying to treat his grandfather as an equal?’ argued one official to the emperor. ‘Thus the Xiongnu will gradually become your subjects.’ And daughters, even with handsome dowries, were a lot cheaper than armies. (Tough on the poor girls, though. One princess wrote a poem mourning her fate: ‘A domed lodging is my dwelling place, with walls made of felt. Meat is my food, with fermented milk as the source. I live with constant thoughts of my home, my heart is full of sorrow. I wish I were a golden swan, returning to my home country.’)
Walls, marriages, trade – and gifts as well. In 50 BC the Chinese imperial court bestowed on one visiting Xiongnu king ‘a hat, a girdle, clothes and underwear, a gold seal with yellow cords, a sword set with precious stones, a knife for wearing at the girdle, a bow and four sets of arrows (with 12 in each set), 10 maces in a case, a chariot, a bridle, 15 horses, 20 ghin of gold, 200,000 copper coins, 77 suits of clothes, 8,000 pieces of various stuffs, and 6,000 ghin of cotton-wool’. All this was the equivalent of the Danegeld with which the English tried to pay off the exacting Vikings; but it was also designed to sap nomad strength with luxuries, as one defecting Chinese official warned his new bosses: ‘China has but to give away one-tenth of her things to have all the Xiongnu siding with the House of Han. Tear the silk and cotton clothes you get from China by running among thorny bushes just to show that they hold together worse than woollen and leather clothing!’
Noyan Uul, The Lord’s Mountain: the name drew me. On a trip in the summer of 2004, I had my chance. A hundred kilometres from Ulaanbaatar? As I arranged car and driver, I thought it would be an easy jaunt. Surely anyone in the travel business would know how to find such a significant site. Not so, on either count. Memories have faded, and Noyan Uul is on no tourist route. You may find a passing reference to it in a guide book, but no help at all in getting there.
I found help in Ulaanbaatar’s Museum of Mongolian History, in a rather odd form. The resident Xiongnu expert sounded odd, because that was his name: Od. Actually, Odbaatar, but Mongolians generally shorten their names to the first element. At first glance I thought he was odd in other ways as well: unusually slight of build, with soft and gentle features, like some furry animal caught away from its nest. He shook hands over-delicately, then held his hands together as if in deference. Wrong again. His modesty disguised not just rare expertise but surprising toughness. He was nursing a dreadful injury: while helping a friend with some building work, he had sliced his forearm on some broken glass, nearly severing a tendon. I had almost opened him up again.
Noyal Uul was only one of several Xiongnu finds, he said. Archaeologists had found sixteen Xiongnu cemeteries, on one of which (Gol Mod, 450 kilometres west of UB) a French–Mongolian team has been working since 2000. But, under Od’s guidance, it was Noyan Uul, the royal cemetery, that sprang to life, because the museum displays photographs of the site, a model tomb, bits and pieces left over from Kozlov’s pillaging dig, bow ends of horn, a silk carpet showing a yak fighting a snow leopard, an iron stirrup (to which we shall return later), an umbrella, three pigtails.
‘Ah, yes.’ I recalled my reading. ‘People cut off their hair in ritual mourning, didn’t they?’
‘I think maybe not mourning. Maybe ritual killing. One pigtail, one person. It is hard to say because the victims were not usually buried with the king. Not many bones. But I saw one skull in Gol Mod with a hole in it, as if, like . . .’
‘A pickaxe?’
‘Yes, pickaxe.’
‘Od,’ I said on impulse, ‘I’m going to Noyan Uul tomorrow. Can you come with me?’
He was intrigued. He had never been there, and wasn’t sure if we could find our way. Od’s boss added another member to the expedition: Erigtse, a graduate student whose dissertation was on Noyan Uul. He looked like a Mongolian Indiana Jones: burly, with broad, weathered features and a crew-cut.
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 khunbecamexiong 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.
For 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,1remarked 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 burancould 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.
Two 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.
If 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.
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). Butöktörmeans ‘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.
In 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 1000BC, 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 whichiron 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.
No metal? No cooked food? You would think the evidence of metalworking would have struck home with the first Hun arrows, followed quickly by the evidence for cooking. Their bulkiest possessions were huge cooking-pots, cumbersome bell-shaped things with hefty handles, up to a metre in height and weighing 16–18 kilos: cauldrons big enough to boil up clan-sized casseroles. Dozens of them have been found, in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Moldova – and Russia, where half a dozen have turned up scattered over a huge area, one near Ul’yanovsk on the Volga, another 600 kilometres further north, one even from the Altai mountains only 250 kilometres from the Mongolian border. They look like enormous vases, with cone-shaped stands. They are crudely cast in two or three moulds, the stand sometimes being made separately, then roughly soldered together, the joints and rough spots left unfiled. The contents of the alloys vary greatly: most of the metal is local copper, with additions of red oxide of copper and lead, but hardly any of the tin which, when mixed with copper, makes bronze. To any good metal-caster, they would seem amateurish, not a patch on Chinese bronze pots or those made by the Xiongnu. But these were people on the move, which makes the cauldrons interesting. Hun metalworkers had the tools to melt copper (it takes a furnace to create a temperature of 1,000˚C) and some large, heavy stone moulds. The cauldrons alone – leaving aside the decorated saddles and horse harnesses – disprove the idea that these were just primitive herders who knew nothing but fighting and ate raw meat. It takes a large, well-organized group and surplus food to support and transport metalworkers, the tools of their trade and their products.
No religion? More rubbish. It has to be, because H. sapiens evolved as an incurably religious creature. It seems likely that the urge to explain and control the natural world is so fundamental to human intelligence and society that no group, however basic, has ever been found to lack the conviction that we spring from the universe’s hidden essence, remain part of it, are subject to it, can influence it and will return to it.3 The Huns were no exception, and the Romans knew it really; by ‘no religion’ those who said it meant not a proper religion, like theirs, whether Christianity or the civilized paganism inherited from the Greeks. ‘Superstition’ didn’t count. What the Huns believed, exactly, and how they worshipped are entirely unknown, but there can be no doubt that they were animists, awed enough by the forces of nature, by wind, snow, rain, thunder and lightning to imagine spirits in them all. It is fair to guess that, like the Mongols a few centuries later, they saw the origins of these forces in the overarching sky, worshipped heaven above as the fount of all, and sought to control their own destiny through worship and sacrifice. We modern Europeans unthinkingly recall this sky-god in every Good Heavens! Ciel! and Himmel! we utter. Turkish and Mongol tribes, who lived cheek-by-jowl before the Turks headed west late in the first millennium, had a name for their sky-god: Tenger or Tengri, in two of several common spellings. Tenger turns up all across Asia, from the Tengri desert of Inner Mongolia to an eighth-century bas-relief in eastern Bulgaria. In Mongol, as in many other languages, tenger means simply ‘sky’ in its mundane as well as its divine aspect. The Mongols’ Blue Sky – Khökh Tenger – is a deity as well as a nice day. (English has the same ambivalence: Heavens above, the heavens opened.) The Xiongnu also worshipped Tengri. A history of the Han dynasty (206 BC – AD 8), written towards the end of the first century by the historian Pan Ku, in a section on the Xiongnu, says, ‘They refer to their ruler by the title cheng li [a transliteration of tengri] ku t’u[son] shan-yü [king]’ i.e. something like ‘His Majesty, the Son of Heaven’. In early Turkish inscriptions, the ruler has his power from Tengri; and Tengri was the name given to Uighur kings of the eighth and ninth centuries. The Huns could not have been outside Tengri’s wide reach. Whether or not they were Xiongnu remnants, whether or not they retained the same name for their god, they surely brought a similar belief-system with them, and a similar faith that shamans, with their chants and drums and spirit-guides, could open a hotline to heaven.
The evidence is in the few records. In 439, just before fighting the Visigoths outside Toulouse, the Roman general Litorius decided to please his Hun auxiliaries by performing what the Romans called the haruspicatio, a ceremony of divination. Attila, who had seers at his court, did the same thing before his great defeat 12 years later. What was true in the mid-fifth century must have been true at earlier times, for divination had a history dating back millennia. Indeed, it was fundamental to Chinese culture, inspiring the earliest Chinese writing: in the Shang dynasty around 1500 BC, shamans saw meanings in the heat-cracks of scorched turtle-shells, and turned the shells into memo pads by scribbling their interpretations on them. Later, many Central Asian groups, including the Mongols, adopted scapulimancy – the practice of reading omens in the heat-cracked shoulder blades of cattle. No-one recorded such a ceremony at Attila’s court, but the Huns’ origins make it highly likely that their shamans used scapulimancy in their divinations.
There is one characteristic that would have struck you as an outsider, once you had become accepted enough by a few important families to be received informally. Some of the children had deformed heads. They seemed to have grown upwards and backwards to form a loaf shape. This was not the result of disease. There was nothing wrong with these children; the opposite, probably, because they would have seemed to live a more privileged life than most. It would no doubt have been easily explained to you, once you had mastered Hunnish. Unfortunately, there were no visitors on that level of intimacy, certainly none who spoke Hunnish and recorded the results of their conversations. The only way anthropologists know of this habit is from finding a number of skulls, mostly of children, with this odd deformity.
I had my introduction to artificial cranial deformation in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Museum of Art History, where Peter Stadler is the resident expert in the barbarian tribes of the Carpathian basin and Karen Wiltschke is the physical anthropologist with a specialist interest in this arcane area. We talked in the museum’s collection of skeletons, none of them set up on wire like anatomical specimens, but lying loose in boxes stacked two or three deep, piled on top of each other in columns, 150 to a column, 80 columns of them lining four walls and the side of a corridor – 25,000 boxed skeletons, with another 25,000 waiting to be inventoried. Of these, some 40–50 have skulls that are artificially deformed. Since they date from the early fifth century, they are mostly Hun skulls, and many are those of children. From the scanty evidence, it appears that both boys and girls were given distorted crania, which they preserved as adults if they survived. Some didn’t, of course, which accounts for the lower percentage of adults among the remains.
Cranial deformation has been quite common throughout history. An extraordinary study of the subject was published in 1931: Artificial Cranial Deformation: A Contribution to the Study of Ethnic Mutilations. Its author, Eric Dingwall, had an odd fascination for ethnic mutilations, among other things. In the fine tradition of English eccentricity, he lived in a flat in St Leonard’s surrounded by a prize collection of chastity belts, working on psychical research and, in an honorary capacity, on the arcana section of the Cambridge University Library, until his death in 1986. He also wrote one of the first studies on female circumcision. Female circumcision – genital mutilation, as it is now called – is with us still; cranial deformation has all but vanished. The differing fates of the two practices have uncomfortable implications for the human character, female genital mutilation being painful, crude, secretive and swift (though its effects are anything but swiftly over), while cranial deformation is painless, demands long-term care and remains openly evident throughout the subject’s life. It arose in scores of societies all over the world. Neanderthalers distorted skulls 55,000 years ago, and the technique has been with Homo sapiens throughout our history, a ‘curious and widespread custom’, as Dingwall noted, providing examples from Asia, Africa, Indonesia, New Guinea, Melanesia, Polynesia and all the Americas as well as Europe. As he remarks, it can have nothing to do with rites of puberty or initiation rituals, because it can only be done in early childhood, when the skull is still soft and growing. In the Americas, indigenous groups in Chile and the north-west used to flatten their babies’ heads by tying boards against them, most notably the Chinook, who are therefore also known as Flathead Indians. Other cultures used fabric bandages to create a cylindrical, loaf-like skull. It is not hard to do. All it takes is a headband wrapped tight, but rewrapped every few days to preserve pressure, to prevent inflammation and to allow for washing. This was the technique used by aboriginals in New South Wales, Australia, some 13,000 years ago, and probably by the ancient Egyptians to give Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s queen, her elegant attenuated skull. It was a common practice in rural France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Why, for heaven’s sake? That is one possible answer: in some cases, it might well have been for the sake of heaven, a sign that a child was destined for the priesthood. But the reasons seem to be mainly social. Among the Chinooks, it was considered proof of good nurturing; mothers who could not be bothered were considered neglectful, and their round-headed children risked being teased by their flat-headed peers. In other cultures, in which mothers or nurses had the time to provide the necessary attention, a long head was a sign of status. In the case of the Huns, it was more subtle than that. Several busts of Nefertiti accentuate her elongated head; but no-one remarked that Attila had a deformed head, or that his sons did, or any of his generals, or his envoys, or his queen, so either they kept their heads covered – and why would they do that, if the deformation were a mark of high status? – or status alone was not the reason behind head-binding.
There is a pattern to be explained. As Karen Wiltschke said, ‘The further east you go, the greater the percentage of deformations.’ But then, during the 20-year span of Attila’s empire (433–53) and immediately afterwards, other tribes in the Huns’ short-lived realm also adopted the practice. Take the great Ostrogothic leader Theodoric, who was born in Pannonia (today, western Hungary and eastern Croatia) a year or two after Attila’s death and ended his days as king of post-Roman Italy. On his coins he is shown with an elongated head, which must have been given him soon after his birth in about 454 – presumably because that was the fashion taken over from the most successful of the barbarian invaders, who in turn brought the habit with them from the east.
We are left with a puzzle. From archaeology we know that the Huns bound the heads of some of their children, who retained their deformed skulls as adults. Yet no outsider recorded seeing any such thing. All we can do is guess at an explanation. Perhaps these buried skulls were in life kept discreetly under hats, known only to the tribe itself, hidden from outsiders. Perhaps the long-heads were an elite, a sort of freemasonry, whose secrets were passed from father and mother to son and daughter. There was among hunting societies such a freemasonry: the community of shamans, who could in their trances take wing upon the beat of drums and become hawk, eagle, gander or duck to roam at will in the realms of power and insight. From the shamans and their visions came the knowledge of a people’s strength and an enemy’s weakness, of the right time to fight, of the way fate would turn, of the cause of diseases and their cures. Such things were not to be revealed to strangers.
Look at Attila’s forebears in a wider context. Into the Black Sea, draining western Russia and eastern Europe, flow four great rivers, looking on the map like flashes drawn to an oddly shaped lightning conductor. From west to east, they are the four Ds: Danube, Dniester, Dnieper and Don, marking regions of increasing obscurity to the Romans, from the semi-Romanized Dacia (present-day Romania), across the nomad-lands of southern Russia to the impenetrable and unknown valleys of the Caucasus. Jutting down in the middle of this twilight world, like a lamp from a shadowy ceiling of barbarism, was the Crimea, which had been a Greek base for centuries, and remained in imperial hands in Roman times. To Roman writers, as to the Greeks, the Black Sea and its river-bastions were buffers between civilization and the barbarian wilderness, with the Crimea as a transition zone for those approaching by sea. Here, Herodotus had known Scythians who lived between the two worlds, Hellenism and tribalism.
But inland, away from the Greek coastal colonies, lay the very un-Greek world of the Pontic steppe, the vast, treeless, gently rolling grassland of Kazakhstan. Now, it has become a Russified version of the mid-West, tamed by the plough. Then, it was to westerners the heart of barbarian darkness, and to uncounted tribes for two millennia a new homeland or a temporary sanctuary in their slow surge westward. It was from beyond even these remote areas that the Huns came, from a world of myth and shadows, an opening break on a vast billiard-table, which sent tribes ricocheting off each other into the Roman world.
What set them in motion? Why would a small tribe in the depths of Asia suddenly explode onto the world stage? Once, it was fashionable to ascribe large migrations and nomadic assaults to climate change and the pressure of population, as if the ‘heartland’ were in fact a vast heart beating to some hidden ecological rhythm, pumping out an arterial flow of peoples westwards. But climate alone is not a sufficient explanation, for to a lesser tribe it might have been as fatal as a drought to impoverished Ethiopians.
Actually, there is a heart beating on the far side of Eurasia. It is China, the history of which is a series of dynastic heartbeats that has continued, with each beat lasting anything from decades to centuries, for over 2,000 years. The emergence and collapse of dynasties over such a period is unique in some four millennia, and many historians have spent their lives trying to spot an underlying pattern in this remarkable sequence. If there is one, it seems to have something to do with the idea of unified rule, in pursuit of which dynasties have followed each other, their life-histories driven by complex interactions involving – among other elements – agriculture, rivers, canals, walls, peasant uprisings, the raising of armies, barbarian incursions, taxation, civil service, power politics,corruption, revolution, collapse and the emergence of some new challenger from outside the established order. For us right now, the point is that sometimes nomad rulers entered the Chinese heart and sometimes the Chinese core took over the barbarian frontier. Every pulse would shake up the borderlands, and send another tribe or two westwards, usually out of time, out of history. As it happened, the fourth and early fifth centuries in north China were chaotic, a time labelled by some historians the Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians, the chaos diminishing somewhat when a Turkish group, the T’o-pa, established a kingdom known as Northern Wei in 396. Did the chaos, much of it unrecorded, send shock waves of refugees westward, forcing the Huns to move? No-one has a clue.
I’m not even sure it matters. A cold snap in central Asia or an invasion by this or that group of nomadic refugees cannot explain why the Huns were inspired to conquer, and the others weren’t. Why the difference? Their success owes nothing to climate or the historical process, and everything to their fighting skills, which are examined in the next chapter.
Let’s speculate about their reasons for moving on the basis of what they lacked and what they had:
• They lacked luxuries.
• They had the power to rob.
Pastoral nomads produce more than enough for the necessities of life, but always lack luxuries, if you adopt the standards of the upper echelons of settled societies. Their very survival demands it. Herds must be led to new pastures, tents put down and up, pack animals and wagons loaded. Possessions threaten mobility, and thus survival. Life on these terms is a life without trimmings. It is wonderful for building character. You can see the results in Mongolia today, out in the countryside no more than two or three hours from the capital. At best, these are proudly independent people: men tough as their horses, wielding their pole lassos like circus riders, red-cheeked children and sturdy women, all with strong hearts and fine teeth, tributes to a sugar-free diet. But a quick visit in summer makes for a romantic view of the pastoral nomad. Tourists easily buy into this latter-day version of the noble savage, who drives his herds between known pastures, living in an age-old seasonal rhythm. But strip away the wind-powered generator, the motorbike and the TV; set aside the school in the nearest town, where children can stay; return in winter, go back in your imagination a century or two, imagine a life without fresh fruit or vegetables (a problem even today in remote areas), and you will see how nasty and brutish this life can be. Winters are lethal. An ice storm that seals up the grass kills horses and sheep by the thousand. Not long ago, such a catastrophe would leave families starving, without milk, meat or dung-fuel. At one level, suffering and its corollaries – fortitude, strength, sturdy independence – were a source of pride; at another, of envy. No wonder pastoral nomads looked outwards.
In fact, looking outwards was built into the way of life. Pastoral nomads were self-sufficient for a few months, a year perhaps, but not in the long term. The evidence is there today in Mongolia, as it was in the thirteenth century, as it had been in the rise and fall of every nomad kingdom since before the Xiongnu. To survive on the steppe, you need a tent, and to support a tent you need wooden lattice walls and wooden roof supports. Wood comes from trees, and trees come from forests and hills, not rolling grasslands. In addition, if you could afford one, a two-wheeled wagon came in handy to carry the young and the old, the tents and cauldrons and other possessions. Wagons, too, were made of wood. For both tents and wagons, steppe herdsmen needed forests. To get wood you need axes, which means iron, either made by local blacksmiths or acquired by trade. Already, we are looking at a society more varied and adaptable than that of ‘pure’ pastoral nomadism. And that is just for survival. In addition, nomads, being as human as the rest of us, want refinements unavailable on the grasslands, like tea, rice, sugar, soft and varied fabrics, especially silk: in brief, the goods produced by farmers and more complex, urban societies.
Pastoral nomads do not live in constant, random wanderings. Many herding families may lead remarkably stable lives for years, decades, even generations, because flocks depend on knowing where and when to find pastures; and the need to guarantee them, year after year, demands co-operation and unwritten laws. But, in the long term, change is inevitable. Seasons vary, disease takes its toll, clans breed, and grow, and split, and dispute pastures. Throughout history, the steppeland has heaved with changes of its own, let alone the changes imposed on it by settled societies round its edge.
Apply all this to the area from which the Huns came, the Pontic and Caspian steppes. It was a cauldron, a slow-motion seething of intermixed and successive peoples. Imagine, then, our small group of Huns, buffeted from established pastures by a few bad years or the ambitions of long-forgotten neighbours. They move into new pastures, unwelcome as gypsies, despised, a threat to and threatened by new and suspicious neighbours, lacking both a homeland and the soft textiles, the carpets, the exotic drinking cups and the jewellery that ease and enliven nomadic life. Strip away the hospitality that acts as a security blanket for nomadic travellers and the reassuring knowledge of local pastures. Wouldn’t you, in these circumstances, yearn for all that you lack?
The Huns were refugees wanting a base, a regular source of food, a renewed sense of identity and pride in themselves. These were lacks that could be satisfied in only three ways: by finding unoccupied land (no chance); or by some new arrangement with established groups (tricky, with little to offer in return); or by force. The future life they faced would be very different from that of the traditional pastoral nomad, for once on the move, with no pastures to call their own, trying to muscle in on the territories and trading arrangements of others, with force as the only means of doing so, they were seated on a juggernaut that would never find rest. For now, with every kilometre westward, they would find pasturage increasingly reduced by settled communities. They would, inevitably, become dependent on the possessions of others. These might have been acquired by trade; but the Huns were less sophisticated than their new neighbours. With little to offer other than wool, felt and domestic animals, their only remaining option would have been theft. They would turn from pastoral nomads into a robber band, for whom violence would be as much a way of life as it became for wandering Vikings.
The Huns were on the move westward, away from the grasslands of Kazakhstan and the plains north of the Aral Sea, wanderers who faced a choice between sinking into oblivion or climbing to new heights by conquest. Conquest demanded unity and direction, and for that we come at last to the final element in their rise to fame and fortune: leadership. It was leadership that had been lacking before; leadership that eventually released the Huns’ pent-up power. Some time in the fourth century the Huns acquired their first named leader, the first to bring himself and his people to the attention of the outside world. His name was something like Balamber or Balamur, and hardly anything at all is known about him except his name. It was he who inspired his people, focused their fighting potential to attack tribe after tribe, each of whom had their own strengths, and each some weakness. For the first time, a great leader released the tactical skills and established a tradition of leadership that would, in the end, produce Attila.
In AD 350 the Huns crossed the Volga. A few small, violent bunches of mounted archers led their wagons and winding columns of horses and cattle into the grassland country which survived little changed until Anton Chekhov saw it as a boy in the 1870s, an experience he described in one of his first great works, The Steppe. The view that stretched out before the Huns, the 800-kilometre sweep of grassland from the Volga to the Crimea, was recorded by the young Chekhov (in Ronald Hingley’s translation) before the plough claimed it. This is a new day, as seen through the eyes of Chekhov’s young hero, Yegorushka:
Now a plain – broad, boundless, girdled by a chain of hills – lay stretched before the travellers’ eyes. Huddling together and glancing out from behind one another, the hills merged into rising ground extending to the very horizon on the right of the road, and disappearing into the lilac-hued distance. On and on you travel, but where it all begins and where it ends you just cannot make out. First, far ahead where the sky met the earth – near some ancient burial mounds and a windmill resembling from afar a tiny man waving his arms – a broad, bright yellow band crept over the ground . . . until suddenly the whole wide prairie flung off the penumbra of dawn, smiled and sparkled with dew . . . Arctic petrels swooped over the road with happy cries, gophers called to each other in the grass, and from somewhere far to the left came the plaint of lapwings . . . Grasshoppers, cicadas, field crickets and mole crickets fiddled their squeaking monotonous tunes in the grass.
But time passed, the dew evaporated, the air grew still and the disillusioned steppe assumed its jaded July aspect. The grass drooped, the life went out of everything. The sunburnt hills, brown-green and – in the distance – mauvish, with their calm pastel shades, the plain, the misty horizon, the sky arching overhead and appearing so awesomely deep and transparent here in the steppe, where there are no woods or high hills – it all seemed boundless, now, and numb with misery.
In the mid-fourth century this grassland was dominated by the Sarmatians, a loose confederation of Iranian people who had taken it over from the Scythians more than 500 years before. Much is known about the Sarmatians, because some of their art treasures were found in western Siberia and handed over to Peter the Great of Russia. They liked to make plaques of coloured enamels set in metal showing fighting animals – griffins or tigers against horses or yaks: a style that spread westward to the Goths and other Germanic tribes. The Sarmatians specialized in fighting with lances, their warriors protected by conical caps and mailed coats; no match for the Hun tornado.
One group of Sarmatians were the Alans, a wide-ranging sub-federation known as As to the Persians. (It is from their name, by the way, that ‘Aryan’ is derived, l shifting to r in some Iranian languages; thus the tribe so admired by Hitler turns out not to be Germanic at all.) Now we are getting into a region and a tribe that became known to the Romans. Seneca, Lucan and Martial mention them in the first century AD. Martial, a sharp-tongued master of epigrams, skewered a certain Caelia and her wide-ranging sexual habits by asking how a Roman girl could give herself to Parthians, Germans, Dacians, Cilicians, Cappadocians, Pharians, Indians from the Red Sea, the circumcised members of the Jewish race and ‘the Alan with his Sarmatian mount’, yet cannot ‘find pleasure in the members of the Roman race’. The Alans raided south into Cappadocia (today in north-eastern Turkey), where the Greek historian and general Arrian fought them in the second century, noting the Alan cavalry’s favourite tactic of the feigned retreat (to be perfected later by Hun archers). Ammianus says they were cattle-herding nomads who lived in wagons roofed with bark and worshipped a sword stuck in the ground, a belief which Attila himself would adopt. They were terrific riders on their tough little horses. The Alans, more European than Asian, with full beards and blue eyes, were lovers of war, experts with the sword and the lasso, issuing terrifying yells in battle, reviling old men because they had not died fighting. They were said to flay their slain enemies and turn their skins into horse-trappings. Theirs was an extensive culture – their tombs have been found by the hundred in southern Russia, many of them commemorating women warriors (hence, perhaps, the Greek legends of Amazons). It was also a flexible one, happy to assimilate captives and to be assimilated. Indeed, perhaps adaptability was their main problem in the mid-fourth century: for they lacked the unity to counter the Hun style of mounted archery.
The Huns blew them apart, clan by clan. The Alans would soon form fragments of the explosion of peoples which usually goes by its German name, the Völkerwanderung, the Migration of the Tribes. However, while good assimilators, they also had a talent for retaining their own identity. In the slurry of wandering peoples, the Alans were like grit, widely mixed, but always abrasive. Within a couple of generations, different clans would become useful recruits for the Huns, and also allies of Rome. Their remnants in the Caucasus would transmute into the Ossetians of southern Russia and Georgia: the first two syllables of this name recall their Persian appellation, As, with a Mongol-style plural -ut (so the current name of the little Russian enclave known as North Ossetia–Alania doubly emphasizes their roots). At the other end of the empire, they would join both the Goths on their march into Spain – some derive the name Catalonia from a combination of Goth and Alan – and the Vandals, who swept them up on their flight to North Africa in about 420. We shall be hearing from the Alans again later in this story.
Across the Dnieper lived the Ostrogoths. They were settled farming folk, but their venerable chief, Ermanaric,4 would have been something of a role model for an aspiring Hun leader. He was the central figure of an estate that straggled from the Black Sea to the Baltic, from its core, which Ermanaric ruled directly, out to an ever looser network of vassals, allies, tribute-payers and trade partners. According to one story, Balamber made his move because Ermanaric was not the man he had been. One of his vassals had turned traitor and fled, leaving his unfortunate wife, Sunilda, to suffer Ermanaric’s revenge. She was tied torso and legs to two horses, which, when whipped to a gallop in opposite directions, tore her in half. Her two brothers tried to assassinate the old king, but managed only to wound him, after which, in Jordanes’ words, ‘enfeebled by the blow, he dragged out a miserable existence in bodily weakness’. Balamber, with his Hun and Alan cavalry, smashed Ermanaric’s army just north of the Black Sea in about 376. The loose federation of tribes collapsed like a burst balloon; the old Ostrogoth committed suicide; and Balamber took a Gothic princess in marriage to seal the takeover.
At the Dniester, the Visigoths of today’s Romania were next in line, as Valens was about to discover. These had become a proud and sophisticated people, now settled in towns, with a respect for law and order administered by their ruler, whom they called a judge. When a Roman envoy referred to the Visigothic ruler as ‘king’, he objected: a king ruled with authority, he said, but a judge ruled with wisdom. Rome, having given up thoughts of direct rule, treated the Visigoths as trade partners, valuing the supply of slaves, grain, cloth, wine and coins. Some of them were Christian. A generation before the Huns arrived, a Greek bishop, Ulfilas, had devised an alphabet for Gothic and translated the Bible. But Christianity never won over the ‘judge’ or the other aristocrats, who were keen to preserve their own beliefs – the very essence of their own sense of identity – in the face of the new cultural imperialism flowing from Constantinople. After Valens acknowledged Visigothic independence under Athanaric in 369, it seemed both would benefit: their agreement established a mutual trade link, mutual respect, a buffer state for Rome against the barbarian hordes of Inner Asia, freedom for Athanaric to do whatever he wanted without fear of great-power intervention. What he wanted was an end to Christianity. This he achieved by means of a sinister ritual reimposing the old Gothic religion, which (as the historian Tacitus implies) was centred on an earth-mother goddess, Nerthus. Athanaric’s officials wheeled a wooden statue of the goddess to the tents of Christian converts and ordered them to renounce their faith by worshipping the statue, on pain of death. Most chose to live, apparently, except a fanatic named Saba, who was set on martyrdom. When he was declared a fool and thrown out of his village, he taunted his fellow tribesmen until they threw him in a river and drowned him by pressing him down with a piece of wood. He became, as he would have wished, the first Gothic saint.
Rome and Christianity could be resisted, then; but not the advancing Huns. Athanaric tried, setting up a line of defence along the Dniester, but it was easily bypassed when the Huns ignored the Gothic army, crossed the river by night and made a surprise assault on the Goths from the rear. After a hasty retreat across present-day Moldova, the Goths started to build a rampart along the Moldovan border, the River Prut. It was at this point that Gothic morale collapsed, driving them across the Danube into Thrace and startingthe train of events that led to the battle at Adrianople.
Behind them, advancing from the Ukrainian lowlands, came Attila’s immediate forebears, on a 75-kilometre march over the Carpathians, winding uphill along the road that now leads from Kolomyya through the Carpathian National Nature Park. It was the regular route for invaders, one used again almost 1,000 years later by the Mongols. You climb easily to 931 metres (3,072 feet) over the Yablunytsia Pass (good skiing in winter, pretty alpine walks in summer), then drop to the Romanian border, and, leaving the Transylvanian highlands on your left, follow the snaking, narrow road along the River Theiss onto the Hungarian grasslands.
Here, as the wagon-train and herds spread out over the Carpathian basin, old pastoral and fighting skills again came into their own.
1 Often translated as ‘snowstorm’, a buran is rather more than that, which is why it became the name of the Soviet space shuttle.
2 ‘New finds . . .’ by Hudiakov and Tseveendorj, see Bibliography.
3 This sweeping generalization is a hypothesis, unproven. I have some evidence, derived from the tribe I worked with in the Ecuadorean rainforest in the early 1980s. The Waorani were then among the simplest of societies known to anthropologists, with no chiefs, shamans or elaborate rituals; with extremely simple music, no clothing but strings of cotton round their waists (into which the men tucked their penises), no art other than body decoration and their few wonderful artefacts (notably 3-metre blowguns and the best hammocks in Amazonia). But they did have stories, and folklore, and a cosmology, with an afterlife – a heaven where people swung in hammocks and hunted for ever, a limbo for those who returned to this world in animal form, and an underworld of the ‘mouthless ones’ – and spirits both good and evil, and a myth of creation, overseen by the creator, Waengongi. A ‘primitive’ tribe who were monotheists! That was a surprise. The idea of one god is supposed to have evolved from polytheism as a higher form of religion. It proved very handy for American missionaries when they arrived with news of what their version of Waengongi had told them. (The ‘primitive’ four lines up is ironic: the Waorani were experts in their way of life, and as bright and as dim, as wary and as curious, as charming and as offensive and as thoroughly human as the rest of us.)
4 Ermanaric’s name probably derives from Hermann-Rex, King Hermann, the Gothic having adopted the Latin word and turned it into reiks, which, when retransliterated, became ric. It was a common ending for the names of Gothic aristocrats.