Free Attila the Hun by John Man Page A

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 transportmetalworkers, 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. TheHuns 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