Free Attila the Hun by John Man Page B

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 seemedto 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 forthe 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