THE RAGES OF EUROPE

element is completely lacking in the late lower Volga group, of which we have only the cranial indices.

Debetz’s discovery that the Finno-Ugrian speakers were originally purely European in race, and furthermore, not local Palaeolithic or Meso­lithic survivors, is in perfect accord with the present state of linguistic knowledge, which makes their form of speech one of two equally weighted elements in the basic Indo-European. They not only were, but on logical grounds must have been, in the larger sense, Mediterraneans.

On equally logical grounds, this discovery does not invalidate the hy­pothesis that the descendants of Mesolithic hunters and fishers persisted until modern times in the forests of the far north, nor that some such sur­vivors may not have been absorbed by those tribes of Finns which mi­grated even beyond the Permian country to the chilly drainage of the Arctic Ocean. This theory is very hard to test, however, for if we review the early racial history of the northern forest belt,⁷ we find very little skeletal data with which to work. What material there is comes almost entirely from Latvia, Esthonia, and the Ladoga Lake country, all north and west of the historic Finnic center. It includes skulls of Corded type, both with and without mixture, and a number of ill-defined crania which do not fit into the usual European picture. Many of these latter are brachycephalic, some are perhaps, but not certainly, incipiently or par­tially mongoloid.

Unfortunately, the manner in which these skulls have been published does not permit a lucid review of their racial position. Similar ones appeared sporadically in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age series in Poland and on the plains of southern Russia, apparently as intrusions from the north, but not in sufficient numbers to alter the prevailing character of the population south of the forest from which they, as the osseous headpieces of stray woodsmen, had wandered.

Until almost three centuries after the birth of Christ, therefore, Europe, except possibly along the very Arctic rim, had not witnessed the invasion of any mongoloid people. Western Asia, from the Bosporus to the Indus, and the plains immediately east of the Caspian as well, were equally ignorant of them. But with the arrival of the Huns this gap was soon filled..

2. The turks and mongols

In order to discuss the movements of Asiatic peoples into Europe from the first inroad of the Huns to the conquests of the Osmanli Turks in the sixteenth century, it will be necessary to review briefly the events in cen­tral and eastern Asia which preceded and precipitated these incursions.

6. See pages 125-126.

227

From the time that the Irano-Aryan ancestors had arrived in Russian Turkestan in anticipation of their descent into the hills of northwestern India, much of this grassy plain had been the home of those Iranians who remained behind while their kinsmen climbed the mountains which would take them into India and the Irano-Afghan plateau. These Iranians apparently developed, or borrowed, a high degree of adaptation to their steppe environment, and especially through the perfection of pastoral nomadism with the horse as chief instrument of mobility. They expanded through the passes to the eastward, which took them to Kashgaria, and there came in contact with the Chinese Empire. On the other side, they expanded westward into Europe, where we have already studied them in the form of Scythians and Sarmatians.

To the northwest of the vast Iranian domain, in Mongolia, a number of semi-agricultural, semi-pastoral tribes, possessing the sheep, probably also cattle, and perhaps wagons, but apparently not the horse, came in early times to the attention of the Chinese historians. By 800 B.C. we hear of a people called the Hiung-Nu, who gradually grew in importance until they came to dominate all of Mongolia.⁸ At a fairly late date, set by McGovern between 541 and 300 B.C., the Hiung-Nu presumably obtained horses, and learned to ride them. They seem to have acquired these animals from the Iranians or from Turkish-speaking peoples, along with the whole com­plex of horse nomadism. Chinese accounts of the Hiung-Nu later than the third century b.c. refer to them as typical plainsmen, strikingly similar in many cultural respects to the Scythians.

The six centuries, more or less, from 400 b.c. to 200 a.d., formed the period of greatness of the Hiung-Nu in Mongolia, during which they con­stantly harried China, and took possession of Chinese Turkestan. Despite their conquest, however, Iranian languages, and the mysterious Tok- harian B, persisted in the towns until 800 a.d. or later. At length the Chinese took measures to rid themselves of this nuisance, and succeeded in defeating the Hiung-Nu so completely that they abandoned their territory and disappeared to the westward.

The last mention of the Hiung-Nu in Chinese sources is about 170 a.d. -and, exactly two hundred years later, the Huns appeared on the banks of the Don in Russia. McGovern has presented a convincing argument to prove that the two were the same people; that their passage across Asia took them across a space sterile of historians, between the spheres of Chinese and of Byzantine chroniclers. Only one glow of light appears in this interim; in 290 a.d. Tigranes the Great of Armenia hired some such people as mercenaries.

6. McGovern, W. M,, Early Empires of Central Asia. I am indebted to Dr. McGovern for permission to make use of his book before publication.

THE RAGES OF EUROPE

The history of the Huns in Europe does not require elaborate treatment. Having defeated the Ostrogoths and sent them and their kinsmen scurry­ing westward, the Huns moved to the present Hungary, which they made their headquarters. From here they sent expeditions to Rome, to Ger­many, and to France, where Attila was defeated in the battle of the Cata­lonian fields in 451 a.d. After his death two years later, the Huns retired to eastern Europe, and many of them united with their relatives the Bol- gars, who had settled between the Ugrian and Finnic tribes of the middle Volga and Kama rivers, where, under Bolgar leadership, a great state arose, which flowered between the eighth and fourteenth centuries.

In the meantime, the Huns in central Asia raided Mesopotamia, Per­sia, Afghanistan, and India; presumably the Turkish penetration of cen­tral Siberia dates likewise from the period between 200 and 400 a.d. This span of two centuries marks the beginning of the great expansion of Turkish-speaking peoples, for the Huns, and their allies and relatives, must have spoken various forms of speech related to Turkish, many of which are now extinct.

When we view the Hunnish inroad into Europe in the light of the total context of Old World history, it ceases to be a strange inruption of hideous and invincible barbarians darting out of nowhere, as it at first appeared to the Byzantines and Romans. The Huns were a people who had been exposed to a high civilization, that of China; they were cultured if illiter­ate, and in every sense the match of the frightened adversaries whom they met in Europe. When we examine the details of these invasions, we see that it was not one simple inroad, but a series of them in which a perplexing confusion of names is involved. Chief of the newcomers, after the Huns, were the Avars, who arrived in the sixth century. The Huns considered these their kinsmen and equals, and later amalgamated with them after the Avars had, in the eighth century, been defeated by Char­lemagne and had retreated, some to Hungary and others to the Don country.

From the fall of the Huns until the rise of the Mongols some thousand years later, the history of central Asia is simply a repetition of the same theme; some obscure sub-tribe would become important, win leadership over the others, and head new invasions of increasing complexity. The history of southern Russia became extremely complicated, for the steppes of the Don country served as a terminal point for all but the most serious of these movements.

After the Avars came the Turks, called Tii-Kiie, hereditary iron-work- ers, who had been an old clan of the Hiung-Nu. They defeated the Avars in 546 a.d., and settled about the Caspian Sea; from here they conducted their raids and expanded, and gave their name to the whole linguistic

229

sub-stock of Altaic which all of them, Huns included, seem to have spoken. It is probable that their speech superseded many older allied forms.

In the guise of Petchenegs and Kumans, in the tenth and eleventh centuries new waves of Turks moved across the southern Russian steppes as far as the Danube. As Seljuks, the Turks took charge of Asia Minor and fought the Crusaders; as Osmanlis, they conquered the Seljuks, withstood the Mongol advance, captured Constantinople, and swarmed over the Balkans and up to Vienna. But meanwhile, in the thirteenth century, other Turks under Mongol leaders, now for the first time called Tatars, had covered southeastern Europe ahead of the Osmanlis; and, in the four­teenth, hordes of true Mongols had followed, leaving permanent settle­ments in the Caucasus, the Kalmuck Steppe, and the Crimea.

In the fifteen hundreds, the tide commenced to turn in eastern Europe; the Muscovites grew powerful, and the Asiatic invaders began to draw eastward as the steppes were peopled with Slavs. Under the rule of the Turks and Mongols, the older population had not entirely disappeared; colonies of Alans persisted until the thirteenth century, and Russian col­onies lived under the protection of the Turkish Khazars. In the same fashion, the Turks and Mongols did not disappear with the Slavic advance, and their colonies in the midst of Slavic territory are still numerous.

There is an abundance of documents dealing with the invasion of Europe by the Huns and by their relatives the Avars. These inroads took place shortly after the expansion of the Germanic peoples to the east, and formed a primary reason for the failure of the Goths and Vandals to found a permanent home in the former Scythian country. They took place, also, before the major expansion of the Slavs, who moved eastward in the in­terim between the invasion of central Europe by the Huns and the whole­sale westward migration of the Magyar ancestors under Arp&d.

That the Huns came in great numbers cannot be questioned, and that they introduced a completely alien racial type onto European soil is vividly attested by the accounts of numerous contemporary historians, among whom may be mentioned Jordanes, Sidonus, Appolinaris, and Priscus. These authors unanimously describe the Huns as being short, broad shouldered, thick-set, swarthy, flat-nosed, slit-eyed, nearly beardless, and bandy-legged. The Avars are described by some authors as being identical with the Huns, but by others as being less horrible of aspect. According to that Byzantine wit, Jordanes, the Avars defeated the Iranian-speaking Alans, who were the descendants of the Sarmatians, by frightening them with their faces and not by valor.

The careful studies of Bartucz, on whose work this following part is almost entirely based, has disclosed, in unquestioned manner, the exact

THE RACES OF EUROPE

racial composition of these invaders.⁹ (See Appendix I, col. 51.) Many of the Hunnish and Avar cemeteries are very extensive, containing, in all, thousands of skulls. In many of these cemeteries, particularly in that of Mosonszentj£nos, purely mongoloid skeletons have been found, unaccom­panied by European followers or European mixture. *

Bartucz finds two clearly differentiated mongoloid types in these cem­eteries. The first, which he designates as type A, is dolicho- to mesocephalic with a mean index of 75.5 for the males and 77.0 for the females. These skulls are of great length and considerable size. The forehead is very narrow, the temples sharply curved, and the zygomatic arches laterally bowed. The occiput is narrow and conical at the end. From the side pro­file, the forehead appears exceptionally low and slanting. The vertex falls well back of bregma, and the profile is curved through the extent of its length. In the occipital region the line of neck muscle attachment forms a powerful torus.

The vault of this type is lower than that found in any European group. It is, in fact, near the low point for mankind, with a range in height from 120 to 130 mm. The browridges, accentuated by the extreme slope of the forehead, are heavy, but the glabella region is flat, the orbits are rounded, and with the lower border often projecting farther forward than the upper. The nasal bones are long, narrow, and flat; so that the nasal skeleton some­times fails to project in front of the malars. The lower borders of the nasal opening are smoothly rounded. The malars are extremely large and prominent, the canine fossa completely lacking, and the maxillary sinus, which overlies it, is so blown out that the surface of the bone is at this point often raised. The dental arch of the palate is U-shaped. The man­dible is heavy, but the chin, however, but slightly developed. The whole sub-nasal portion of the face is enormous. The stature of this type, calcu­lated from the long bones, is 164.4 cm. for the males, 153.1 cm. for the females.

Type B is also purely mongoloid, but it is brachycephalic, with a mean index of 83 for both sexes. The forehead is also low, but much broader and more sharply curved, the occiput is rounded and broad, and the skull as a whole is globular, although the vault is still low. The face is broad and low, the orbits are lower, the nose less leptorrhine, the malars and zygomata less pronouncedly mongoloid, than in the case of type A. The nasal bones are shorter, the palate broader and rounder, the chin more prominent. This type is characterized by shorter stature; 160.9 cm. for the males, and 152.8 cm. for the females.

6. Bartucz, L., ZFRK, vol. 1, 1935, pp. 225-240; Skythika, vol. 2, 1929, pp. 83-96; vol. 4, 1931, pp. 75-90; ESA, vol. 5, 1930, pp. 66-73.

Krecsmarik, E., Dolgozatok, vol. 3, 1927, pp. 160-166.

Lebzelter, V., MAGW, vol. 65, 1935, pp. 44-46.

231

Thanks to the industrious researches of the modern Russian school of physical anthropology, it is not difficult to discover the Asiatic relationships of these two types. Type A is found today among the living Tungus,¹⁰ and it has likewise a long history in Siberia, for it is found among many Siberian peoples, including Palaeasiatics, and it is characteristic of many of the Neolithic skulls excavated in the neighborhood of Lake Baikal.¹¹ Type B belongs to the Mongol-speaking peoples, and is found in especial purity among the Buryats, who represent, culturally and probably racially, the Mongols before the time of their expansion. Modern Buryat skulls are among the largest in capacity known.

In most Hunnish and Avar cemeteries, type B is more in evidence than type A. Type A, however, predominates in the cemeteries which are known to have been used by the Huns, type B in those which belong to Avars. The Avar cemeteries contain also, in many cases, intermediate types which show that these people had begun to mix with members of the white stock, either in central Asia, in Europe, or both, and other cemeteries in which the white element is in the majority. The leading classes of the Huns and Avars, however, appear to have kept themselves apart, and to have preserved their mongoloid racial types pure throughout the centuries of their political domination. In the graves which are most richly fur­nished, and which show that the occupants were men of power and conse­quence, the mongoloid types are unaltered. The two graves of known Avar heroes contain skeletons belonging purely to type B.

Bartucz’s identification of type A predominantly with the Huns, and B with the Avars, seems valid. That the two intermarried freely is shown by the fact that in single graves containing a man and wife, the two are often of opposite types. In such cases of differential mating, there is no linkage between sex and type, indicating that A and B were socially equal. It is very likely that the initial amalgamation of these two types took place in Mongolia, and not in Europe. Also, the presence of numerous interme­diate forms attests this freedom of intercourse. Individual Hunilish skulls found as far afield as Lower Austria and France may be easily identified with the crania from Hungary, and belong in known cases to type B.¹²

A further light upon the physical characteristics of the Huns is shown by a study of Hunnish head hair, from graves of this period. A sample of it is very fine, straight, and jet black.¹³ In color and in form, this hair was classically mongoloid, but this fineness casts some doubt upon the gen­eralization that all mongoloid hair must be coarse, especially since it has

6. Roguinski, A., RAJ, vol. 23, 1934, pp. 105-126.

7. Debetz, G., RAJ, vol. 19, 1930, pp. 7-50.

8. Lebzelter, V., MAGW, vol. 65, 1935, pp. 44-46.

Zaborowski, S., RA, vol. 24, 1914, pp. 318-320.

¹⁸ Greguss, P., Dolgozatok, vol. 7, 1927, p. 232.

THE RACES OF EUROPE

been shown that American Indian hair is very variable in this respect.

The incontrovertible evidence of the Hungarian graves completely dis­pels the theory that the Huns may have been largely European in racial type. If the Hiung-Nu were ancestors of the Huns, then the early inhabi­tants of Mongolia were definitely mongoloid, and belonged to the two important racial elements present there today, the Tungus and the Mongol proper. This throws the prehistory of central Asia into a clear and logical light. It is exactly what one would expect.

But it is necessary to discover what was the nature of the European racial element amalgamated by the Avars. This may be accomplished by studying some of the least mongoloid cemeteries. In that of Jutas ¹⁴ (see Appendix I, col. 52), only five out of twenty-four skulls show any trace of recognizable mongoloid features. The Jutas sample, then, may be used for testing. Fourteen male skulls are all below 78 in cranial index, and are very similar to one of the Minussinsk regional sub-series; less pronounced relationships are present between it and Scythian and Armenian Iron Age skulls. The resemblance to Slavic and Germanic skulls, which are larger, is less pronounced. It is therefore certain that these non-mongoloid Avars belonged to the general Mediterranean racial family, and that some, at least, were members of the Nordic Iron Age group; it is more than likely that they were for the most part incorporated into the Avar ranks in central Asia before coming to Europe. The study of the crania from another cemetery, that of Tiszadersz¹⁵ (see Appendix I, col. 53), makes this virtually certain.

McGovern has discovered a number of Chinese references to the Hiung-Nu and other Turkish-speaking “barbarians” which describe them as hairy, big-nosed, and partially blond. In later times, Genghis Khan was supposed to be red-haired and green-eyed. It is therefore likely that some of the Asiatic Nordic element found in the Jutas and Tiszadersz cemeteries was incorporated by the Avars before they left Mongolia, but, on the basis of the evidence from purely mongoloid cemeteries like Mosonszentjanos, it is unlikely that this influence could have penetrated the entire Hunnish and Avar nations.

At any rate, it is evident from the size and number of the Avar ceme­teries that, as Bartucz says,¹⁶ these invaders played an important r61e in the peopling not only of Hungary but also of adjacent countries of central Europe, for the people whom the Avars brought into the Danube basin did not depart with the cessation of Avar rule.

At the same time the Avars did not uproot the former population, which

¹⁴ Bartucz, L., Skythika, vol. 4, 1931, pp. 75-91.

16. Lebzelter, V., MAGW, vol. 65, 1935, pp. 44-46.

Bartucz, L., ZFRK, 1935.

“Bartucz, L., ZFRK, vol. 1, 1935, pp. 225-240.