Ancient Romans depicted Huns as barbarians – their bones tell a different story | Hacker News Reader

Ancient Romans depicted Huns as barbarians – their bones tell a different story

washingtonpost.com

116 pointsbenbreen130 comments

The Fall of Rome podcast had a really interesting episode on The Huns: https://m.soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast/fall-of-rome-epis...

He makes the argument that in the later Roman Empire, the Huns treated the Roman Empire as either a vassal or a buffer state to their own empire. They demanded tribute from them and even forced the romans to chase down and return refugees. It's really interesting to look at the Roman Empire from a hun-centered point of view-- just one more border state along a small section of a vast empire.

They seem to have been one of a long series of steppe empires with the same basic organization-- from the Scythians to the Mongols.

Speaking of Scythia - somewhat bizarrely Scottish legends claim that the Scots were originally from there!

"They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today."

Declaration of Arbroath, 1320.

It's not an unreasonable legend. Conventional wisdom is that all Indo-Europeans sprang from the steppes of Central Asia. Having it mentioned in a 14th century declaration is pretty fascinating!

Sort of. The languages did. But there were people in Scotland before any indo Europeans got there.

And people before those people, most likely!

Given the context of the Declaration (i.e. The First Scottish War of Independence) it sounds to me like propaganda trying to claim an ancient and separate lineage for the Scots.

Mind you the Declaration is a great document - proclaiming Scottish freedom and saying that while Robert the Bruce is a cool guy if he doesn't turn out to be a good king then he'll be sacked and another one found from somewhere. Which is a fairly novel idea for kings.

The proto-indo-European migration is thought to have been a cultural and linguistic migration, not a mass physical migration or a conquest.

Source on that? IE spread from the Dnieper River area to Western Europe and Western China in a rather short amount of time. Clearly there was a lot of migration from the Urheimat.

That is was written in the 14th century makes it very suspect.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain makes similar claims for Scythian ancestry, and that the Scythians were in turn refugees from Troy.

He also claimed that ancient Britons laid seige to Rome.

Pretty funny how his bullshit survived and was repeated through the centuries.

And on the way from Scythia the Scots somehow also apparently also picked up the stone that Jacob rested his head on at Bethel which became, via a detour to Dunadd and Scone, the Stone of Destiny!

[Spoilsport geologists dispute this story with their pesky "facts" ;-)]

I was astonished to learn that the biggest Celtic megalith structures are in northern France. Easy to forget how certain empires spread and collapsed in different directions.

The legendary early settlers of Ireland, the Nemedians (who would have later settled Scotland) came from Scythia:

"Nemed, ... was the son of Agnoman of Scythia..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemed

Interesting that they talk about their predecessors completely dying out. There was a fascinating Time Team special where they mentioned that Britain has had seven completely separate waves of inhabitants - with the predecessors apparently all dying out.

Probably a coincidence though as the timescales won't match up but fascinating to even consider that there was some historical truth behind those old myths.

Sounds similar to the stories of the deluge in many cultures, that supposedly wiped out all or most earlier life, once or periodically. Bible's Noah's ark, Hinduism's pralaya (IIRC, primeval flood), many others ...

If there really was such a thing, it might explain a lot of these stories.

Wow. What a weak article. It basically tells nothing other than the fact that the Huns were people (we knew that) and that different people may lead different lives (we knew that also).

I was thinking the same thing. As someone who spent a lot of his PhD time with Late Antiquity as a secondary area of specialization, I can say that an enormous amount of this is "duh". It does not uproot the commonly accepted research by any stretch.

I'm sure most popular press articles are "duh" if you have PhD in the field or a closely related field ...

Indeed. I've spent many a Sunday at university libraries reading about history and this was interesting and largely new to me. That people with some expertise thinks it's a duh article makes me happy that I didn't just read a bunch of bullshit!

  That people with some expertise thinks it's a duh article 
  makes me happy that I didn't just read a bunch of bullshit!

A good point, by the way.

I thought by now we knew that Romans used the label "barbarian" on any group not Romans.

Came here to write this. I think it's the headline writer who made the error. The first part of the article just says the Romans thought they acted like animals. So the issue is really what was the culture of the Barbarians.

In the context of the article, it's clear they mean the now common meaning of "barbarian: a person in a savage, primitive state; uncivilized person." TFA even mentions the Romans considered Huns "scarcely human".

Obviously they are not referring to the Roman meaning of "any non-Romans", because that would be a tautology.

Fun fact, "Barbarian" is a Greek word as a label for non-Greeks. To the Greeks, foreign languages just sounded like they were mumbling "bar-bar-bar", hence Barbarians = Non-Greeks.

I've heard this oft repeated over the decades. I wonder if there is a legitimate historical source for it.

Pretty sure this explanation is just really old speculation. Even if the ancient greeks kept records of word origins, those documents would likely be lost by now

Judging by this link: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=barbarian, the reasoning is based on words in other indoeuropean languages having a similar root to 'barbarian' being used to refer to stammering or incoherent speech.

The most interesting part is this: `...meaning "rude, wild person" is from 1610s.`

"from Greek barbaros 'foreign, strange, ignorant,' from PIE root *barbar- echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners (compare Sanskrit barbara- 'stammering,' also 'non-Aryan,' Latin balbus 'stammering,' Czech blblati 'to stammer')." I don't know if the source I'm quoting is reliable, but I find the same reference to Sanskrit in a variety of sources.

>compare Sanskrit barbara- "stammering,"

Interesting. Though I knew Sanskrit (well in school), didn't know or remember that word - but still know Hindi well, and in Hindi, bad-bad (pronounced like bud-bud) means blabbing, as in:

Kya bad-bad kar rahe ho - What are you blabbing.

And to close the loop, in Hindi, the sounds r and d are closely related and sometimes substituted for one another - at least while talking.

I've seen forensics shows where the person was identified using oxygen isotopes in the water the person drank.

I wonder how mixed up we are now with bottled water from Fiji, strontium in toothpaste and other weird non-local molecules.

Cops talking "Hey Frank He's from Fiji but seems to have lived in Siberia too."

I would love to see a cop procedural where all the science keeps leading them to the wrong conclusion.

I presume it is easiest to write it as a comedy, but might be pulled off as a drama too.

How about a dystopian Law and Order where every week a new batch of innocent people are sent to prison based on dubious science and willful ignorance from police and prosecutors.

Fun fact: for radiocarbon dating and similar techniques, when something is identified as from "ten thousand years before now," "now" is defined as January 1st, 1950. Anything past that date is too screwed up compared to historical trends to use standard archaeology on.

History is written by the... victors. It's not surprising to get a single-sided story when the other side didn't care much about leaving written detailed records.

The Huns were victors though, so the age old adage may need some updating

"History is written by the victors, unless the victors can't write."

Yep. History is written by... the people that cared to write it down. And Romans wrote a lot.

That and the random chance of having your writings preserved through centuries.

Burning down the libraries in not something unheard of.

Burning wasn't necessary. Most texts that weren't copied continuously were simply lost. Our oldest sources for written Chinese are on dinosaur bones -- but the script already had characters that clearly show they also wrote with pen on bamboo slips, but we don't have any surviving examples of that until the Classical Chinese era.

Not really. In my mind, they won the battle but lost the war.

It all depends on your point of view. If you look over the last millennia, the Huns didn't leave a lot of legacy beyond finishing off the corpse of Western Roman Empire, which wasn't really an empire then anyway. Their culture was absorbed and we only know of them because of that.

End of the day, they were ultimately just another band of warlords.

They lost at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains and were driven from Roman lands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Catalaunian_Plai...

History is written by other side as well. Unfortunately layman does not bother to read/listen alternatives.

Historians have no problem incorporating reliable documents written by the "other side". You just have to understand the context that it was written in.

However, all the "alternative" history I've looked at has ended up being fan fiction, with no real supporting evidence.

A common refrain hurled by those completely ignorant of how historiography works.

Please don't post snarky dismissals to HN. It sounds like you know a lot about history. If someone is wrong, explain why, so we all learn something. Putting other people down because they don't know as much as you doesn't belong in thoughtful conversation.

This applies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940423 too.

There are a couple of good books on the Hun-Roman relationship if you want to learn more about that era:

The End of Empire is a more casual read: https://www.amazon.com/End-Empire-Attila-Fall-Rome/dp/039333...

The Huns by EA Thompson is older but as far as I know one of the canonical works: https://www.amazon.com/Huns-Thompson/dp/0631214437%3FSubscri...

Another fun fact: Attila (aka King Etzel) assists the protagonist Kriemhild, widow of Siegfried, in the medieval saga "The Song of the Niebelungs"

So, they weren't barbarians because some of them farmed? Seems to be a rather low bar.

Washington Post has become a rather low bar in general the last few years. I've stopped reading it all together and am disappointed to see the number of articles from it cropping up on HN lately.

Also (off topic) they have begin a policy of shadowbanning commenters in their comment sections who disagree with their "official" policy on things. It's really barely one step above Brietbart now days in my opinion.

> Also (off topic) they have begin a policy of shadowbanning commenters in their comment sections who disagree with their "official" policy on things.

This policy is known to exist or you believe it does? Serious question.

You mean is it a published policy? Not that I know of.

Does it happen? At least once (personally observed) and I assume more.

They really ought to get rid of comments if they are going to shadowban. An echo chamber of Clinton support is kind of sad at this point and I doubt it fools anyone.

It is their paper and they have a right to publish whatever propaganda they want. And they certainly have been doing that. It's kind of sad to see the major paper of our nations capital sunk to this level but I guess it's the trajectory of big media right now.

My interpretation of what the article says is they weren't all barbarians because some of them seem to have coexisted with the locals peacefully.

A 'barbarian' doesn't have to be a violent invader. It's just an 'uncouth and uncivilised' person.

> Some bones suggested that the individual was born into a roaming tribe but later settled down; others indicated the opposite lifestyle change.

Not sure what history Susanne Hakenbeck studies, but asiatic hersdmen populations in Eastern Europe have a long documented history of looting for slaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean%E2%80%93Nogai_raids_in...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devshirme

If your argument is correct US and European slave trade in 19th and 20th century shows us what?

It shows that observed mixture of populations doesn't imply peaceful coexistence. Which refutes the main thesis of the article / research.

...and Romans were drinking Soylent and sending probes to Mars?

Looks like racism in Europe haven't evolved much. Europeans are human rest is animal.

The number of downvotes will reveal how many are disconnected from the fact that racism raising (once again) in Europe.

The number of downvotes will reveal that your initial comment adds little to the conversation and your second comment is basically a downvote complaint.

Humanity as a whole has not evolved much once one start scrubbing of the layers of verbal coating we have applied over generations.

In the end we are wired to be tribal apes.

Surprise, surprise. Propaganda and "fake news" existed during Romans' time, too.

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