Attila the Hun (6 page)

T
he 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.

I
n 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!’

N
oyan 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.