Huns: The Origin

[Music] throughout history the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe have played a key role in the rise and fall of Empires from the Seljuk Turks about vast land to the great Mongol host of Genghis Khan unique military tactics and a stunning series of victories against the settled civilizations have immortalized the people of the steppe in the minds of many but one-step people in particular are well known to us the Huns pushed west during the mid 4th century causing a series of Domino effects which would eventually help bring down the Roman Empire in the West under their leader Attila the Huns became a byword for ferocity and ruthlessness for millennia afterwards but where did this enigmatic people come from and how did they live their lives what gods did they worship and what was their culture welcome to our video on the mighty Huns shout out to rise of kingdoms for sponsoring this video sponsors like this allow our channel to produce more and better content so downloading rise of 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food and 100,000 wood the Romans had popular but ultimately incorrect ideas about where the mysterious Huns came from shown in such sources as those left to us by Solomon Zhou Simas Jordan ease and procopius according to the standard tale the Huns and Germanic Goths lived side by side with one another for centuries without even knowing it separated by the Straits of Kerch each nation believed there was no land over the horizon until one fateful day at this point the story diverges into two forms but the general message is clear one version relates how a cow belonging to a hun herdsmen was stoned by a gadfly and fled through the marshy water to the opposite shore the herdsmen followed his animal in hopes of retrieving it and instead found land to the west where he believed none existed before after retrieving his wayward cattle the man returned to honey clans and told his countrymen the other account states that a hanok hunter in pursuit of the stag was led across the Straits by their fleeing prey and was amazed by the mild climate and fertile soil in the land he encountered whatever the case the Huns soon crossed the Straits after discovering the landmasses existence and barreled into the Gothic inhabitants of the Crimean Peninsula where the Huns truly came from originally is a controversial question and to examine it properly we must travel far to the east to the borders of China centuries before Attila ascended to the role of chieftain in the 18th century a jesuit priest named josef Deegan came up with the idea that European Huns which devastated Rome in the fifth century were the same people as the even more ancient zhangmu who had fought titanic wars with the Han Chinese centuries before since this first proposition the debate has raged for centuries and by using recent scholarship we can almost conclusively state the relationship between the two peoples various sources from the ancient Chinese region authored by people from diverse origins such as Sogdian merchants and buddhist monks have dubbed the Xiong nu as translations of Huns or Hana therefore it has been concluded that there must be a connection of some kind between the two but the nature of this connection is perhaps even more interesting than we previously thought the implication for centuries has been that the Huns are blood-related but the established link between the names does not definitively prove this step Confederations such as the Huns are almost always multilingual and multi-ethnic which means that attempting to determine blood relation is a difficult task in the early Empire of Genghis Khan for example the 90,000 troops he led into China consisted of a primarily Mongol High Command and a myriad of other steppe tribes such as markets Karaites Nieman's and many more what is more noteworthy is that the later European Huns of Attila chose to use the name of Imperial Xiong nu as their own name much like the Holy Roman Empire dubbed themselves Roman to inherit the greatness of the old Empire this is clearly an indication that the Huns valued this link with the old Eastern steppe and this political and cultural heritage of the Huns is key to understanding the connections between their manned the Xiong nu of old rather than direct descent the fragmentation of the once powerful Xiong nu Empire by combined hand pressure from the Han Chinese and other rival nomadic groups such as the Shan Bey might have knocked them down from their formerly lofty status but it did not finish them off far from being finished the Xiong nu Huns survived in the see of the Altai mountains away from mainstream Chinese and greco-roman sources though they had survived destruction the Xiong nu were in a desperate situation during the first and second centuries surrounded as they were by hostile powers all around their home in the Altai mountains to the west and south kangju dingaling and Wilson tribes in addition to the Kushan Empire exerted pressure to the east the Shan Bey and Han Dynasty were driving the Xiong nu out of their former eastern lands this situation changed during the third century when these strong powers who hemmed them in began to decline fahan descended into their three kingdoms period and the various other nomadic tribes began to fragment and the Kushan started to disintegrate it was this weakness in their neighbors which allowed the Xiong nu Huns to expand both into Central Asia and eventually and more famously into Europe where they would come into contact with the Roman Empire archaeological evidence from the Ural Mountains shows us that by the early fourth century at the latest the Huns had expanded that far west implying that all states and tribes between the Altai and the Urals were subject to the resurgent Xiong nu who should now be considered the European Huns of popular imagination by the three 70s the Huns first emerge on the horizons of greco-roman sources when they famously defeated the Alan's as well as the growth in G and Ferb indeed Goths instead of going over the better-known aspects of hanok history we will diverge to some of the less well-known aspects of the hunters themselves beginning with the predominant religion among their people Roman soldier and historian ami annasmith colonist stated that the Huns had no religion but this seems incredibly unlikely what the Huns exactly believed and how exactly they worshipped is unknown but it can be inferred that they were Animists they were likely reverent of the natural forces and elements of the world such as wind snow rain fun lightning and others and probably believed each possessed a spirit like the infamous Mongols many centuries later it is probable that the Huns perceived the origins of these myriad forces in the sky worshipping heaven above as the font of all creation and using sacrifice and worship in an attempt to control their own destiny this sky god has a name by which Turkish and Mongol tribes knew it and which is also familiar to many modern people Tenga or Tengri a God which tribal shamans would placate with their chants drums and spirit guides evidence is very scarce for Hunnic religiosity but there are a few notable appearances in the year 439 just before a battle against a Visigothic army a Roman general decided to please his Hanukkah hilary's by performing a ceremony of divination a traditionally 10 Griest practice this is the most accepted modern view point on the Hunnic religion but it is not the only one the most outlandish and exotic sounding of all the possibilities is that the Huns worshipped a sacred sword in this interpretation the worship of the sword is a sort of proxy for the true worship of a war god the nomadic equivalent of Aries or Mars in the greco-roman world as a mark of this worship many nomadic and settled peoples alike swore on their swords as if it were witnessing the oath in an economic sense the common perception of Huynh like step empires is that agriculture was not practiced at all however new evidence has emerged which suggests that this might not have been the case instead the designation agro pastoralist has been placed on the Hunnic Empire as it possessed both a large pastoralist nomad population and sedentary agriculturalists that is farmers the nomads tended to alternate between summer pastures and winter quarters depending on the time of year and climate in order to partake in the traditional steppe lifestyles such as animal husbandry hunting and fishing your Deniz provides us with an ax example of this pastoralist lifestyle the Hunnic outsi aguirre tribe they pastured near chess on in the Crimea in the summer where their cattle could find plentiful food and migrated north of the Black Sea in winter where Reed's apparently provided good animal fodder though it is not mentioned in the sources a key animal kept by the Hunnic nomads would have been the sheep which is capable of providing milk cheese and crucial wool during their interactions with the Roman Empire two mediterranean products in particular became a crucial part of the han economy silk and wine the Huns would often obtain highly desired roman silk by raiding imperial territory and exacting tribute but they also traded goods such as furs and step horses for it while the Huns did not drink wine during their migration west this was probably because they did not have access to it rather than any cultural aversion to the drink we know this because they took to the traditional Roman beverage perhaps too much after they entered modern Hungary at banquets organized between Huns and room and diplomats wine would be liberally consumed after the first course ant the second course after the Romans left the Huns would keep on drinking late into the night all this meant that during the high point of the honey Empire under tiller vast quantities of wine were exported to their lands from Rome now that we have discussed some of the aspects of hunnic life during their time in Rome's vicinity we shall discuss how the Huns transitioned into different forms after atilla's death that death triggered a bitter civil war between many of Attila sons and other powerful hunnic Nobles who fought over the grand inheritance he had left behind the nature of this civil war is hazy but it probably occurred between two coalition's the honey clans of the east and west the latter of which Attila had favored during his reign the Western faction with its power base sent it in the Carpathian Basin was led by the semi Germanic Gap it's they were only semi Germanic because in the fourth these it is widely believed that the Gepard elite was almost identical to the honey Khalid due to intermarriage and other cultural blending the eastern coalition was headed by the Hunnic Achatz eerie tribe located in modern Ukraine who had been disempowered due to supporting blader against a tiller before the latter killed the former the key battle in this Civil War took place in 454 ad at nadao where are during king of the gap it's defeated and killed alack the eldest of Attila sons and the chief of the akatsiya although it is common to see this war as a Germanic revolt against hanok overlordship it seems instead that those Germanic leaders were in fact hun princes who had been culturally hybridized to almost become something like Jamaa no Huns interestingly this might have been a conscious policy by the hun aristocracy to ease integration of the formerly independent Germanic tribal unions to their own rule and our Durack himself was likely a member of the highest tier of hun society why did the Achatz Arif action lose this battle despite its greater military strength during the post attila period we can reconstruct what appears to have been an unintentional but deadly giant pizza which struck the eastern portion of the honey camp ire the gap it led faction hit from the west and a more threatening assault from a new nomadic group the Orcas came from the eastern stem the task of salvaging the eastern remnant was left to atilla's youngest son known as air nak who eventually succeeded and found is the political entity which would become associated with the bulgar Huns militarily this group was still extremely formidable and would be used as food arathi and mercenaries in eastern roman armies for almost a century after during the Byzantine campaigns against the van Dalek Kingdom 70 Hunnic horsemen reportedly defeated an entire Moorish army in the conquest of Italy both Belisarius and narcy's would use Hunnic mercenaries as elite shock troops the Roman cavalry in the sixth and seventh centuries which try to copy the model of the legendary mobile an Army's victory or defeat in Byzantium wars depended on the mood of Han allies and mercenaries in 531 Emperor Justinian learned that the Huns had defected to join the Persians but managed to trick the Persians into thinking the Huns were instead marching against them and they fled in terror indicating the or with which the Romans and Persians held the military power of the Huns almost a century after their greatest leader perished once again allow us to thank the sponsor of this video rise of kingdoms this free-to-play mobile strategy game will give you hours of enjoyment and by downloading it you will support our channel so use the link in the description or the pin to comment we will continue talking about ancient civilizations so make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have pressed the bell button we would like to express our gratitude to our patreon supporters and channel members who make the creation of our videos possible this is the kings and Generals channel and we will catch you on the next one

Channel: Kings and Generals

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Keywords: Hun, Huns, attila, china, han, rome, roman empire, catalaunian plains, aetius, mobei, eastern roman empire, roman history, western roman empire, fall of rome, attila the hun, fall of the roman empire, atilla the hun, the huns, genghis khan, sack of rome, hunnic empire, ancient rome, byzantine empire, history channel, ottoman empire, kings and generals, julius caesar, tengri, mongols, Tenger, genghis, ancient history, crash course, fall of constantinople, seljuks, ottoman

Id: bFpQjWtpHcM

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019