bows, which everyone had to have, were not high-status objects. The graves in western Mongolia were for lower-ranking officials, who would have wished to pass on their prize possessions to their surviving relatives. Who in their grieving families would waste such a precious, life-and-death object by burying anything but a few unused bits and pieces?
Perhaps, then, what we see in Xiongnu graves is a Hunnish bow in the process of evolution; and this, if true, would argue for a direct link between Hun and Xiongnu.
I f Hun and Xiongnu are not quite joined by archaeology, what about folklore? If there was a link, isn’t it odd that the Huns did not seem to have a folk memory of it? The Xiongnu’s Turkish successors in Mongolia were happy to claim them as ancestors until they, too, were driven westwards in the eighth century; but Attila, much closer to the Xiongnu in time, apparently never did. He had his bards, but no eye-witness recorded them singing of conquering forebears.
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 helpfrom language. Though Attila employed interpreters and secretaries, no-one wrote Hunnish, only Latin or Greek, the languages of the dominant culture, with its inbuilt prejudice against barbarian tongues. Scholars have been free to improvise, a favourite solution being Gibbon’s, that the Huns were actually Mongols. (They weren’t: the Mongols did not move into Xiongnu territory until half a millennium after the Xiongnu had gone.) Some experts have claimed certain words as Hunnish; all are disputed; no single word that is absolutely, undoubtedly Hunnish has survived.
But we have Hun names, or think we do. First we must strip away veils of obscurity, for Huns, Goths, other Germanic tribes, even Romans all adopted names from each other’s cultures; and Hun names acquired Latin or Greek endings; and they were often spelled differently by different scribes. Still, there is behind these veils a core of names that offer clues about the language. Attila’s uncle Octar was also written Oiptagos, Accila, Occila, Optila and Uptar ( ct shifted to pt in the Balkan dialect of Latin). But öktör means ‘powerful’ in old Turkish. A coincidence? Scholars think not. The names of other characters in this story also suggest Turkish roots: Attila’s father Mundzuk (‘Pearl’ or ‘Decoration’), his uncle Aybars (‘Moon Panther’), his senior wife Erekan (‘Beautiful Queen’), his son Ernak
Perhaps, then, what we see in Xiongnu graves is a Hunnish bow in the process of evolution; and this, if true, would argue for a direct link between Hun and Xiongnu.
I f Hun and Xiongnu are not quite joined by archaeology, what about folklore? If there was a link, isn’t it odd that the Huns did not seem to have a folk memory of it? The Xiongnu’s Turkish successors in Mongolia were happy to claim them as ancestors until they, too, were driven westwards in the eighth century; but Attila, much closer to the Xiongnu in time, apparently never did. He had his bards, but no eye-witness recorded them singing of conquering forebears.
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 helpfrom language. Though Attila employed interpreters and secretaries, no-one wrote Hunnish, only Latin or Greek, the languages of the dominant culture, with its inbuilt prejudice against barbarian tongues. Scholars have been free to improvise, a favourite solution being Gibbon’s, that the Huns were actually Mongols. (They weren’t: the Mongols did not move into Xiongnu territory until half a millennium after the Xiongnu had gone.) Some experts have claimed certain words as Hunnish; all are disputed; no single word that is absolutely, undoubtedly Hunnish has survived.
But we have Hun names, or think we do. First we must strip away veils of obscurity, for Huns, Goths, other Germanic tribes, even Romans all adopted names from each other’s cultures; and Hun names acquired Latin or Greek endings; and they were often spelled differently by different scribes. Still, there is behind these veils a core of names that offer clues about the language. Attila’s uncle Octar was also written Oiptagos, Accila, Occila, Optila and Uptar ( ct shifted to pt in the Balkan dialect of Latin). But öktör means ‘powerful’ in old Turkish. A coincidence? Scholars think not. The names of other characters in this story also suggest Turkish roots: Attila’s father Mundzuk (‘Pearl’ or ‘Decoration’), his uncle Aybars (‘Moon Panther’), his senior wife Erekan (‘Beautiful Queen’), his son Ernak
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