Ancient World Review

Attila The Hun: One Of History's Monsters?

Comment: Was Attila a monster? I guess that depends on your point of view. He probably wouldn't make Esquire's Best People In The World List, but I think calling him a "monster" is inaccurate because the word implies that there was something inhuman about him, that he was unusually cruel and wicked. Attila may have been a thug, extortionist and mass-murderer, but he had plenty of company then and now. Piling up corpses in the pursuit of glory, plunder and conquest isn't exactly unusual in the pages of history. If anything, it could be called all too human.

The Huns were very successful for a while, but like so many warrior cultures who carved out empires for themselves in a bloody, ultraviolent world, they couldn't hang on to what they had conquered. Despite all the mayhem they caused, their lasting contribution was probably the role they played in the collapse of the western Roman empire.

Ironically, the Germanic tribes might not have overrun the Roman frontier the way they did (or at least when they did) if the Romans hadn't been so successful at keeping the barbarians out in earlier times. Frustrated in their search for new land to the west, the Ostrogoths, in particular, started to expand to the east where they collided with the Huns in the region north of the Caspian and Black seas.

"In 372, the eastward expansion of the Ostrogoths provoked an explosive reaction from the Huns of the Volga steppe," according to The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, p. 12. "The Ostrogothic cavalry was humiliated by the faster-moving Huns, whose mounted archers destroyed every force ... sent against them." The Huns then advanced all the way to the Danube, driving the Germanic tribes before them. Fleeing from the terrifying barbarian hordes, many of the Germans ended up flooding across the frontier into Roman Gaul. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Attila came along later, a charismatic killer who united the Huns and raised hell with the Byzantine Empire. His forces spread terror and destruction wherever they went, but his record in battle wasn't all that great when you look at the big picture. He invaded Italy, causing a lot of damage, but he couldn't take Rome. His campaign against Persia failed. He was defeated when he tried to conquer Gaul. He never gave up, though, and might have had more success if he hadn't died in 453 AD.

The Huns' role in the fall of the western Roman empire was indirect. They would probably have expanded into the West in any case, but as it turned out it was the Ostrogoths who stirred them up by intruding into their territory and pulling the trigger on the Romans in the process. The Huns were savage barbarians who slaughtered a huge number of people, but they were too wild to stay unified for long in the absence of warlords strong enough to hold them all together. Led by killers like Attila, the so-called "Empire of the Huns" rose to great heights, only to fall apart soon after his death, leaving behind a legacy of smouldering cities, rotting corpses and the ruins of ancient civilizations.

Little Known Facts About The Huns

Dinner with Attila the Hun. Account by Priscus, 5th century Roman diplomat.

"‘Huns’ – the very word brings up of reveries of hordes of horsemen swarming upon the resplendent Roman Empire, with their unkempt appearances, cacophonous intensity and ferocious ambitions. Well the historical truth is very different from this biased depiction heaped upon by the Christian chroniclers of the time. In fact, in spite of their branding as being 'scourges of God’s fury', it still remains a mystery when it comes to the origins of the Huns." Source: Realm Of History.

Comment: The Huns are usually represented as little more than a horde of cruel and demonic savages, but their image in the West is at least partly the result of Christian propaganda. As usual, the reality was more complicated than that and while they were terrifying fighters it's also true that they never had the political skills to hold onto their conquests for very long. Like many barbarian hordes, they could never cross the big divide that separates conquerors from rulers of stable empires.

"The Huns' society and culture remains elusive and, despite their demonization by Rome, their historical significance requires prudent assessment. Their prowess as cavalrymen was as much exploited by Roman generalissimos (in particular, Flavius Aetius) as it was turned against the empire; and, though they exacted large quantities of gold from the eastern empire, they failed to win any of its territory." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised).

Note: Allied with the Visigoths, the Roman general Flavius Aetius (391-454 AD) put together an army which defeated the Huns in 451 at the epic Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. This battle shattered the Huns' aura of invincibility and established Aetius' reputation in the East as "the last of the Romans". By this time, of course, classical  Rome was essentially dead.

Before the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, Aetius made a treaty with Atilla in a shortlived diplomatic effort to contain the threat:

"Before 449 Aetius had signed an agreement with the Huns, allowing some of them to settle in Pannonia, along the Sava River; he also sent to Attila, the king of the Huns, a man called Constantius as a secretary. In 449, Attila was angry for an alleged theft of a golden plate, and Aetius sent him an embassy under Romulus to calm him; Attila sent him as a present a dwarf, Zerco, whom Aetius gave back to his original owner, Aspar."

In a typical example of Rome's tendency to stab itself in the back, Aetius was assassinated by his political rivals in 454.

Related: Rome Halts The Huns (National Geographic, 2017).

Alexander The Great: One Of History's Most Ruthless Kings?

It doesn't make sense to judge an ancient figure like Alexander the Great by modern standards, but there's no doubt that he could be extremely ruthless under certain circumstances. For example, when his Macedonian troops staged a second mutiny at Opis in Babylon (324 BC) after their earlier, successful mutiny in India, Alexander "confronted their contumacious demands for repatriation with summary executions and a devastating threat to man his army exclusively from Persians," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised).

Alexander and his snake-handling mother, Olympias, may have been behind the assassination of his father, Philip II of Macedon, but Philip's death remains one of those ancient murder mysteries which may never be solved. Whatever the case, "Alexander was proclaimed king against a background of dynastic intrigue, in which his rivals ... were eliminated. A show of force in southern Greece saw him acknowledged Philip's successor ... and in 335, [when the Thebans rebelled], he destroyed the city and enslaved the survivors." (OCD)

Alexander was more interested in creating a new empire than in butchering his enemies but he was responsible for several massacres, most of them in response to stubborn resistance. For instance, when the Macedonians finally defeated the city of Tyre after a long siege, "[s]ix thousand Tyrians were slaughtered ... and another 2,000 crucified on the beach. A further 30,000 were sold into slavery," according to the Ancient History Encyclopedia. (These figures are probably exaggerated).

The rest of this six-part series can be found here.

Alexander could be just as ruthless when dealing with rebellion in his own court. For example, "he isolated and struck down Parmenion because of his resistance to imperial expansion, and the adolescent pages, who seriously threatened his life for reasons which are obscure (but probably based on empathy to the new absolutism), were tortured and stoned to death." (OCD)

Note: Parmenion, one of Alexander's most trusted generals, may have simply been murdered to prevent his taking revenge for the execution of his son, Philotas, for treason.

To Alexander, "insubordination was as intolerable as conspiracy," according to the OCD. "Alexander's return to the west in 325/4 witnessed a spate of executions of [puppet] satraps who had exceeded their authority or arrogated power." 

Alexander's homicidal behavior sounds grim, true, but it wasn't really all that unusual. He was capable of extreme violence under certain circumstances, but he wasn't Ramsay Bolton. His use of violence was always calculated. There was nothing mindless or sadistic about it. Executing his internal enemies was necessary to maintain his power and, in some cases, to protect his own life; and massacring the populations of cities that refused to submit was standard operating procedure in the ancient world. Maybe the Dali Lama wouldn't approve, but as a practical matter harsh measures were required to send a message to other cities that might be thinking about resistance.

Photoshop reconstruction based on a bust by the 4th century BC Greek sculptor Lysippos. His depictions of Alexander are thought to be the most accurate, but the various details of Alexander's general appearance (hair color, etc) vary from source to source. He was said to have one blue and one brown eye by more than one source, however - a detail captured in this reconstruction.

Alexander was ruthless but was he "one of the most ruthless kings in history?" Not by a long shot. I wouldn't call him moderate by any means, but he was nothing compared to Vlad the Impaler, for instance, or the bloodthirsty rulers of ancient Assyria who had a well-deserved reputation for cruelty and violence.

All things considered, Alexander showed a surprising amount of tolerance and diplomacy in his conquests. He wasn't a liberal, though. He didn't live in Berkeley or Portland. Like all rulers throughout history, he had to use violence to maintain order and some of the things he did like executing corrupt politicians are practices that we would do well to emulate today.

New Insight Into The Evolution Of Complex Life

Video from 2019.

"A novel connection between primordial organisms and complex life has been discovered, as new evidence sheds light on the evolutionary origins of the cell division process that is fundamental to complex life on Earth." Source: Science Daily (Aug. 6, 2020).

This new research "...sheds light on the cell division of the microbe Sulfolobus acidocaldarius, which thrives in acidic hot springs at temperatures of around 75?C [around 167 degrees F]. This microbe is classed among the unicellular organisms called archaea that evolved 3.5 billion years ago together with bacteria."

"Eukaryotes evolved about 1 billion years later -- likely arising from an endosymbiotic event in which an archaeal and bacterial cell merged. The resulting complex cells became a new division of life that now includes the protozoa, fungi, plants and animals."

Note: The idea that complex life started with an act of endosymbiosis isn't new. For instance, the 2018 PBS Eons documentary below discusses the same thing.

Plato Was Right; Earth Is Made Of Cubes?

Note: This video has nothing to do with the story. I just thought it was interesting.

"The ancient philosopher Plato posited the shapes of the building blocks of the universe. According to him, the earth was formed of cubes. Researchers now find a fundamental truth in that premise. Studying the shapes and fragmentation patterns of a variety of rocks, they found that the average of all their forms is a cube." Source: Science Daily.

Comment: The wording in the Science Daily headline and summary is kind of misleading. It turns out that the researchers are talking about "earth" as in "soil," not "the Earth" as a planet:

"'The interesting thing here is that what we find with rock, or earth, is that there is more than a conceptual lineage back to Plato. It turns out that Plato's conception about the element earth being made up of cubes is, literally, the statistical average model for real earth. And that is just mind-blowing.'"

This is an interesting discovery, I guess, but I'm not sure I would call it "mind-blowing." In fact, I'm kind of skeptical about the claim that "real earth" (as opposed to rocks and minerals and such) is actually made up of cubes. "Earth" to the Greeks was one of the four basic elements, but soil is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids and organisms, and there doesn't seem to be anything cubical about it at all.

Soil under a microscope doesn't look like cubes. It looks more like a collection of vaguely round or irregular particles crawling with microscopic monsters.

Early Humans Mated With Mysterious Ancestor

"Today's humans carry the genes of an ancient, unknown ancestor, left there by hominin species intermingling perhaps a million years ago." Source: Live Science.

"The ancestor may have been Homo erectus, but no one knows for sure — the genome of that extinct species of human has never been sequenced, said Adam Siepel, a computational biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and one of the authors of a new paper examining the relationships of ancient human ancestors."

Massive Ancient Temple Complex May Lurk Beneath Famous Northern Ireland Fort

"The remains of 'monumental temples' dating to the Iron Age and medieval buildings may be hidden underground at Navan Fort, an archaeological site in Northern Ireland, a new study finds." Source: Live Science.

"Exactly what's left of these ruins, however, remains to be seen. Archaeologists discovered the buried structures by using remote-sensing techniques that allowed them to map the hidden landscape and detect anomalies, such as architectural features made by humans."

"These Iron Age and medieval buildings suggest that Navan Fort was 'an incredibly important religious center and a place of paramount sacral and cultural authority in later prehistory,' study co-researcher Patrick Gleeson, a senior lecturer of archaeology at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told Live Science."

Related: Time Team S03-E05 Palace of the Irish Kings (Navan, Co Armagh)

1531 Map Shows Ice-Free Antarctica?

Oronteus Finaeus (1494 - 1555) was an French mathematician and cartographer. I guess it would accurate to call him a popular-science writer of the Renaissance period. According to Wikipedia, he was "one of the most prolific authors of mathematical books of his age" and published several popular astronomy books, including 'De mundi sphaera (On the Heavenly Spheres), a popular astronomy textbook whose woodcut illustrations were much appreciated.'"

Over the years the Oronteus Finaeus map and other old maps have been used to support the existence of various lost civilizations.

Video from 2019.

These maps have also been used to support the idea that ancient mariners may have explored the coasts of Antarctica. For instance, in a 1984 NY Times story about the subject, a geophysicist named Dr. John W. Weihaupt suggested that it was possible that "Bronze Age seafarers from the Mediterranean, trading along the east and west coasts of Africa, might have ventured farther south than previously believed" and discovered a relatively ice-free Antarctica.

The idea that that ancient sailors might have discovered Antarctica isn't all that far-fetched. There's no evidence to support it, as far as I know, but it could have happened.  Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the Oronteus Finaeus map can be used to support the theory that Antarctica was recently free of ice or that the continent was discovered before the first confirmed sighting in 1820. Finaeus mixed legend with reality when he created the map and the landmass taken for Antarctica is probably Tierra del Fuego:

"Finé attempted to reconcile discoveries in the New World with old medieval legends and information (derived from Ptolemy) regarding the Orient. Thus, on one of his two world maps, Nova Universi Orbis Descriptio (1531), the legend marked Asia covers both North America and Asia, which were represented as one landmass. He used the toponym 'America' for South America, and thus Marco Polo's Mangi, Tangut and Catay appear on the shores of the present-day Gulf of Mexico. On the same map, Finé drew Terra Australis to the south, including the legend 'recently discovered but not yet completely explored', by which he meant the discovery of Tierra del Fuego by Ferdinand Magellan." (Wikipedia)

Early maps showed an extreme southern continent because the ancients believed that the land in the northern hemisphere had to be balanced by an equal amount of land in the southern hemisphere:

"The history of Antarctica emerges from early Western theories of a vast continent, known as Terra Australis, believed to exist in the far south of the globe. The term Antarctic, referring to the opposite of the Arctic Circle, was coined by Marinus of Tyre in the 2nd century AD." (Wikipedia)

Antarctica, the last region on Earth to be discovered, was a true lost world until the mid-20th century when the first serious research efforts began.

When H.P. Lovecraft wrote his classic novella The Mountains of Madness in 1931, Antarctica was still terra incognita in many ways so it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that the remains of an unknown ancient civilization could exist deep in the interior of the continent. A lot of people still think this could be true.

Video from 2017. Man, I wish this was real.

Why Knights Fought Snails In Medieval Art

"It’s common to find, in the blank spaces of 13th and 14th century English texts, sketches and notes from medieval readers. And scattered through this marginalia is an oddly recurring scene: a brave knight in shining armor facing down a snail." Source: Smithsonian Magazine (2013).

"It’s a great unsolved mystery of medieval manuscripts ... Epic snail-on-knight combat showed up as often in medieval manuscripts as Kilroy across Europe. 'But the ubiquity of these depictions doesn’t make them any less strange,' says the British Library, rounding up a number of examples of the slimy battles."

Killer Bunnies, Phallic Trees & Other Weird Medieval Images

"The image of cute little bunny rabbits doing horrible violence to people is strangely adorable – watching the twitchy nosed little guys beat the hell out of people who’d normally have then for dinner with Rosemary, thyme and sage – but it does beg a simple question: what the hell is going on?" Source: Jon Kaneko-James.

Weird images aren't unusual in manuscripts from the Middle Ages.

According to Sexy Codicology (2013): "Often, in medieval manuscripts’ marginalia we find odd images with all sorts of monsters, half man-beasts, monkeys, and more; even in religious books the margins sometimes have drawings that simply are making fun of monks, nuns and bishops. For example: The monkey is a popular animal to take over the human role in the marginal decorations; but so is the rabbit, along with many other animals."

Besides killer rabbits and knights fighting snails, the bizarre images in medieval art also include cats licking their butts, women riding Aristotle like a pony,  Moses with horns on his head, Mary Magdalene covered in body hair, bored people getting killed in various violent ways, people flying spaceships and demons with faces on their crotches. And don't forget tubas in people's butts. (Listverse)

These images may have had some kind of symbolic value. There's been a lot of speculation about that, but it's also possible, I guess, that the artists were just flat-out deranged.

Also see: X-rated Medieval Doodles Reveal Our Ancestors Had A Sense Of Humor.

Medieval Paintings Of Cats Licking Their Butts