Whitewashing Attila the Hun

So I'm watching this BBC docu-drama historical re-enactment show called Warriors (although it's originally called Heroes and Villains in Britain), and this particular episode chronicles the life of Attila the Hun, whose marauding armies laid waste to much of Europe in the 5th century BC. I'm a sucker for medieval military history so I watched it eagerly, but it's not all that great really.

Now, the series carries the claim that "it is based on the accounts of writers of the time. It has been written with the advice of modern historians."
But the most glaring feature of the program for me was how Attila and his Huns were portrayed - as a kind of generic medieval European warrior force. They could have been straight out of a Viking movie, or Lord of the Rings, or Braveheart (particularly as they sounded kinda Scottish when they spoke). Attila (played by Rory McCann) was depicted as the stereotypical alpha-male warrior leader in the Western tradition - tall and powerfully built, with long hair, a beard, and a big sword. His soldiers looked much the same.



Problem is, everything we know about Attila says that he looked nothing like that. He and his armies came not from Northern Europe but Central Asia, beyond the Volga River.

Roman writer Priscus describes Attila thusly:

"Short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with grey; and he had a flat nose and tanned skin, showing evidence of his origin."

Of the Huns, Gothic-Roman bureaucrat Jordanes wrote:

"They made their foes flee in horror because their swarthy aspect was fearful, and they had, if I may call it so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes. Their hardihood is evident in their wild appearance, and they are beings who are cruel to their children on the very day they are born. For they cut the cheeks of the males with a sword, so that before they receive the nourishment of milk they must learn to endure wounds. Hence they grow old beardless and their young men are without comeliness, because a face furrowed by the sword spoils by its scars the natural beauty of a beard. They are short in stature, quick in bodily movement, alert horsemen, broad shouldered, ready in the use of bow and arrow, and have firm-set necks which are ever erect in pride. Though they live in the form of men, they have the cruelty of wild beasts."

Clearly, the real Huns did not resemble Rory McCann. But descriptions of them are complicated by the likelihood that they were not a single homogeneous ethnic group. The Central Asian steppe from whence they came was gigantic inhabited by numerous tribes, and as they conquered more territory they would have absorbed more diverse populations. So among the Hun armies there might have been people who spoke Turkic, Uralic, Mongolic, Slavic and Iranic languages. As for Attila himself, he was probably not purely "East Asian" in phenotype (in the way that Genghis Khan would have been); rather, he likely resembled a modern day Uighur, Uzbek or Kazakh, or a Hazara from Afghanistan.

The Huns played an important role in shaping the history and genetics of Europe. Firstly, they were one of several nomadic groups to have introduced East Asian DNA into Eastern Europe. Secondly, their invasions displaced numerous other barbarian tribes, such as the Goths, who then in turn invaded Western Europe and precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire. It also pushed the Angles and Saxons out of Germany and into England.

So it's a shame that the folks at the BBC didn't see fit to acknowledge the Oriental origins of the Huns. The East-meets-West culture clash between the Huns and Rome would have made for a far more interesting program.