Who are the Huns and where did they come from

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Even those who are not at all interested in history must have heard of such a mysterious people who “buried” Ancient Rome as the Huns. Furious barbarians-nomads who came from the east and became one of the reasons for the Great Migration of Peoples in Eurasia. In their movement to the west, the Huns became one of the main catalysts of historical processes for several centuries, and most importantly, they largely predetermined the future appearance of Europe and Asia, the Mediterranean and the Caucasus.

Where did this mysterious people come from and where did they disappear?

Who are the Huns?

It is worth immediately breaking the "intrigue": the Huns are not a people in the usual sense. And it is very important to understand and understand, since in fact the Huns are a huge tribal group of many nomadic and once settled peoples, inhabitants of Asia, and later Europe and the Caucasus.

The basis of the Huns was the Altai tribal group, the peoples of Asia, who spoke the Turkic, Tungus-Manchu and Mongol languages of that time. After the beginning of the resettlement, the Huns, like an avalanche, will drive other peoples in front of them. Others will even be included in this tribal conglomerate, themselves becoming Huns.

Modern genetic research confirms this fact. The study of the remains and objects left from the Huns indicates that this was an extremely diverse group of people in terms of genetics.

As you might have guessed, the Huns did not call themselves Huns. If only because it was a huge number of clans and tribes, societies with a very primitive structure, especially by the standards of the ancient empires of Europe and Asia. The name "Hunni" was first applied to nomadic peoples by the Romans.

Moreover, in the “Greek” part of the Roman Empire, they were called not “Huns”, but “Unnes”. In the Caucasus and among the barbarian tribes of Europe, the Huns had their own local names. The current name of this nomadic people began to be widely used only since 1926, after the beginning of an active study of the Great Migration of Nations.

Where did the Huns come from?

In 206 BC, in the valley of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers on the ruins of the Chinese Qin Empire, a new power appeared - the Han Empire. Like any other highly organized slave-owning society of antiquity, the Han Empire could not but pursue an aggressive foreign policy with the aim of capturing slaves, population and fertile lands. Moving westward, the Chinese with numerous nomadic Hun tribes.

The Chinese expanded their empire, the Huns launched raids on all neighboring tribes, as well as on "sedentary weaklings" from the east. The long and fierce confrontation between the nomads and the settled by the end of the 2nd century AD ended with the victory of the Han Empire, which began to squeeze the Huns out of their traditional habitats with fire and sword. Then the nomads moved west in search of salvation from sworn enemies. So the first domino bar fell, which launched the Great Migration of Nations.

The Huns began to migrate to the west. The migration was by no means peaceful: on the way, the Huns constantly came into conflicts with other tribes, including for the weaning of livestock and the capture of slaves. Gradually, more and more peoples poured into the wave of nomads with evil and good: some joined the Huns, others fled from them, doing the same in front of them, what their fierce enemies were doing. This is how the wave of tribes appeared, which was later named by the Huns.

At the same time, it is important to emphasize that for the most part there was no unity among the Huns. For a long time, all "unity" ended in small associations at the hand of more or less successful leaders, as well as in a kinship. The resettlement of the Huns to the west was not a coordinated military campaign, but a chaotic migration.

Of course, each tribal leader, for objective reasons, tried to gather as many nomads as possible under his hand. The process of unification of the Huns lasted for several centuries: the migration of tribes either consolidated, then again disintegrated into disparate groups. The best way to unite the disparate tribes was the legendary leader of the barbarians Attila, who was the ruler of the nomads from 434 to 453 AD.

Moreover, by the beginning of the 5th century AD, not only the Turkic and Mongol tribes were somehow integrated into the migration of the Huns. Many peoples of the Caucasus entered there, for example, the nomads Alans (Sarmatian tribe), the tribes of the Germans, Celts, Scythians and even the ancient Slavs were also incorporated into the Hunnic environment.

Where did the Huns go?

Nothing comes out of nowhere and disappears nowhere. So the warlike people of the Huns did not dissolve into thin air. Throughout the entire migration, the Huns, like a locust invasion, devastated the lands and destroyed the states of the sedentary peoples. First of all, the peoples of the Caucasus, Asia Minor, and also the non-Latinized part of Europe were unlucky.

The Romans also drank grief from the Huns. The Great Migration of Nations became one of the largest migrations in the history of mankind and predetermined the appearance of Europe for many centuries. Without the Great Migration and the arrival of Asian tribes in Europe, without resettlement under the pressure of the migration of the Huns, Germanic tribes today would not have been the peoples of the Old World familiar to us: Spaniards, Italians, Germans. What is really there, the Huns and the Great Migration of Peoples had a significant impact on the subsequent ethnogenesis of the Slavs.

At the same time, the Huns were by no means an "unbridled barbaric force" that swept away everything in its path (although they were doing just that!). Do not forget that, first of all, migration, which began in the II century AD on the border with ancient China, was looking for a place to settle all this time. Ultimately, the peoples of the Hunnic migration settled in one way or another. Somewhere they mixed with the indigenous inhabitants, somewhere they became conquerors and built their own states.

For example, on the territory of modern Dagestan, part of the Huns created their own kingdom. On the territory of Iran, the so-called "White Huns" founded the Ephtalite kingdom back in the 3rd century AD. Even the glorious Italian city of Venice came about thanks to the Huns.

Since it was as a result of the Great Migration of Nations that people began to settle in the Venetian lagoon - the Huns, Visigoths and Lombards (the last two are Germanic tribes). By the 6th century AD, the great migration of peoples began to decline, and it was completely completed already in the 17th century. By this time, the descendants of the Huns had become part of the population of Europe, the Caucasus and Asia Minor.