# The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe



## Safranek (May 29, 2022)

*The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe*​_Author: Hyun Jin Kim_​Introduction​
*Steppe Empires and their Significance in the history of Wider Eurasia and Late Imperial Rome *​
In the heyday of the Mongol Empire in the late 13th century AD, the Grand Vizier of the Ilkhan Ghazan (the Mongol King of Persia), the famous Rashid al-Din, set about writing a history of the known world, the whole world, not just of Islam or Europe as many histories up until then and even today claiming to be world histories often are. Rashid, a Jewish physician turned Muslim and later Prime Minister of a Mongol Khanate, working in union with scholars and administrators from every corner of Eurasia subdued by the Mongols, set about his task declaring:

_Today, thanks be to God and in consequence of him, the extremities of the inhabited earth are under the dominion of the house of Chinggis Qan and philosophers, astronomers, scholars and historians from  North and South China, India, Kashmir, Tibet, (the lands) of the Uighurs, other Turkic tribes, the Arabs and Franks, (all) belonging to (different) religions and sects, are united in large numbers in the service of majestic heaven--- This book----, in its totality, will be unprecedented- an assemblage of all the branches of history (Rashid al-Din/ Alizade, vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 16-7)_1​
It was indeed an unprecedented undertaking2 and no similar work was to emerge until the 20th century. A history which covered the whole of Eurasia from the realm of the Franks, i.e. Western Europe, through Muslim lands into India and past the Nomadic world of the steppe to the plains of China and beyond. Even places as far as Java, Korea and Japan are included in this grand survey. This was a historical undertaking made possible by the dominance of the Mongols, the greatest of the steppe empires, over the whole of Eurasia. The world had indeed become one under the Mongols, not just in terms of political unification of most of the known world under the dynasty of Chinggis Khan (better known as Genghis Khan), but intellectually and economically3.

Strangely enough this intellectual unity in our age of globalization and fervent cultural exchange is sadly lacking in the discipline of history. The branches of history that Rashid referred to are in discordant disunion in a way that would have appalled our 13th century predecessors. World history of the type Rashid engaged in, in our age of departmentalization and compartmentalization, has without doubt lost something of its former allure. The monumental works of intellectual giants such as Max Weber and Arnold Toynbee, never mind distant luminaries of the past, the likes of Rashid, Ibn Khaldun, Sima Qian and Herodotus, are well and truly relics of the past. Those who dare to engage in work that is broad-ranging enough to be categorized, perhaps, as world history, do so with fear that their work may be castigated for lacking specialist knowledge or be lampooned as a random collection of trivial generalisations4. However, fortunately or alas (!) for those historians who engage in the history of the 4th and 5th centuries AD (i.e. Late Antiquity), the centuries characterized by the rise of steppe Empires and the collapse of the Western half of the Roman Empire, departmentalization and selective specialization are wishful thinking and in fact wholly inappropriate.

Many in fact have tried to engage in such limited research and have arguably produced erroneous conclusions as a consequence. Dependence on nothing but Greco-Roman sources have produced valuable insights to be sure, but has fallen short of providing satisfactory answers to one of the key issues raised in this book: why indeed did the imperial structure of Rome which had held firm for so many centuries previously, fail miserably in the last century of its existence? To unravel this ‘mystery’ a much broader inter-disciplinary and comparative analysis, the type that calls to mind some of the ambitious eclecticism of Rashid al-Din’s enterprise, is needed. In short ‘a Eurasian perspective’ must again be adopted.

Such an analysis would prove the main argument of this book, that the most important historical development of late antiquity, which was of critical importance to the later history of the world was not the fall of the Western half of the Roman Empire, which was one of its consequences, but the world changing dynamics or convulsions, a veritable revolution in the strategic and political balance of the global power structure5, which originated in a region that central Asian specialists identify as Inner Asia6, the steppe region that has historically linked the main civilizations of Eurasia: China, the Greco-Roman world, Iran and India. Indeed the fifth century AD, which saw the collapse of Western Rome, saw these cultural zones linked together by and under the domination of 4 well-organized and long-lived Empires: The Hunnic Empire in Europe, The White Huns (Hephtalites) in Central Asia, Northwestern India and Eastern Iran, the Rouran Khaganate in Turkestan and Mongolia and finally the Xianbei Tuoba Empire in Northern China7 of which the first three had a core Hunnic/Xiongnu element and the fourth (Xianbei) had likewise originated from the Xiongnu/Hunnic political entity.

We will return to these Empires shortly, but first a brief and by no means comprehensive overview of the background to these world-changing developments is needed. Scholars have already discussed at some length what the remarkable polymath Hodgson8 and after him Chase-Dunn and Hall identify as the Afro-Eurasian interactive system9. Between the 5th century BC (perhaps even earlier) and the 15th century AD, before the discovery of the New World, this interactive system, in essence a network of trade routes (the most famous being the Silk Road)10 across the Eurasian continent and sea lanes which linked China and India to the Middle East and East Africa via which to the Mediterranean, constituted the most vital avenue of cultural exchange and economic prosperity in the world. This system expanded and contracted over nearly 2 millennia and arguably reached its climactic apogee with the establishment of the pan-Eurasian Empire of the Mongols under Chinggis Khan11. The Mongols, as Rashid al-Din so accurately demonstrates, dominated virtually all the traditional continental trade routes and created an unprecedented mechanism for cultural exchange across the known world12. Their contribution (in fact that of all the steppe polities that had preceded it) to the birth of what is now called the Modern world is somewhat underrated13 and vast amount of historical data and information concerning this remarkable Eurasian Empire still remain under-researched14.

As much as the author would like to discuss this matter further, the Mongol Empire is only of peripheral concern to the main subject of this book and hence it is hoped that more scholarship would in the future further highlight the importance of this critical phase in world history15. However, it must be noted in passing that the Mongol Empire was the culmination of nearly a millennium of domination of much of Eurasia by Turkic or Mongolic Empires (with a greatly heterogeneous population base16) of the Eurasian steppe. Between 311 AD, arguably the beginning of the Great Inner Asian incursions into China17, and 1405 AD, which marked the death of perhaps the most brutal of the numerous inner Asian conquerors of the known world Timur or Tamerlane18, every corner of Eurasia from Gaul (France) to the Pacific, from the deep frozen recesses of Siberia to the fertile plains of the Ganges in India, had at one stage or another been ruled by a Turkic (heavily mixed with Iranian19) or Mongolic ruling elite20. This is surely remarkable and there is simply no parallel in world history to this persistent and millennium-long dominance by a single cultural group originating from basically the same region, the eastern steppes (from the Altai to eastern Mongolia). Arguably, not even the Romans or the Chinese at their height under the Tang Dynasty (7th to the 9th centuries AD) came even close to exerting such a far-reaching and long-lasting influence geographically or in temporal terms.

With the exception of the significant, but in fact comparatively brief, interlude of Arab Muslim and Tang Chinese dominance between the 7th and 9th centuries AD (roughly 200 years)21, the millennium that we identify as the Dark Ages-cum-Middle Ages was without a doubt the era of Turco-Mongol supremacy. In this world order Inner Asia formed the core and Europe, China and the Middle East merely the periphery22. Such a reality was difficult to accept for most historians in both the West and also the East. No Sinocentric or Eurocentric writer could ever admit that their world was of secondary importance in the grand scheme of things and that the ‘nomadic’, steppe barbarians, whom they despised, were at one stage even in the distant past their superiors and overlords.

The solution had been to basically ignore this period of history altogether (as the relative dearth of scholarly interest in the so-called Middle Ages in comparison to the previous ‘Classical Period’ of Greco-Roman pre-eminence and the later Pre-Modern European era shows) or relegate the Turks and the Mongols to oblivion by attributing to them unbelievably primitive and bestial levels of cultural development and a comprehensive lack of any redeeming civilized features23. To be sure the Huns and the Mongols were extremely cruel in their conquests and caused substantial destruction24, but can we argue that the Romans or even the Macedonians destroyed any less? The Persians at Persepolis, the Greeks of Thebes, the Phoenicians of Tyre, the Sogdians of Cyropolis and the countless thousands of innocent victims in India and Central Asia who were massacred by Alexander’s conquering army25 could hardly appreciate the argument that ‘Greek’26, Macedonian conquest brought them the benefits of a superior civilization27. The brutal efficiency of Roman conquest doesn’t even need a survey. The ruins and mass slaughter of Carthage, Etruria, Gaul and Jerusalem would be sufficient evidence of that.

However, any student of Classical Civilization would certainly reply that the Romans and the Macedonians after the initial brutality of conquest left behind them shining monuments of cultural brilliance that are the heritage of the Western world. That is certainly true too. But by the same logic the Seljuks, the Timurids, the Moghuls, the Mongol Yuan Empire and the Ottomans, after the initial terror, all bequeathed on posterity architectural and artistic wonders and a fabulously rich cultural legacy, no different from the Romans28. They were a brutally efficient and capable group of conquerors and rulers, in every way the equals of the Roman Caesars or the Macedonians kings.

Yet in the plethora of rhetoric concerning racial/ethnic superiority, democracy, western orientalism, Chinese nationalism etc., the group that was the real instigator of momentous changes in the millennium before European dominance, has been largely forgotten. The public in both the West and the East are vaguely aware of them, if at all, as simple savages who killed, looted and plundered their ancestors. It is perhaps time to give the Steppe Empires what is their due and acknowledge the fact that their world constituted another, important civilization29, which made a significant contribution to our ‘modern’ civilization by first bringing together the disparate cultural centers of Eurasia out of their comparative isolation into a Eurasian whole and then contributing to the molding of a new global culture. Central Asians, though they certainly weren’t peace-loving sages, were also certainly not the paradigm of unrestrained barbarism30. In this book we seek to introduce the reader to the people who began the legend of the ‘rapacious’ and fearsome nomad in the West, the Huns who brought down the Roman and Chinese Empires and ushered in the era of Turco-Mongol pre-eminence.


*The Huns, a New World Order, and the Birth of ‘Europe’ *​

Between the year 311 AD, when Luoyang the capital of the Jin Dynasty of China was sacked by the eastern Huns (Southern Xiongnu)31, and 450s AD when the last vestiges of Western Roman military supremacy over Europe vanished at the hands of losses inflicted on the empire by the European Huns, in the space of little over a century the steppe powers, mostly referred to as Huns (‘hiungnu’, Hunas, Chionites etc.) in our various sources caused the total or partial collapse of 4 sedentary empires: Rome, Jin (China), Sassanian Persia (lost its eastern territories to the Hephtalite and Kidarite Huns) and the Guptas (India). The Huns, who brought about these cataclysmic changes and threatened the borders of all the major powers of the ancient world simultaneously across the whole length of the immense boundaries of Inner Asia, were, as mentioned earlier, the forerunners of a whole millennium of military and political dominance emanating from the steppe in world affairs. Han China and Rome, the superpowers of the ancient world, were eclipsed by the third power group, the Huns and other steppe peoples.

This revolutionary shift in the balance of power from the sedentary world to the steppe or rather from the Eurasian periphery to its center, turned what had once been the poorest and most desolate region of world civilization into the very core of the Eurasian interactive system. Through the ‘nomads’32, much maligned and underrated, the Eurasian world became further integrated. The concept of east and west was rendered irrelevant and peripheral. Steppe Empires ruled both East and West and under the Mongols a truly universal Empire was brought into existence. In effect both East and West became merely the wings of the central Inner Asian core. This dominance of Inner Asia was only broken gradually between the 15th and 17th centuries by a combination of factors, one of which was European maritime activity from the 15th century onwards33. Until in some cases the 20th century the residual states of this old order, e.g. the Manchu Qing Empire, the Ottoman Turkish Sultanate34 and the Uzbek Khanates of Bukhara and Khiva, survived. The green ‘oceans’ of the steppes and the steppe horse, the old vehicle of rapid movement, were gradually replaced by blue oceans and mechanized ships. East and West Eurasia, in large part due to the unity brought about by Central Eurasians (steppe peoples), which alerted them to the existence of each other and the great benefits (i.e. trade and exchange) that could be gained through greater interaction, chose to meet directly and no longer via Central Asian intermediaries. The world became closer than ever before. In a way the histories of both Greco-Rome and China became the history of the whole world, not just their parochial locality. Steppe history, however, made this later development possible35. A 14th century sinicized immigrant in Jiangxi, South-eastern China, from the west called or rather renamed Wang Li (1314-1389), aptly sums up the impact of the steppe Empires in the following way:

_The land within the Four Seas had become the territory of one family, civilization had spread everywhere, and no more barriers existed. For people in search of fame and wealth in north and south, a journey of a thousand li was like a trip next door, while a journey of ten thousand li constituted just a neighborly jaunt. Hence, among people of the Western Regions who served at the court, or who studied in our south-land, many forgot the region of their birth, and took delight in living among our rivers and lakes. As they settled down in China for a long time, some became advanced in years, their families grew, and being far from home, they had no desire to be buried in their fatherland. Brotherhood among peoples certainly reached a new plane_.36​
Yet while the impact of later Steppe empires is finally getting some belated recognition at least among interested academics, the significant historical, cultural and political contributions made by earlier Steppe Empires, especially the Hunnic Empire, to world history and civilization, are still almost entirely neglected by both many academics and the general public. It is the argument of this book that the political and cultural landscape of Early Medieval Europe was shaped by the fusion of Roman and Inner Asian (Hunnic and Alanic) cultural and political practices. Most importantly the book will trace the origins of certain elements of early Medieval ‘feudalism’ in Inner Asia37. It will demonstrate that the Hunnic Empire played a decisive role in the unraveling of Roman hegemony over areas that would later become Western Europe and actively facilitated the political formation of the so-called ‘Germanic’ successor kingdoms. It proposes that Early Medieval Europe was as much Inner Asian as Roman and that this has significant ramifications for how we should view and categorize ‘Europe’ and our ‘Modern’ Civilization. The book will address these critical issues specifically and is not intended to be a full history of the Huns or the Later Roman Empire, though substantial information about the history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages will be provided as part of the effort to elucidate the main arguments of the book.

For the sake of clarity it is also necessary to explain here in the introduction the relevance of the concept of ‘ethnicity’ to the subject matter of this book. I have already used terms such as ‘Germanic’, ‘Iranian’, ‘Turkic’, and ‘Turco-Mongol’. All these terms are broad, linguistic terms referring to speakers of groups of languages (belonging to language families38) and not specific ethnic appellations. In contrast terms such as Goth, Hun, Alan, Parthian, Scythian, Frank etc., which will regularly appear, refer to primarily political and ethnic categories. I need not remind the reader that the term ethnicity is a neologism coined in the middle of the 20th century. Yet in scholarship the ideas and concepts embraced by this neologism have often been used to define and categorize historical ethnic entities and political groupings39. An extended discussion of ethnicity is out of place here and I must refer the reader to my earlier publication40 on the subject, but a brief overview will be provided to clarify just what is meant when terms such as Hun and Goth are used in this book.

Scholarship on ethnicity is divided among those who follow the model of the Norwegian ethnologist F. Barth, the so-called Modernists (or instrumental approach), who argue that an ethnic group is in reality purely a self-created, artificial entity formed to protect specific political and economic interests41, and the primordialists (sometimes also called the perennialists) who tend to argue that ethnic groups are the product of specific cultural and historical realities such as blood ties (‘race’), language, common territory, common religion, and common historical memory that function as ‘primordial’ ties42. A synthesis of aspects of both positions is now generally accepted as best reflecting the reality of ethnicity and ethnic consciousness in history43.

As will be shown in due course, groups such as the Huns, the Goths and the Franks were neither entirely concrete ethnic entities in the sense advocated by the primordialists nor simply artificial political-economic constructs as proposed by the modernists. They were a complex agglomeration of peoples who were united for a number of different reasons: political, economic, military, putative blood links, at times by common language(s) and historical memory. Multilingualism was very often a feature of a number of these groups, especially those originating from Inner Asia, and heterogeneity both in terms of language and ‘genetic’ makeup, especially of the elite, was common. Therefore, when reference is made to the Huns or Goths, one should not consider automatically a racial category or a clear-cut ethnic identity. The reality was much more complex, fluid and ever-changing. Identity (both ethnic and political) was inherently unstable. A Hun could transform himself into the leader of the Goths or Franks whom he dominated, as we shall see, and become a Frankish or a Gothic leader. A Goth could also become a Hunnic noble. Such complexities should therefore be recognized when reference is made to ‘ethnic’ names such as the Huns and the Goths.


_See also Allsen (2001a), 83 ff. _
_See Findley (2005), 91. See also Adshead (1993), 76_
_See Rossabi (2007). _
_For the difficulties involved in writing world history see Hodgson (1993), 247-266. See also Manning (2003), 313-23_
_See also Beckwith (2009), 93. _
_See Sinor (1990a), 1-18. _
_For the history of the Toba Xianbei conquest of Northern China see Holmgren (1982). _
_Hodgson (1993), 12-28. Liu (2010), 62, argues that cultural exchange and trade across the whole of Eurasia reached maturity only after the conquest of all sedentary empires by the Huns and Xianbei in the 5th century AD. _
_Chase-Dunn and T. Hall (1997), 149. _
_See Rossabi (1989), 81 ff., for a nuanced discussion on the Central Asian caravan trade and what he sees as the less than decisive impact the discovery of new trade routes between Europe and East Asia in the 15th century had on this trade. He rightly emphasizes that the impact of political disruptions and religious and social changes in Eurasia itself must not be overlooked as one of the root causes for the demise of the so-called Silk Road. See also Beckwith (2009), 216 ff. Whatever the circumstances, after the 16th century this trade route, which had been the primary instrument of cultural dissemination and exchange in Eurasia, gradually ceased to function in its former capacity. With its demise the role of steppe empires in world history also gradually faded. Extended discussion of the Silk Road, as fascinating as it is, is beyond the scope of this book. _
_Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997), 149. See also Christian (1998), 426. _
_Allsen (2001a), 14 and (2009), 135-154. See also Beckwith (2009), 183-203, and Di Cosmo, Frank and Golden (2009), 3, for assessments of the Pax Mongolica . For the effect that this Pax had on trade and exchange see Martinez (2009), 100-108. See Bentley (1993), 27, for the role of Turco-Mongols and their vast trans-regional empires that sponsored regular and systematic interactions between peoples of different cultural traditions. See also Abu-Lughod (1989), 170, and Seaman (1991), 1-16. _
_For a rare attempt at a revisionist stance see Weatherford (2004), xxiii-xxiv. _
_Ever since the days of the great Central Asian scholar Chokan Valikhanov in the 19th century when Eurocentrism was in full swing, the history of the steppe has received relatively scant attention from mainstream Western historians. Many of whom, until the beginning of the 20th century (!), displayed a condescending attitude towards evidence derived from writings of Eastern authors. Even today when studying events such as the invasion of the Huns from Central Asia, historians of Classical Antiquity and Medieval Europe rarely, if ever, consult in depth Central Asian sources, relying instead on highly limited and scanty Greek sources. See Sulejmenov (1989), 30. _
_An admirable starting point is Amitai-Preiss and Morgan (2000), The Mongol Empire and its Legacy, and the recent Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Era (2009) by Di Cosmo, Frank and Golden. See also the assessment of Hall (1991), 34-5, of the importance of Eurasian nomads in the restructuring of the old Eurasian world order, which in turn acted as a catalyst for the emergence of what we now call the modern world. See also Christian (1998), 9. _
_See Sinor (1990c), 290. _
_The Southern Xiongnu who initiated the rule of the ‘barbarians’ in Northern China were part of the Chinese political landscape by this stage and resembled the federated barbarians of the contemporary Roman empire to the west. However, their conquest of the Jin dynasty was the catalyst for all subsequent incursions into China by other related steppe peoples from beyond China’s Political sphere of influence. _
_See Hookham (1962), for the most detailed biography of Timur and also Manz (1999). The Manchu Empire of the 17th century and the formidable Ottoman Turks, the Empire of Nader Shah the Afsharid, the Turkmen Qajar state of Iran which survived into the 20th century, were all created by Inner Asian peoples. However, by this stage Inner Asia was no longer the only dominant force in global politics, as in the centuries of Turco-Mongol hegemony under Chinggis Khan and Timur. _
_Johanson (2006), 1-14 and Golden (2006), 21-26. Turkic, Iranian and Mongolic are all primarily references to language families, not racial categories. In other words they refer to groups (sometimes with a pronounced ethnic identity) that spoke certain languages that belong to a certain language family (Turkic, Mongolic etc.). _
_Darwin (2007), 5-6. _
_The era of Tang expansionism was actually even shorter, though the dynasty would linger on until 907 AD. From its very beginnings the ruling Li clan of the Tang Empire was related by marriage to the Turks and used Turkish cavalry to unify China after the collapse of the previous, short-lived Sui Dynasty. See Lattimore (1976), 485, and Pulleyblank (2000b), 82-3. Many of the powerful border magnates along the Great Wall could speak Turkish or were Turks commanding Turkish troops in imperial service. The most famous among them An Lushan, a Turkish general in Tang service, would destroy the stability of the Empire through his massively destructive rebellion in 755 AD, an event which made the later Tang emperors dependent on Uighur Turkish support for their very survival. See Mackerras (1990), 317-8. For the impact of Turk political organization on the Tang Empire see Beckwith (2009), 138. In fact the Northern Zhou, which provided the foundations on which the Yang family of the Sui and the Li clan of the Tang (both imperial houses had a strong admixture of nomadic, non-Chinese blood) unified China, was itself a Xianbei (Mongolic) dynasty ruled by the Yuwen clan, who also provided the Sui dynasty with most of its top ranking generals. The Yang clan of the Sui dynasty came to power by virtue of being related by marriage to the Yuwen emperors. Chinese power then barely lasted a century, if it was ever really Chinese. The Arabs would hold on to power for roughly 200 years before being overwhelmed by the Buyids and the Samanids (Iranians) who were themselves extinguished by the Turks (Seljuks, Karakhanids and the Ghaznavids) in the 10th and 11th centuries AD, See Golden (1990c), 359-365._
_Beckwith (2009), 75 ff., argues that this situation had existed even earlier during the period of Proto-Indo-European conquests in the Bronze Age and calls the Hunnic conquests and Germanic migrations the ‘re-central Eurasianisation of Europe’, p. 109 ff. The Bronze Age is, however, well beyond the scope of this book and we cannot realistically overlook the ‘Roman and Han Chinese interlude’ in between the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the Huns. Nonetheless, it does provide an interesting precedent for later Central Asian dominance of much of Eurasia and given the astonishing similarities between Scytho-Sarmatians and Xiongnu-Huns, it is an area that deserves to be researched in much greater detail. See also Frank (1992), 1-52, and Hodgson (1993), 26-28. _
_A representation that has to some extent been corrected in recent scholarship on the Mongols in particular. See Allsen (2009), 141-148. _
_The destruction and butchery caused by the nomads are arguably grossly exaggerated in most of our hostile sedentary sources. See Khazanov (2001), 6. Most famously the decline of agriculture in Khwarezm in Uzbekistan and in Iraq was attributed to the destruction of irrigation networks by the Mongols, but there is ample evidence that in Khwarezm this was actually due to the salinization of the soil and in Iraq irrigation systems had long been in decline since the tenth century AD, long before the Mongol invasion. _
_See Bosworth (1988) for an in depth discussion on the destruction caused by the Macedonian conquest. _
_There is controversy over whether the Macedonians were Greek or a Balkan ethnic group. See Hammond and Griffith (1979), vol. 2, 39-54. _
_See Dani and Bernard (1994), 67-72. _
_See Beckwith (2009), 202-3, 229-231; Soucek (2000), 132-138; Adshead (1993), 135-149, for the Mongol Il-Khanid and Timurid Renaissance (consult also Findley (2005), 102-3, Manz (2009), 194-196, and Dale (2009), 207-217, for the artistic and cultural brilliance of the Timurid era, especially under Husayn Bayqara and Babur). See also Allsen (2009), 148 for the centrality of the Mongols in the selection and transmission of transcontinental cultural traffic in the 13th and 14th centuries, especially, but not exclusively, in the domains of military technology (perhaps most famously gunpowder (p. 150-1), used by Mongol armies in western campaigns as early as the 1220s) and administrative methods_
_Martynov (1990), 187-191. _
_Bell-Fialkoff (2000), 1. Beckwith (2009), 320 ff., in a reaction against the excessive demonization of steppe polities in ‘sedentary’ literature, even asserts that Central Asia is the home of Modern Civilization (p. 319) and downplays the brutality of central Eurasian conquests of their periphery. Although he is right to criticize the excessive exaggeration of some of our sources, it does not lead us anywhere to inaccurately minimize the power and belligerence of steppe peoples. For instance attributing the Hunnic conquest of the Goths to Gothic aggression (p. 331), hardly makes sense and is not supported by any serious interpretation or reading of our sources. His emphasis on the weaknesses of steppe polities, which is designed to minimize their aggressive potential vis-à-vis sedentary states and thus refute some of the negative press that attributes unrelenting belligerence to the steppe, has some validity when applied to the later and more recent history of the steppe in the 17th -19th centuries AD when Central Asia was conquered and divided by the Manchus and the Russians (p. 339). However, the impressions derived from Central Asia in decline can hardly be applied to the millennium of Central Asian dominance that came before it. Attila, Chinggis Khan and Timur fighting to avenge grievances inflicted on their people by sedentary populations? That is surely going too far and though the motive is understandable, as our analysis of the Hunnic Empire will subsequently show, the notion of relative weakness of steppe empires vis-à-vis sedentary states is pure fiction in these earlier centuries. They were the elite military powers of the day and did not shy from using their potential in the most brutal fashion conceivable, just as the Romans, Greeks and the Persians did before them. _
_There has been an extensive and ongoing debate on the controversial issue of the ethnic provenance of the Huns and their links to the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu connection will be discussed later. However, it is necessary to note here that the Huns were from very early on in their history a highly heterogeneous people (probably with a heavy mixture of Tokharians and Scytho-Sarmatians (linguistically belonging to the Iranian language family) whom they conquered before their entry into Europe). There are, however, good reasons for regarding at least their ruling, dominant tribes as one of the very first Turkic (linguistic category) groups to enter Europe. The region from which the Huns derived, the Altai region, and southern Siberia, by the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD (when the region was overrun by refugees from the Northern Xiongnu confederation fleeing Xianbei pressure) was predominantly occupied by Turkic nomads. Oghuric Turkic groups, the so-called Ding-ling (see Pulleyblank (1983), 455-56), elements of which later became the Tiele Turkic confederation that dominated much of Kazakhstan after the end of Hunnic rule over much of Europe in the 5th century AD, were already in close proximity of this region as early as the 2nd century BC when they were conquered by the Xiongnu (Golden (1992), 61, 78-9), the most probable progenitors of the Huns. The original Xiongnu in Mongolia, however, according to Pulleyblank, may have spoken a Palaeo-Siberian language, Kettic to be precise (Pulleyblank (1962), 242-3). But it is highly unlikely that the Huns spoke Kettic by the time they entered Europe. Maechen-Helfen (1973), 23, 402-3, 438-9, 453-4, identifies reasonable Turkic etymologies in the names of tribes ruled by the Huns, in particular the Alpidzuri and Tuncarsi, and also in personal names of Hunnic rulers. More on this later. _
_As Beckwith (2009), 325, 341-2 accurately points out, the so-called ‘nomadic’ empires of Central Asia, including that of the Huns, had their own urban and agricultural resources and were definitely not the quintessentially, parasitical predators, as they are often viewed. The population of these states consisted of not only pastoralists, but urbanites and sedentary farmers. They were therefore largely self-sufficient and could produce their own metalware, clothes, food and weapons. For a good list of export items from Central Asia during the Middle Ages see p. 327. More discussion on the limited nature of nomadism in steppe empires will follow later. _
_See also Di Cosmo, Frank and Golden (2009), 4. Bentley (1993), 27 and 163, attributes the cause of the decline of Eurasian empires, their economy, agricultural and industrial production, trade and communications to the disruptions caused by the bubonic plague. See also Christian (1998), 426-7. For a view with greater stress on economic factors see Adshead (1993), 178-9, 194-201. _
_See Fletcher (1979-80), 236-51. _
_See also Findley (2005), 86-7, for the remarkable stimulus provided by steppe empires for trans-Eurasian exchanges in trade, material goods, and most importantly ideas. This all eventually led to the formation of a ‘unified conceptualization of the world’ (p. 89). For a discussion on the integration of information brought about by the Mongolian unification of Eurasia see Adshead (1993), 53, 70-77. _
_Chen (1966), 252. _
_Beckwith (2009), 111. _
_For an extensive discussion of Iranian languages see Sims-Williams (1998), 125-153, particularly page 4, and Haig (2008), 4-5. For Germanic Languages see König and van der Auwera (1994). For Turkic Languages see Johanson and Csató (1998). _
_See Smith (1986), who argues that ethnicity is a historical phenomenon that is not exclusively confined to the Modern era. _
_Kim (2009), 7-10. _
_Barth (1969). _
_Smith (1986), 12. _
_See Jones (1997), 65, for a good discussion of the two approaches to ethnicity. _

Source: The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe

Book: The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe: Kim, Hyun Jin: 9781107009066: Books: Amazon.com


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## programador.dias (Jul 11, 2022)

Thanks for your text. 
It would be good if we in this forum explored more the figure of Attila the Hun, since he had a great impact on the history of Europe. 
to be honest I believe that Attila the Khan of the Huns and Genghis Khan were the same person, or to an extension the term Genghis Khan may have been used for Attila's sons as well, as Genghis Khan means "great leader" and was a term used to refer to the leaders of the Alans and the Huns. 

He was also the leader Gog, Prince of Ross (Southern Russia, Khazaria) that the prophet Ezekiel says would invade the land of Israel (Europe actually).
 History seems very confusing as our timelines have been altered. The fall of Rome, I believe, was due to a sequence of catastrophes, in this case the destruction by the invasion of Attila, the Black Death (caused by volcanic eruptions and the poisoning and famine that followed) and other cataclysms.

All this prophesied by Ezekiel in his book.


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## Safranek (Jul 12, 2022)

programador.dias said:


> It would be good if we in this forum explored more the figure of Attila the Hun, since he had a great impact on the history of Europe.
> to be honest I believe that Attila the Khan of the Huns and Genghis Khan were the same person, or to an extension the term Genghis Khan may have been used for Attila's sons as well, as Genghis Khan means "great leader" and was a term used to refer to the leaders of the Alans and the Huns.


Yes, we are certainly faced with a major load of deception when it comes to our history and our historical figures, especially when considering the chronological aspect of things.

There's another theory regarding the possibly many characters attributed to Attila and his sons put out by the researcher Gyula Tőth in an article he wrote called;
From Scythia to Maghreb: Beyond the Phantom Middle Ages​which may be of interest to you.


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## TuranSilvanus (Aug 14, 2022)

this book can be dloaded somewhere i did in past letz see
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not this site was but is here too; [this site is blocked otherwise by Facebook
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The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe | Hyun Jin Kim | download


programador.dias said:


> Thanks for your text.
> It would be good if we in this forum explored more the figure of Attila the Hun, since he had a great impact on the history of Europe.
> to be honest I believe that Attila the Khan of the Huns and Genghis Khan were the same person, or to an extension the term Genghis Khan may have been used for Attila's sons as well, as Genghis Khan means "great leader" and was a term used to refer to the leaders of the Alans and the Huns.
> 
> ...


''khone'' in tukic = Old and d=t; Atila-Old?; or GNGS; Sanguis/Blood; and Atila's brother was Bleda/Buda and ''kan'' in turkic=Blood - mixed up but same persons are hiden i guess; but Bold=Bator in hungarian so the name of capital ; Bald=Tar in hung. so ''Tartar''; this all are same persosn and even can apear as Woman too; i even made a clip with Elisabeths=Geng-Gyz but i don teven put here coz ou will say i am crazy etc


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