Attila the Hun (9 page)

No metal? No cooked food? You would think the evidence of metalworking would have struck home
with the first Hun arrows, followed quickly by the evidence for cooking. Their bulkiest possessions were huge cooking-pots, cumbersome bell-shaped things with hefty handles, up to a metre in height and weighing 16–18 kilos: cauldrons big enough to boil up clan-sized casseroles. Dozens of them have been found, in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Moldova – and Russia, where half a dozen have turned up scattered over a huge area, one near Ul’yanovsk on the Volga, another 600 kilometres further north, one even from the Altai mountains only 250 kilometres from the Mongolian border. They look like enormous vases, with cone-shaped stands. They are crudely cast in two or three moulds, the stand sometimes being made separately, then roughly soldered together, the joints and rough spots left unfiled. The contents of the alloys vary greatly: most of the metal is local copper, with additions of red oxide of copper and lead, but hardly any of the tin which, when mixed with copper, makes bronze. To any good metal-caster, they would seem amateurish, not a patch on Chinese bronze pots or those made by the Xiongnu. But these were people on the move, which makes the cauldrons interesting. Hun metalworkers had the tools to melt copper (it takes a furnace to create a temperature of 1,000˚C) and some large, heavy stone moulds. The cauldrons alone – leaving aside the decorated saddles and horse harnesses – disprove the idea that these were just primitive herders who knew nothing but fighting and ate raw meat. It takes a large, well-organized group and surplus food to support and transport
metalworkers, the tools of their trade and their products.

No religion? More rubbish. It has to be, because
H. sapiens
evolved as an incurably religious creature. It seems likely that the urge to explain and control the natural world is so fundamental to human intelligence and society that no group, however basic, has ever been found to lack the conviction that we spring from the universe’s hidden essence, remain part of it, are subject to it, can influence it and will return to it.
³
The Huns were no exception, and the Romans knew it really; by ‘no religion’ those who said it meant not a
proper
religion, like theirs, whether Christianity or the civilized paganism inherited from the Greeks. ‘Superstition’
didn’t count. What the Huns believed, exactly, and how they worshipped are entirely unknown, but there can be no doubt that they were animists, awed enough by the forces of nature, by wind, snow, rain, thunder and lightning to imagine spirits in them all. It is fair to guess that, like the Mongols a few centuries later, they saw the origins of these forces in the overarching sky, worshipped heaven above as the fount of all, and sought to control their own destiny through worship and sacrifice. We modern Europeans unthinkingly recall this sky-god in every
Good Heavens! Ciel!
and
Himmel!
we utter. Turkish and Mongol tribes, who lived cheek-by-jowl before the Turks headed west late in the first millennium, had a name for their sky-god: Tenger or Tengri, in two of several common spellings. Tenger turns up all across Asia, from the Tengri desert of Inner Mongolia to an eighth-century bas-relief in eastern Bulgaria. In Mongol, as in many other languages,
tenger
means simply ‘sky’ in its mundane as well as its divine aspect. The Mongols’ Blue Sky – Khökh Tenger – is a deity as well as a nice day. (English has the same ambivalence:
Heavens above
,
the heavens opened
.) The Xiongnu also worshipped Tengri. A history of the Han dynasty (206
BC
–
AD
8), written towards the end of the first century by the historian Pan Ku, in a section on the Xiongnu, says, ‘They refer to their ruler by the title
cheng li
[a transliteration of
tengri
]
ku t’u
[son]
shan-yü
[king]’ i.e. something like ‘His Majesty, the Son of Heaven’. In early Turkish inscriptions, the ruler has his power from Tengri; and Tengri was the name given to Uighur kings of the eighth and ninth centuries. The
Huns could not have been outside Tengri’s wide reach. Whether or not they were Xiongnu remnants, whether or not they retained the same name for their god, they surely brought a similar belief-system with them, and a similar faith that shamans, with their chants and drums and spirit-guides, could open a hotline to heaven.

The evidence is in the few records. In 439, just before fighting the Visigoths outside Toulouse, the Roman general Litorius decided to please his Hun auxiliaries by performing what the Romans called the
haruspicatio
, a ceremony of divination. Attila, who had seers at his court, did the same thing before his great defeat 12 years later. What was true in the mid-fifth century must have been true at earlier times, for divination had a history dating back millennia. Indeed, it was fundamental to Chinese culture, inspiring the earliest Chinese writing: in the Shang dynasty around 1500
BC
, shamans saw meanings in the heat-cracks of scorched turtle-shells, and turned the shells into memo pads by scribbling their interpretations on them. Later, many Central Asian groups, including the Mongols, adopted scapulimancy – the practice of reading omens in the heat-cracked shoulder blades of cattle. No-one recorded such a ceremony at Attila’s court, but the Huns’ origins make it highly likely that their shamans used scapulimancy in their divinations.

T
here is one characteristic that would have struck you as an outsider, once you had become accepted enough by a few important families to be received informally. Some of the children had deformed heads. They seemed
to have grown upwards and backwards to form a loaf shape. This was not the result of disease. There was nothing wrong with these children; the opposite, probably, because they would have seemed to live a more privileged life than most. It would no doubt have been easily explained to you, once you had mastered Hunnish. Unfortunately, there were no visitors on that level of intimacy, certainly none who spoke Hunnish and recorded the results of their conversations. The only way anthropologists know of this habit is from finding a number of skulls, mostly of children, with this odd deformity.

I had my introduction to artificial cranial deformation in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Museum of Art History, where Peter Stadler is the resident expert in the barbarian tribes of the Carpathian basin and Karen Wiltschke is the physical anthropologist with a specialist interest in this arcane area. We talked in the museum’s collection of skeletons, none of them set up on wire like anatomical specimens, but lying loose in boxes stacked two or three deep, piled on top of each other in columns, 150 to a column, 80 columns of them lining four walls and the side of a corridor – 25,000 boxed skeletons, with another 25,000 waiting to be inventoried. Of these, some 40–50 have skulls that are artificially deformed. Since they date from the early fifth century, they are mostly Hun skulls, and many are those of children. From the scanty evidence, it appears that both boys and girls were given distorted crania, which they preserved as adults if they survived. Some didn’t, of course, which accounts for
the lower percentage of adults among the remains.

Cranial deformation has been quite common throughout history. An extraordinary study of the subject was published in 1931:
Artificial Cranial Deformation: A Contribution to the Study of Ethnic Mutilations
. Its author, Eric Dingwall, had an odd fascination for ethnic mutilations, among other things. In the fine tradition of English eccentricity, he lived in a flat in St Leonard’s surrounded by a prize collection of chastity belts, working on psychical research and, in an honorary capacity, on the arcana section of the Cambridge University Library, until his death in 1986. He also wrote one of the first studies on female circumcision. Female circumcision – genital mutilation, as it is now called – is with us still; cranial deformation has all but vanished. The differing fates of the two practices have uncomfortable implications for the human character, female genital mutilation being painful, crude, secretive and swift (though its effects are anything but swiftly over), while cranial deformation is painless, demands long-term care and remains openly evident throughout the subject’s life. It arose in scores of societies all over the world. Neanderthalers distorted skulls 55,000 years ago, and the technique has been with
Homo sapiens
throughout our history, a ‘curious and widespread custom’, as Dingwall noted, providing examples from Asia, Africa, Indonesia, New Guinea, Melanesia, Polynesia and all the Americas as well as Europe. As he remarks, it can have nothing to do with rites of puberty or initiation rituals, because it can only be done in early childhood, when the skull is still soft
and growing. In the Americas, indigenous groups in Chile and the north-west used to flatten their babies’ heads by tying boards against them, most notably the Chinook, who are therefore also known as Flathead Indians. Other cultures used fabric bandages to create a cylindrical, loaf-like skull. It is not hard to do. All it takes is a headband wrapped tight, but rewrapped every few days to preserve pressure, to prevent inflammation and to allow for washing. This was the technique used by aboriginals in New South Wales, Australia, some 13,000 years ago, and probably by the ancient Egyptians to give Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s queen, her elegant attenuated skull. It was a common practice in rural France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Why, for heaven’s sake? That is one possible answer: in some cases, it might well have been for the sake of heaven, a sign that a child was destined for the priesthood. But the reasons seem to be mainly social. Among the Chinooks, it was considered proof of good nurturing; mothers who could not be bothered were considered neglectful, and their round-headed children risked being teased by their flat-headed peers. In other cultures, in which mothers or nurses had the time to provide the necessary attention, a long head was a sign of status. In the case of the Huns, it was more subtle than that. Several busts of Nefertiti accentuate her elongated head; but no-one remarked that Attila had a deformed head, or that his sons did, or any of his generals, or his envoys, or his queen, so either they kept their heads covered – and why would they do that, if
the deformation were a mark of high status? – or status alone was not the reason behind head-binding.

There is a pattern to be explained. As Karen Wiltschke said, ‘The further east you go, the greater the percentage of deformations.’ But then, during the 20-year span of Attila’s empire (433–53) and immediately afterwards, other tribes in the Huns’ short-lived realm also adopted the practice. Take the great Ostrogothic leader Theodoric, who was born in Pannonia (today, western Hungary and eastern Croatia) a year or two after Attila’s death and ended his days as king of post-Roman Italy. On his coins he is shown with an elongated head, which must have been given him soon after his birth in about 454 – presumably because that was the fashion taken over from the most successful of the barbarian invaders, who in turn brought the habit with them from the east.

We are left with a puzzle. From archaeology we know that the Huns bound the heads of some of their children, who retained their deformed skulls as adults. Yet no outsider recorded seeing any such thing. All we can do is guess at an explanation. Perhaps these buried skulls were in life kept discreetly under hats, known only to the tribe itself, hidden from outsiders. Perhaps the long-heads were an elite, a sort of freemasonry, whose secrets were passed from father and mother to son and daughter. There was among hunting societies such a freemasonry: the community of shamans, who could in their trances take wing upon the beat of drums and become hawk, eagle, gander or duck to roam at will in the realms of power and insight. From the
shamans and their visions came the knowledge of a people’s strength and an enemy’s weakness, of the right time to fight, of the way fate would turn, of the cause of diseases and their cures. Such things were not to be revealed to strangers.

L
ook at Attila’s forebears in a wider context. Into the Black Sea, draining western Russia and eastern Europe, flow four great rivers, looking on the map like flashes drawn to an oddly shaped lightning conductor. From west to east, they are the four Ds: Danube, Dniester, Dnieper and Don, marking regions of increasing obscurity to the Romans, from the semi-Romanized Dacia (present-day Romania), across the nomad-lands of southern Russia to the impenetrable and unknown valleys of the Caucasus. Jutting down in the middle of this twilight world, like a lamp from a shadowy ceiling of barbarism, was the Crimea, which had been a Greek base for centuries, and remained in imperial hands in Roman times. To Roman writers, as to the Greeks, the Black Sea and its river-bastions were buffers between civilization and the barbarian wilderness, with the Crimea as a transition zone for those approaching by sea. Here, Herodotus had known Scythians who lived between the two worlds, Hellenism and tribalism.

But inland, away from the Greek coastal colonies, lay the very un-Greek world of the Pontic steppe, the vast, treeless, gently rolling grassland of Kazakhstan. Now, it has become a Russified version of the mid-West, tamed by the plough. Then, it was to westerners the heart of barbarian darkness, and to uncounted tribes for two
millennia a new homeland or a temporary sanctuary in their slow surge westward. It was from beyond even these remote areas that the Huns came, from a world of myth and shadows, an opening break on a vast billiard-table, which sent tribes ricocheting off each other into the Roman world.

What set them in motion? Why would a small tribe in the depths of Asia suddenly explode onto the world stage? Once, it was fashionable to ascribe large migrations and nomadic assaults to climate change and the pressure of population, as if the ‘heartland’ were in fact a vast heart beating to some hidden ecological rhythm, pumping out an arterial flow of peoples westwards. But climate alone is not a sufficient explanation, for to a lesser tribe it might have been as fatal as a drought to impoverished Ethiopians.