But the worst of the so-called Barbarians, these forgotten ancient peoples whose reputation has been trashed by the Romans, the very worst of them where the Huns. Poor Huns! If anyone in ancient history deserves some rebranding, it’s this notorious nation of energetic invaders.

No-one has a good word to say about them. The Goth historian, Jordanis, tells us they were scarcely human, a stunted, puny and faithless tribe.

Christian writers were even harsher. According to a Christian cleric writing in Syria, the Huns eat the flesh of children. And drink the blood of women.

A Badly Maligned People

It’s like reading a bad airport paperback. The Christians were determined to demonise all pagans and they were particularly determined to demonise the Huns. So we can’t trust the Christian clerics. We need to trust the art. And that tells a different story.

In the First World War, the British began calling the Germans “Huns”. It was the worst insult they could think of.

But also, very bad geography, because the Huns were not from Germany.

Exactly where they came from is one of the big mysteries of the Dark Ages. Nobody knows for sure. But it was somewhere out here, in the Euro Asian steppe. Somewhere far away and different. The first record of the Huns in Europe dates from around 376 A.D., when a group of retreating Goths turned up here on the banks of the Danube and begged the Romans to take them in.

The fleeing Goths had been pushed out of their lands by a nation of nomads, coming in from the east. A fighting tribe, of whom everyone was scared. Huns were fierce warriors, there’s no denying that. But not all the time. Like all nomads, they lived a precarious, travelling existence. They moved around in small family groups, menfolk, women and goats.

Tinkerish Domesticity

The default lifestyle of the Huns was a tinkerish domesticity. And among the splendid Hunnic objects they’ve left behind, the defining one’s are these battered Hunnic cauldrons, preserved in the museum in Budapest. In these robust vessels, the Huns cooked their goats and boiled their water. “A man can live to 50…” Is an old Kazakh saying that still circulates. “But a cauldron will live to 100.”

Something else we know about the Huns is that they loved gold. Oh, how the Huns loved gold. The Hunnic graves that have been dug up, the horded caches of treasure and valuables, reveal such a deep and instinctive passion for treasure.

These days, we’ve lost sight of gold’s crazy, hypnotic power. And that special relationship it enjoys with the sun. The Incas called it “The sweat of the gods”. And in the Dark Ages, gold was a substance with a magical presence. And the Huns loved it in a visceral and unbalanced way. In my book, that’s a good reason to love them back.

Because they spend so much of their life on the move, travelling from pasture to pasture, the Huns had a particularly creative relationship with the natural world. Hun treasure is dominated by exquisite animal forms.

In the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, there is a wonderful piece of jewellery. It’s a golden bit of a bangle, or a neck torque, like one of these. And it’s this piece here at the end, shaped so atmospherically like the head of a creeping Wolf.

This is gold that nurses an intense symbolic ambition, to commune with the natural world. To speak to it and steal some of its power. To steal the power of the Wolf.

Another animal that was dear to them was the eagle. They probably used eagles to hunt with, as nomads of the Steppes still do. And the great bird in the sky inspired such beautiful Hun bling. Eagles have a special significance for the Hun. They were ready-made symbols of power and beauty combined. And right across the barbarian world, these garnet-studded eagle brooches became noticeably popular. This powerful new relationship to the natural world was one of the great barbarian contributions to civilisation.

And then of course there was the magnificent Hunnic horse art.

Horsemen of the Steppes

The Huns depended on their horses totally and they loved them deeply, so, of course, they made sure their horses looked suitably splendid, too.

These are the remains of a full-length Hunnic horse ornament, fashioned delicately from gold and studded so generously with precious stones. Lucky is the horse who got to wear this.

The Huns would ride into battle with Wolfskin pulled down on their faces, screaming demonically in a deliberate effort to get inside their enemy’s heads. So, this was dark, psychological warfare. Very sophisticated. And one of the reasons the Huns were so easy to demonise is because they looked so strange.

They practised ritual deformation, and their skulls were deliberately misshapen at birth. Infant Huns would have their heads tightly bound so the grew into these uncanny and elongated Mekon shapes. And on these deformed heads of theirs, the Huns would balance spectacular crowns of unimaginable preciousness.

External Links

The Huns – Wikipedia Page