Attila the Hun (35 page)

These lines have inspired much scholarly analysis, even some brave attempts to reconstruct a Gothic version, to little effect. It is impossible to prove if it had a genuine Hunnish source, let alone if it captured anything of the original. But Priscus surely believed it did, or why would he have quoted it so exactly? Perhaps he was eager to do a good job of reportage that does something to record the Huns’ grief, albeit nothing much for their poetic abilities. The best Attila’s people can say of him, apparently, is that he pillaged on a massive scale, and died without giving them an excuse to kill in revenge for his death. As Maenchen-Helfen says, it sounds ‘like an epitaph for an American gangster’.

The description continues with a ritual lamentation, a sort of wake, a display of both grief and celebration of a life well lived.
¹

Then, when night fell, the body was prepared for burial. The Huns did something to which we will return in a moment, ‘first with gold, second with silver and third with the hardness of iron’. The metals, Priscus says through Jordanes, were symbols – iron because he subdued nations, gold and silver for the treasures he had stolen. And then ‘they added the arms of enemies won in combat, trappings gleaming with various special stones and ornaments of various types, the marks of royal glory’.

What was it that was done with the metals? Most translations say they bound his ‘coffins’ with them, from which flows a ludicrous but often-repeated story that Attila was buried inside three coffins, one of gold, one of silver, one of iron. Gibbon accepts the legend as fact, without comment. As a result, generations of treasure-hunters have hoped to find a royal tomb containing these treasures.

This idea is widely accepted in Hungary – it was even taught as hard historical fact in schools – partly thanks to the account in Géza Gárdonyi’s novel,
The Invisible Man
. As Attila lies in state,

the head shamans sacrificed a black horse behind the catafalque, and the blind Kama questioned the departed Hunnish souls as to how Attila should be buried.

‘Put him in a triple coffin,’ was the reply. ‘Let the first coffin be made of gold, like the sunshine, for he was the sun of the Huns. Let the second coffin be made of silver, like the tail of a comet, for he was the comet of the world. Let the third coffin be made of steel, for he was as strong as steel.’

It’s nonsense if you give it a moment’s thought. How much gold would it take to make a coffin? I’ll tell you: about 60,000 cubic centimetres. This is $15 million worth in today’s terms, a solid tonne of gold: not much in terms of modern production or in terms of the empire’s annual gold output, but still the equivalent of a year’s tribute from Constantinople (which, remember, had dried up long before). If the Huns had had that much gold, Attila would never have needed to invade the west, and he would by now have had a good deal more than a wooden palace and a single stone bathhouse. And, if they had it, is it really conceivable that they would do anything so dumb as to bury it all?

And there are still two more coffins to go, each bigger than the last. Two hundred thousand cubic centimetres of metal! No emperor was ever buried with wealth like that. Besides, it would have taken months to cast and make them, and then they would have weighed over 3 tonnes. Handling them would have been a considerable operation – 60 people to lift them, a hefty wagon, a team of oxen – and this was a ritual that was supposedly performed secretly, at dead of night. The whole thing is as daft as anything that can be spun from a single word.

And spun it was, not by Gárdonyi, but by his sources, examined in detail by the eminent director of Szeged’s museum, now named after him, the Mora Ferenc Museum. He traced the story back to a nineteenth-century writer, Mor Jokai, who in turn took it from a priest, Arnold Ipolyi, who in 1840 claimed he had it from Jordanes, at a time when very few people had access to Jordanes. More likely, he had heard of Gibbon’s account. Anyway, Ipolyi either failed to understand, or deliberately improvised for the sake of a good story.

If you look at what Jordanes actually wrote, there were no metal coffins. The Latin suggests a more realistic solution:
coopercula . . . communiunt
, ‘they fortified the covers’. No mention of
arcae
(coffins), although the word is used in verbal form later in the account. Now it begins to make sense. We may, at the most, be talking of a wooden coffin, into which are placed a few precious items like the slivers of gold used to decorate bows. The lid is then sealed with small, symbolic golden, silver and iron clasps. As it happens, there are precisely such coffins among the Xiongnu finds in the Noyan Uul hills of Mongolia.

What, then, of the riches supposedly buried with the body? As Peter Tomka writes, ‘The dead man would have been laid in his coffin in ceremonial clothing. He would have been furnished with gifts of food and drink, sometimes with simple tools, like knives or tweezers.’ But nothing of much great value would have been placed in the coffin itself. If the Pannonhalma treasure – cult objects decorated with gold flake, but no
body – is anything to go by, the body and the king’s prize possessions would have been buried separately. What treasure-seekers and archaeologists are looking for is a corpse in a wooden box, which might by now have vanished into the Tisza’s flood plain, and a hoard of small personal objects.

I
n Szeged’s museum, you feel you are as close to Attila as you are likely to get, especially in the company of its current director, Bela Kurti, who routinely handles objects that could well have been handled by Attila himself. Kurti, a burly man with a greying beard who has been at the museum for over 30 years, explained how this had come about.

The hero of this story is an octogenarian who lives in a hamlet on the flood plain of the Tisza, about 12 kilo-metres south-west of Szeged. Balint Joszef – Joseph Balint, if you like – is a former farm worker who is famous locally because of what he found when he was five. The place is too small to show up on a map, but there’s a lake that bears the same name – Nagyszéksós (pronounced Narj-sake-shosh). It was a fine day in the early summer of 1926. Little Joszef was out with his family, playing while they planted pumpkins. He saw something hard sticking up from some newly turned earth, scratched at the soil, and pulled out a strange-looking metal pot, which seemed to be all holes – 39 of them to be precise, in three rows. He showed it to his mother. As a pot, it was completely useless, being filthy and full of holes, so she took a hammer and flattened it out, and made it into a rough-and-ready circle, like a
crown. ‘Now you’re going to be king!’ she said, and he took it away to play in the pig-sty. It was a heavy thing. He couldn’t wear it. So, having rolled it like a hoop around the farmyard, he forgot about it, and lost it.

Six months later, one of the farm labourers found it again, and this time it occurred to one of the family that it might be important. He cleaned it, and saw to his astonishment that he was holding gold. He cut it into three pieces and took it to a jeweller in Szeged to see what it might fetch. The jeweller, wary of the law, reported the find to the police, who took it to Szeged’s museum, where it came into the hands of the director, Mora Ferenc. Mora at once drove out to the farm and spoke kindly to little Joszef, who pointed out where he had made his discovery. The other two bits of the bowl appeared. There followed an official request: could the museum’s archaeologists please dig up the Balints’ pumpkin field? Balint senior was appalled at the idea, and wouldn’t hear of it.

Eight years passed. Mora died. His successor, rather more determined, returned to Nagyszéksós, overruled Mr Balint, excavated the field, and discovered the greatest Hun treasure ever found – 162 pieces: belt buckles, neckrings, gold jewellery inlaid with precious stones, horse harnesses, saddle decorations, boot clasps, decorative bits of swords and daggers, handles of wooden tools, bits of saddles and whips, bows and pots. Further finds have raised the total to over 200 pieces, mostly small, amounting to a kilogram of gold. From the boot clasps, archaeologists know that these
items belonged to one or more members of the Hun elite. Experts like István Bóna and Peter Tomka agree: this was a funeral offering, and it was – crucially – not part of a burial. No bones were found in the Balints’ field, no ashes, no trace of any washed-away burial mound.

The bowl, by the way, is now back together again, and in the National Museum in Budapest, the centre-piece of a trove on which Kurti is expert. A copy stands in the Szeged museum. Similar finds in Persia show that the holes once held decorations of glass or semiprecious stones, which suggests it would have been used for toasts at formal dinners like the one described by Priscus. It is, frankly, a pretty coarse piece of work. But it is intriguing to think that this object may come down to us from that place, that man, that particular occasion when Attila was at the height of his power, just four years before the bowl became a funeral offering.

M
eanwhile, there would have been the mournful funeral procession, and a secret burial ‘in the earth’. There is no mention of a burial mound. If the burial was in line with Xiongnu royal burials, there might have been a deep pit, a wooden room and a wooden tomb, into which the coffin would have been placed, the hole then being refilled.

The word ‘secret’ is important. Genghis Khan was buried in secret, and so were his heirs. The secrecy had a double purpose. The obvious one was to foil grave-robbers (both knew the dangers, the Mongols from the
Noyan Uul burial mounds in the hills of their homeland and the Huns from the attentions of the Bishop of Margus a few years before Attila’s death). The second one was to preserve the sanctity of the site, and thus protect the divine aura that surrounded the emperor. In the case of the Mongol rulers, their attendants had a problem, in that everyone knew roughly where the burials were – on the sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun, now known as Khan Khenti, in northern Mongolia. To solve the problem, the Mongols disguised the graves thoroughly by churning the ground with galloping horses, placed guards around the whole area, and then allowed trees and grass to camouflage the place. After a generation, no-one could find the exact sites, which remain secret to this day.

Attila’s case was rather different. There would, it seems, have been traditional rites to honour the passing of the leader of a tribe of wandering pastoral nomads. But the Huns, wanderers no more, had been in Hungary for only a couple of generations. There was no traditional sacred site that would have been suitable as a burial-ground for Hun chiefs, and, even if there were some distant folk memory of their (unproven) Xiongnu ancestry, no mountains around that would act as a bridge between earth and heaven. There was not much option except a simple earth burial.

That is what Hungarians believe, with a slight twist added by Gárdonyi. Where was the king to be buried?

Old Kama answered, following the heavenly council. ‘The River Tisza is full of tiny islands. Divert the waters from the narrower branch in one of the places where the river divides. Dig the grave there very deep in the exposed bed, and then widen that bed so that it will be the greater. After the king has been buried, let the waters flow back again.’

As a result, in Hungary today many believe, and state as a fact, that Attila was buried in the River Tisza.

However the burial was made, it would have had to be in a place kept secret, something of a problem in Hungary’s gently rolling or dead-flat
puszta
. Priscus, according to Jordanes, tells us how this was supposed to have been achieved. ‘That so great riches might be preserved from human curiosity, they slaughtered those appointed to the work – a dreadful reward, which engulfed in sudden death both buriers and buried.’

This is worth a closer look. It was common practice across all Eurasia to mark the death of a king with the ritual slaughter of animals and slaves. In Anyang, China, tourists can now view a remarkable burial-site, in which a small army was buried along with its royal commander, leaving human skeletons, horse skeletons and a score of chariots. Not that it was a universal custom, for slaves and soldiers were valued assets, and so increasingly models were used instead: hence the famous terracotta army of Xian.

Now to the business of killing grave-diggers to preserve secrecy. As far as I know, Jordanes’ is the first mention of such an idea. Perhaps this should not be
surprising, considering that usually the burial of a great king involved a rather obvious memorial, in the form of a burial mound, of which there are hundreds across Hungary, the Ukraine and southern Russia, all the way over Asia to the royal tombs of the Xiongnu in Mongolia. Secrecy had never been an issue. It became so again only with the burial of Genghis Khan, which, perhaps not by coincidence, spawned a similar idea: that, to preserve the secret of the great khan’s death, all living creatures along the route of the funeral cortège were killed. Marco Polo was told this about the burial of Genghis’s grandson, Mönkhe, and it soon became a truism applied to the cortège of Genghis himself. In the case of the Mongols, it simply doesn’t make practical sense. Nothing could be better designed to make the route of a cortège visible than a trail of dead bodies and grieving families.

But in Attila’s case perhaps it was different. This was a unique circumstance. Never before had a barbarian ruler achieved so much. There was no precedent to draw on. A night-time burial, no mound – that sounds real to me. If Priscus had made up the whole thing, or if he had responded only to his own classical models, he would surely have gone on about lamentations and the death of victims and burial mounds.