"Huns: What did they look like?" Topic

Do we know anything about their appearance, clothes, armour, tactics and racial background?

Or is it all speculation?

I assume that after Attila's first successes, they must have been quite well armoured and horsed. All that gold must have been used somehow.

They had cloven hooves & horns. & gave birth through their nipples.

Scary, they inflict a -1 on enemy morale.

Asiatic features similar to the Turks and Mongols. They had a strange practise of deforming their skulls by wrapping them tightly when they were babies which gave quite an alarming elongated, almost pointy head judging by skulls that have been found. Many of their Germanic allies seemed also to follow the practise. They also slashed their cheeks to leave scars
This picture is probably about right

By the time of Attila they would have been very wealthy and had settled down on the Hungarian plain so the furry hats and animal skins so loved by most figure manufacturers would have been replaced by good wool and linen clothing and they probably also had quite a bit of armour and good weapons.
They were however still light horse archers, albeit well equipped ones who were quite happy to fight hand to hand as well.
Their appearance seemed to scare the Romans (and Germans) silly judging by the various writings of the time.

There are legends that they lived just east of the lower Don River close to the primordial territories of the Goths. From the skull / skeletal finds, are the archaeologists certain that the Huns are Asiatic in appearance?

Great pic BTW!

Well you could always follow Jordanes:

"We learn from old traditions that their origin was as follows: Filimer, king of the Goths …entered the land of Scythia with his tribe,--found among his people certain witches, whom he called in his native tongue Haliurunnae. Suspecting these women, he expelled them from the midst of his race and compelled them to wander in solitary exile afar from his army. There the unclean spirits, who beheld them as they wandered through the wilderness, bestowed their embraces upon them and begat this savage race, which dwelt at first in the swamps,--a stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human, and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance to human speech. Such was the descent of the Huns who came to the country of the Goths.
For by the terror of their features they inspired great fear in those whom perhaps they did not really surpass in war. 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."

Priscus and Amianus had them originating from beyond the Sea of Azov, which is probably about as far east and any of their readers would have had any knowledge

It is emphatically not certain that they are 'light' horse archers. There is a very good case made in Slingshot 285 that they are a troop type that forms up in a 'close' order and sends out units to skirmish that shake out into open order and deliver shooting. If anything that is how most of the steppe armies operate, most of the time there is a line (or two to three lines) of close order clan units that are awaiting the point when the enemy gives or charges and becomes disordered.
Rather than just being happy to fight hand to hand they are very eager to do so. That differentiates them from say the Parthians who have lights who deliver shooting and cataphract heavies who do the charging. I'd reconstruct Hun units as having their best armoured men at the front and least protected at the back, but the whole unit either skirmishing or charging in together.
Huns have big composite bows and arrows with heavy iron heads and carry big swords.

It is likely that at least the top level of Huns were originally Mongol looking, but it is an army made up of an alliance so there would be Turks and Iranians in there too. Also the Hun leaders took wives from their subjects and slaves so don't expect racial purity.
Skull binding similarly is not universal to `Huns so we just cannot be sure quite why it was done. As with all ancient barbarian archaeology there is no uniformity.

That classical description quoted above was the basis of Tolkien's Orcs and their appearance.

Huns, as noted already, were an amalgum of many races under one head, Attila. After that they broke up into several clans or "kingdoms", just as the later Mongols did after Genghis died.

It does appear that the typical Steppes army was a combination of mostly "light" troops backed by the heavier elite or guard units to deliver the final shock of an armored charge.

There is no reason to assume that Hunnish armies were in any way inferior arms and armor-wise, especially after conquering so much of the East before finally coming to grips with the Romans….

Sorry to bang on GWA. But many steppe people's do not have a distinction between lights and heavies. Troops adopt the appropriate order for the activity that they are undertaking at the time so that they move from close order to open order and back.
There are some armies that may have had special units of heavy cavalry such as the 'wolves' of the Blue Turks, but we have no evidence for it in Hun, Pecheneg, Magyar , Cuman armies.

As those who have read the last Slingshot will know. I disagree with Roy's analysis that the Huns were not light horse archers although I would agree with his comment above that they did not have the sort of sharp distinctions that wargames love to make. All contemporary descriptions show quite clearly that they operated in a very fluid way, shooting from a distance when it suited them and closing in hand to hand combat when it did not

The article in the Slingshot sounds interesting.

Did the Huns have any internal infantry? Or did they just make use of whatever Germanic "allies" were available to be used from time to time?

I would say not. They had plenty of Germans and Slavs they could call on to fight on foot. This is what Ammianus Marcellinus says and he was a 4th C Roman officer who may even had met the nice fellows:

"They are not well suited to infantry battles, but are nearly always on horseback… There is not a person in the whole nation who cannot remain on his horse day and night. On horseback they buy and sell, they take their meat and drink, and there they recline on the narrow neck of their steed, and yield to sleep."

A discussion on Ancmed a few years back, came to the conclusion that their cloaks, previously thought to have been roughly made from stitched-together "field mouse skins", may well have been made from rather more attractive marmot pelts.

Rudy Paul Lindner thought that the Huns became infantry when they moved to Pannonia (modern Hungary) because he calculated that they could no longer maintain the horse stocks needed to have an army of 20 or more thousand men with ten horses each. Lindner's logic is just nonsense, for a start not all Huns lived in Pannonia, secondly the ten horses each is an arbitrary figure based upon later (XVIth century) Tartar invasion forces that took a string of ten horses with them when on an extended (1000 mile ) raid. That doesn't mean that each Tartar back home had ten horses! Add to that the fact that we have no credible evidence of Western Huns using their own ethnics as infantry and that the same area supports a large cavalry force when part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and it is seen as very poor research indeed.
So the Huns, like the later Avars use their subjects as infantry and, of course a Hunnic battle method doesn't really need great infantry.
Sometimes Hun subjects are referred to as Huns, just as classical authors refer to anyone from the steppes as a Scythian, including Huns and Goths, but why an ethnic Hun would go afoot when they do pretty well everything on horseback eludes me.
Given that up to and including the time of Attila the Huns are bossing around other nomad tribes such as the Sabirs and Kutrigurs and commanded the steppe all the way from Germany to the Crimea, if they needed more horses they would have just got them from their nomad subjects as tribute annually.

If you want Slingshot 285 then I think it is sold singly at soa.org.uk

Roy

The Hun debate in Slingshot was very good indeed as was part 1 of the Western Mediterranean Way of War.

Contra Ferrill who many of us read some decades ago and who championed the horseless Hun I can see no evidence to support ethnic Hun infantry.