(‘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 nameshave been absorbed into English. But there is enough, in the words of the greatest of Hun archaeological experts, István Bóna, ‘to correct a great and widely-held error perpetrated by some modern researchers: because of some Mongoloid features in selected skulls, they confuse race with language, and turn the Huns into thorough-going Mongols’.
To tally the possible, the probable and the certain: the Huns were probably of Turkish stock, probably spoke a Turkish language (which shared roots with Mongolian), were possibly a remnant of migrating Xiongnu, had no connection with China apart from some cultural overlap, and were certainly nothing whatever to do with the Slavic and Germanic tribes into whom they so rudely barged.
I n the evolution of the warrior nomad, there remained a vital step. To be truly effective, a bowman needs a delivery system. For this, the Scythians and Chinese developed the two-wheeled chariot: a fast, stable and manoeuvrable firing platform, always provided that you, the archer, had a driver; and always provided that your society had access to wood and carpenters, mines and skilled metalworkers. Thus they were the preserve of well-organized, semi-urbanized peoples. Nomads, riding perhaps bareback, almost certainly without stirrups, could only occasionally match the skills and resources of charioteers.
To reach a peak of effectiveness, warrior nomads had to await the arrival of the stirrup, in particular the iron stirrup, an invention that, in combination with thesaddle, was as influential as the composite bow in the development of warfare. This is a murky subject. Prevailing orthodoxy claims that stirrups developed surprisingly late and spread surprisingly slowly, perhaps because expert horsemen can manage without them, perhaps because chariots provided a partial solution to the problem of wielding a bow. The earliest stirrups, first recorded in India in the second century BC, were supposedly made of rope, as supports for the big toe. The idea was carried to China and Korea, where iron stirrups emerged in the fifth century AD. From there, iron stirrups spread westwards, the first evidence for them being dated to the early sixth century. But dig deeper, and orthodoxy vanishes in a puff. Stirrups should be older, they really should. The idea is so obvious, after all. And they really should not have come from India. A simple toe-stirrup is a help in mounting, but only if you have bare feet, which is all very well in India, but not in Central Asia, where horses were first domesticated. The combination of leather boots, iron-working and horses should have inspired the creation of the iron stirrup by 1000 BC , along with arrowheads. Perhaps it did; but it doesn’t show up in the archaeological record until Turks came to dominate Mongolia in the sixth century. The earliest example I have seen is a reference by the great scholar Joseph Needham, in his Science and Civilisation in China : a pottery figure showing a Chinese horseman with stirrups, dated AD 302. If the Chinese had stirrups, so, surely, did their enemies. Yet they do not appear in paintings of mounted archers. (There is a theory that explains this, according to 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
To tally the possible, the probable and the certain: the Huns were probably of Turkish stock, probably spoke a Turkish language (which shared roots with Mongolian), were possibly a remnant of migrating Xiongnu, had no connection with China apart from some cultural overlap, and were certainly nothing whatever to do with the Slavic and Germanic tribes into whom they so rudely barged.
I n the evolution of the warrior nomad, there remained a vital step. To be truly effective, a bowman needs a delivery system. For this, the Scythians and Chinese developed the two-wheeled chariot: a fast, stable and manoeuvrable firing platform, always provided that you, the archer, had a driver; and always provided that your society had access to wood and carpenters, mines and skilled metalworkers. Thus they were the preserve of well-organized, semi-urbanized peoples. Nomads, riding perhaps bareback, almost certainly without stirrups, could only occasionally match the skills and resources of charioteers.
To reach a peak of effectiveness, warrior nomads had to await the arrival of the stirrup, in particular the iron stirrup, an invention that, in combination with thesaddle, was as influential as the composite bow in the development of warfare. This is a murky subject. Prevailing orthodoxy claims that stirrups developed surprisingly late and spread surprisingly slowly, perhaps because expert horsemen can manage without them, perhaps because chariots provided a partial solution to the problem of wielding a bow. The earliest stirrups, first recorded in India in the second century BC, were supposedly made of rope, as supports for the big toe. The idea was carried to China and Korea, where iron stirrups emerged in the fifth century AD. From there, iron stirrups spread westwards, the first evidence for them being dated to the early sixth century. But dig deeper, and orthodoxy vanishes in a puff. Stirrups should be older, they really should. The idea is so obvious, after all. And they really should not have come from India. A simple toe-stirrup is a help in mounting, but only if you have bare feet, which is all very well in India, but not in Central Asia, where horses were first domesticated. The combination of leather boots, iron-working and horses should have inspired the creation of the iron stirrup by 1000 BC , along with arrowheads. Perhaps it did; but it doesn’t show up in the archaeological record until Turks came to dominate Mongolia in the sixth century. The earliest example I have seen is a reference by the great scholar Joseph Needham, in his Science and Civilisation in China : a pottery figure showing a Chinese horseman with stirrups, dated AD 302. If the Chinese had stirrups, so, surely, did their enemies. Yet they do not appear in paintings of mounted archers. (There is a theory that explains this, according to 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
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