The Huns

[L.Valerius Gaudentius]

This inter-disciplinary approach allowed him to gain insights that other more narrow scholars lacked. Priscus tells a story of how, in his 452 invasion of Italy, Attila was frustrated by the resistence put up in the Siege of Aquileia. According to Priscus, Attila was walking around the walls of the city, pondering whether to maintain the siege or break camp. As he walked, he noticed storks flying out of their roosting places in the city roofs as though abandoning the city. Encouraged by this, he launched an assault and took the city by storm.

That's a nice story, but Maenchen-Helfen noticed a parallel between it and similar stories from central Asia. In the Chin shu, the biography of the Chin Era conqueror of Turkistan, Lu Kuang, a similar tale is told. In this version the general sees a golden figure flying from the besieged town of Ch'iu-tz'u and declared: "This means the Buddha and the gods are deserting them. The Hu will surely perish."

Maenchen-Helfen concludes, " ... stories like the ones told about Attila and Lu Kuang are unknown in Europe. It must be the Huns who bought them from the east." (The World of the Huns, p. 134)

The Huns' origins remains a vexed question and the old assurance that they were related to the earlier Xiong-Nu is now widely questioned. Analysis of their names from a range of sources shows most of them are Turkic, many are Indo-Iranian, some are Germanic and a few are hybrids of these languages. This probably reflects the make up of the peoples that attached themselves to the Huns and those that came to consider themselves 'Hunnic', as well as intermarriage between Huns and 'subject peoples'. It's interesting that Attila's own name is Gothic, for example.

Interesting detail, Thiudareiks Flavius. Could you put a bibliography about the Huns? (books that you considered interesting or useful)