EurasianStudies_0110..

January-March 2010 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume II., Issue 1.
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OBRUSÁNSZKY, Borbála
State Structure of the Huns
In the past few centuries many scientists — historians, orientalists — dealt with the questions
regarding the Hunnic statehood. Most of the European scholars focused on Attila’s European Empire,
but they have not enough historical sources in order to describe this Empire as a whole system, because
the late ancient Greek and Latin historical sources (4-5 th centuries) fragmentally recorded Attila’s state
and its governance, hence it is very difficult to reconstruct the state of the European Hunnic Empire from
these sources only. In order to reveal the managing system of the huge empire, historians and
orientalists have worked out a comparative system, from which the reconstruction of the operation of
the Hunnic Empire becomes fairly precise. They used the results of several scientific fields like
archaeology, history, linguistics, history, numismatics, and ethnography.
Main results
Among the European scientific researchers, the first man, who composed a significant publication
about the Huns was Deguignes. He collected and printed those ancient Chinese sources, which recorded
the life and history of the Huns. Next to that he wrote analyses about the origin of the great people of
that time. Additionally, he listed those, who could be the descendants of the Huns; he listed the Turkic
people, the Mongolians and the Hungarians. His great work determined the European scientific way of
thinking until the second half of the 19 th century. Unfortunately, the positivist historical theory broke
with the above mentioned scientific methods, which was based on historical sources, and historians
“removed” Huns from the history of the world, and mentioned the Huns a few times and even then as
“wild and barbaric” people. On the places the Huns populated these historians put fictive nations, and
the Eurasian territory was populated with unknown Siberian people; they called them first “Finn-like
people”, then Finno-Ugric, at present they are named Uralic. These peoples actually have no historical
roots, we do not possess any historical sources about them, which would record their appearance in the
past and the archaeological findings do not belong to them. 1
In the field of Oriental Studies Stein Aurel’s expeditions represented a great leap forward. Thanks to
his activity, the European scholars became familiar with the documents of the Dunhuang libraries, and it
became obvious, what a flourishing civilisations populated the territories of Eastern-Turkestan from the
ancient times. In the written documents we read about such local people, as the Scythians 2 and the Huns,
and then about those peoples, who inherited their heritage. Roughly at the same time, in 1899, the first
Hunnic tombs were excavated in the Russian Far-East, and in the course of the 20 th century significant
artefacts of the Huns´ material culture were discovered, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The above
mentioned large documents were studied by several Sinologists and historians, who researched among
1 About the theories: Marcantonio, 2002.
2 According to the scholars, Yue-chi in Chinese sources was Saka or Scythian. Boodberg, 1977, 5. Christian, 1998. 190.
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