"Discovered in 1944, this tomb dates from the Hellenistic period, around the end of the 4th century BC. It is located near Seutopolis, the capital city of the Thracian king Seutes III, and is part of a large Thracian necropolis." Source: UNESCO World Heritage List.
Note: The tomb "comprises a narrow corridor and a round burial chamber, both decorated with murals representing a Thracian couple at a ritual funeral feast. The monument dates back to the 4th century BCE and has been on the UNESCO protected World Heritage Site list since 1979. The murals are memorable for the splendid horses and for a gesture of farewell, in which the seated couple grasp each other's wrists in a moment of tenderness and equality (according to Lyudmila Zhivkova—a view that is not shared by all specialists). The paintings are Bulgaria's best-preserved artistic masterpieces from the Hellenistic period." (Wikipedia)
The tomb itself is closed to the public, but a full-scale replica has been constructed nearby [next video].
"Traces of violence on 1700 year old skeletons allow researchers to reconstruct warfare and sacrifices of nomads in Siberia. An international and interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, archaeologists and specialists in forensic sciences performed a detailed and revealing analysis of the traumas found on the skeletal remains." Source: Science Daily.
"Ancient historiographers described steppe nomads as violent people dedicated to warfare and plundering. Little archaeological and anthropological data are however available regarding violence in these communities during the early centuries CE. In a new study in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, an international team led by researchers from the University of Bern and the Russian Academy of Sciences presents new discoveries about the types of violence lived [sic] by nomads from Siberia between the 2nd-4th centuries CE."
Analyzing the remains found in a Siberian tomb known as Tunnug1 (located at Arzhan - "a site of early Scythiankurgan burials"), researchers discovered that Scythian culture -- during this period, at least -- was incredibly violent:
"The study demonstrates that 25% of the individuals died as a consequence of interpersonal violence, mostly related to hand-to-hand combat, often represented by traces of decapitation. Even though violence affected mostly men, also women and children were found among the victims. Some of the individuals from Tunnug1 show traces of throat-slitting and scalping. According to Marco Milella, first author of the study 'this suggests that violence was not only related to raids and battles, but probably also due to specific, still mysterious, rituals involving the killing of humans and the collection of war trophies.'"
I'm a huge fan of the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, one of the best American writers who ever lived. I like the movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as well, even the second one which is almost universally considered, with considerable justification, to be a piece of crap. The Conan of the movies is so radically different from the Conan of the Howard stories that they might as well be two different characters, but never mind that.
The scene in the clip above is from the first movie, Conan the Barbarian (1982). It shows how Conan, enslaved as a child after his village was destroyed by the forces of the evil Thulsa Doom, was chained to a mill wheel and grew into a heavily muscled giant after years of pushing the wheel around in circles.
This scene always bothered me because it seems unlikely that pushing a wheel around like that would give you the physique of a world-class bodybuilder. It's possible, I guess, at least to a certain extent. This kind of labor would definitely strength your thighs and calves, and I suppose the pushing action would have some effect on your chest, back and other muscles, but would it turn you into The Arnold? Very doubtful.
There's also the question of nutrition here. Bodybuilding, even accidental bodybuilding, requires a good diet and I find it hard to believe that the slaves pushing that wheel were fed very well. I'm not sure how old the movie-Conan was supposed to be when he was first chained to the wheel, but he must have spent at least ten years pushing it around and around in all kinds of weather. In the real world I'm guessing all that repetitious slogging would have left him extremely thin, wiry and prematurely aged when they finally released him. And he probably would have had all kinds of knee and back problems.
Around the time Conan the Barbarian was made, Arnold Schwarzenegger was 6'2" with a 52" chest, a competition weight around 235 and an off-season weight around 260. (Source: Bodybuilding.com) The guy was flat-out monstrous and even though he had the genetics for size he didn't get that big on a slave's diet. Hard labor can give you mass and make you tough and strong (if it doesn't kill you) but the one thing it doesn't do is give you gigantic, well-defined muscles like a bodybuilder. That kind of physique requires a specific type of training and it's not the same thing as training for strength.
There's a big difference between bodybuilders like Arnold, who train for size and definition, and powerlifters, who train for strength. For example, the next video shows the Georgian powerlifter Lasha Talakhaze at the 2017 Weightlifting Championship in Anaheim, California. His build is a long, long way from Arnold's, but it's fairly typical of powerlifters I've seen.
Warriors in movies are usually shown as being extremely chiseled, but that kind of physique requires long sessions of targeted exercises in the gym. It's not the kind of body that a Viking farmer, for instance, or a Cimmerian like Conan would develop as a matter of course. In the stories, Howard describes Conan as being huge and muscular with amazing endurance and lightning reflexes. He can also move across a forest floor as "silently as a panther," a talent not usually associated with sheer mass. These qualities -- speed, size, stealth, fast reactions -- aren't usually found together. In and of themselves, they're not totally unrealistic, but even if Conan combined them all in one lethal package, he still wouldn't have looked like Arnold.
There's also the question of how good a fighter someone as big and muscular as Arnold would be. If you put a sword in his hand, he could do a lot of damage -- for a while -- but he would probably gas out pretty quickly because sustained fighting requires a lot of cardio conditioning and cardio tends to work against the bodybuilder's goal of size. Runners have a completely different kind of physique and a smaller, lighter opponent can usually run circles around a bigger, slower man. For example, the next video shows the notorious MMA fighter, Conor McGregor (around 155 pounds, depending), sparring around with Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (400+ pounds), the Icelandic strongman who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones.
They're just playing around here, but it's obvious that Björnsson could crush McGregor with his bare hands if he ever got hold of him in a real fight. It's also obvious that someone as big as Björnsson doesn't have the cardio to keep the conflict going for very long. If this was a sword fight, the lighter, faster McGregor could probably beat Björnsson if he could just stay out of his reach and wear him down long enough to strike a blow, something that probably wouldn't take very long. The heavier you are, the slower you are. It's the classic size-and-brute-strength vs speed-and-agility tradeoff. Smaller fighters have an advantage over bigger, heavier opponents if they know how to use it. This is how Bronn won the trial-by-combat against the heavily armored Sir Vardis Egan in Game of Thrones. It's also how the Viper almost beat the Mountain in GOT. Unfortunately for the Viper, he got cocky and that particular fight didn't end so well for him.
Getting back to Conan, though, what would someone like him look like in real life? That's hard to say. He would be big, certainly, and muscular, but he wouldn't have the kind of physique that Arnold had in his prime. There were no bodybuilding gyms (or steroids) in the Hyborean Age. Conan was fast as well as strong, so he wouldn't look like Lasha Talakhaze, either. If he did, his stamina and fighting abilities would be limited. A real-life Conan would be big, but not too big, and he would also be lean due to his diet and the generally harsh conditions of his life. He might look something like a extremely fast UFC heavy-weight (206+ pounds) fighter, but considering his speed and agility it seems more probable that he would fit into the light heavy-weight (186-205 pounds) category. In other words, he wouldn't be a giant.
All of this, of course, directly contradicts Howard's own descriptions of Conan. For example, in the classic novella Red Nails, Conan is said to be "almost a giant in stature, muscles rippling smoothly under his skin which the sun had burned brown." In Queen of the Black Coast, he's described as a "tall powerfully built figure in a black scale-mail hauberk, burnished greaves and a blue-steel helmet from which jutted bull's horns highly polished." In The Hour of the Dragon, he's a "mailed giant" and so on. He can move over a bed of dead leaves in complete silence and he's always bounding around, as "supple as a panther." In other words, Conan somehow manages to combine the muscularity and size of a heavyweight bodybuilder with the speed, reactions and endurance of a lightweight MMA fighter, not to mention the fact that he's highly intelligent, literate and a wise ruler with a strong sense of honor and chivalry towards the weak. All told, that's a fantastic collection of attributes not normally found in the real world; but he is, after all, a fantasy character, the greatest fantasy character ever created.
Scene from The Whole Wide World (2003), based on the life of Robert E. Howard.
The Germania by the great Roman historian Tacitus is "a most dangerous book," according to the thought police in the Lugenpresse. Tacitus' description of the history and culture of the ancient Germanic tribes living outside the control of the Roman empire has become a kind of ethnologic bible in Germany and everybody knows that the Germans can't be allowed to have a sense of national pride and identity. For instance, the Harvard Gazette (2008) said that Tacitus "helped to fuel Nazi propaganda" and the New York Times (2011) claimed that the book "was exactly what nationalists had been waiting for." And many other "journalists" agree:
"Perhaps the most fateful decision in all of European history was made by Augustus Caesar, when he chose to fix the border of the Roman Empire at the Rhine. As a result, the region known to the Romans as Germania would go without the products of Roman civilization (1) —good roads and big cities and the Latin language and Christianity (2). But it would also remain vigorous and untamed enough to threaten Roman power, and finally destroy it in the fifth century A.D." Source: "Ideas Are Viruses - How Tacitus' Germania Became the Bible of German Nationalism," Slate.com (2011)
Comment: This is all crap, of course, not to mention the fact that it's obvious anti-German propaganda. The paranoia about Tacitus' history of Germania is the kind of stuff you would expect from these particular sources, however. (See the footnotes below for some of the problems with the argument in the Slate article.)
Tacitus was the greatest historian ancient Rome ever produced. His primary concern in all of his writings was to analyze and expose the corruption of the Roman state under the emperors.
According to Moses Hadas, in his introduction to the 1942 Modern Library edition of the complete works of Tacitus (p. xii), "[i]t is a temptation to which many have succumbed to look upon the Germania as a sort of Utopia, a conscious idealization of a primitive and unspoiled people calculated to chasten and reform the decadent Romans. This view is justified in the degree that a strong moralizing strain runs through all Tacitus' work. It has been wittily remarked that no one in Tacitus is good except Agricola [his father-in-law] and the Germans."
Concerning the problems with the Slate article:
(1) The writer seems to think that the savage Germans would have become more civilized if they had been conquered by the Romans. It's hard to understand how the warlike Germans would have become less warlike by exposure to the warlike Roman culture, but it hardly matters because the author of this Slate article has his facts all wrong. In reality, the Germans were exposed to Roman civilization and learned Roman methods of warfare from them, among other things.
Many Germans served in the legions. In one notable example, Arminius, the commander of the German tribes who wiped out three Roman legions in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD, had served in the Roman military and was apparently a Roman citizen. The Romans needed mercenary forces and, like modern Americans, they ended up providing weapons and training to some of their worst enemies.
(2) - The author of the Slate piece also got it wrong when he said that Germania wasn't exposed to Christianity. The Germans described by Tacitus were still pagans, but by the time of the invasions, many of the invading tribes were Christians, though of a "heretical" variety. The Visigoths who sacked Rome, for instance, were Arian Christians:
"Being Arian Christians, the Visigoths respected Christian sites and treasures. According to one story, a group of them refused to steal rich gold and silver vessels when told that they belonged to St Peter and on Alaric’s orders the sacred objects were carried safely through the streets to St Peter’s Church, respectfully accompanied by a throng of Christian citizens who were only too glad to find sanctuary there themselves. St Augustine told this story in City of God to help rebut allegations by pagans that the sack of Rome was the fault of the Christians, who had enraged the city’s pagan gods." Source: History Today (2010)
I have no idea how true these stories are, but I really doubt if Christians in Rome ever "respectfully" marched through the city with the invading Visigoths or that the invaders "refused to steal rich gold and silver vessels." St. Augustine is a suspect source, to say the least, and he obviously had an agenda in presenting the Visigoths as being respectful of Christian fetishes.
The "barbarians" were Christians, but their religion didn't have any effect on their warlike behavior. That's not too surprising, however. Even if they had been completely "orthodox," there is absolutely no evidence in history that Christianity has ever made people more gentle or nations more peaceful.
Getting back to Tacitus, it's disingenuous for modern writers to blame him in any way for the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Ethnic nationalism - a sense of common tribal identity - has been a common feature of all countries throughout history. Besides, even if Tacitus did idealize his pagan subjects to a certain extent in order to contrast them with the decadent Romans there's no evidence that I'm aware of that his information on the Germanic tribes is intentionally inaccurate.
According to Moses Hadas again, "More than six hundred items of information are recorded [in the Germania], of a credibility, to be sure, varying with that of Tacitus' sources. The sources were undoubtedly the best available, and included eye-witness accounts as well as written material, and Tacitus was a conscientious workman."
Modern Germans have every right to be proud of their ancestors.
Note: The British Empire at its height was larger than the Great Mongol Empire, but it was scattered across several continents.
The short history of the Mongols is so complex and covers so much territory that I'm not even going to try to describe it in any kind of detail. Basically, Genghis Khan united the savage Mongol tribes of the Asian steppes, invaded China, then sent some of his forces west to attack Europe. The Great Khan and his sons led these various battles, spreading terror and massive destruction wherever they went.
"The Mongol invasion of Europe in the 13th century was the attempted conquest of Europe by the Mongol Empire, by way of the destruction of East Slavic principalities, such as Kiev and Vladimir. The Mongol invasions also occurred in Central Europe, which led to warfare among fragmented Poland, such as the Battle of Legnica (9 April 1241) and in the Battle of Mohi (11 April 1241) in the Kingdom of Hungary." (Wikipedia)
Genghis Khan died in 1227 AD. One of his sons, Ogedei, became the new Khan in 1229. The Mongol forces in the West might have gone on to conquer Europe, changing world history forever, but they began to withdraw in 1242. To this day, no one knows for sure what happened. According to Wikipedia, "the true reasons for the Mongol withdrawal are not fully known, but numerous plausible explanations exist."
The invaders might have left following the death of Ogedei in the East -- maybe they had to go back in order to take part in the inevitable leadership challenge. It's also possible that their forces were bogged down in Europe and got stretched too thin after suffering a large number of casualties. The weather may have played a role as well, the harsh winter making it difficult to feed their horses, and internal rebellions could have weakened them to the point where withdrawal was their only option.
The Mongols were always an unstable coalition and their unity depended on strong, charismatic leaders like Genghis Khan. His death led to the inevitable wars of succession and by 1294 "the Mongol Empire had fractured into four separate khanates or empires, each pursuing its own separate interests and objectives." (Wikipedia) After that it wasn't long before Mongol rule collapsed all over Eurasia.
The Mongols may have been responsible, at least in part, for carrying the Black Death into Europe, but the growth in trade between East and West probably had more to do with the spread of the contagion. One way or another, the Mongols had a devastating effect on Eurasia. Overall, they are thought to have been responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of up to 40 million people. Despite that incredible statistic, however, some historians argue that the impact of the Mongol invasions was beneficial for the regions they vanquished:
"In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege." Source: "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World," by Jack Weatherford.
Weatherford, an anthropologist, believes that the popular image we have of the Mongols is an historical distortion created by 18th century European writers:
"Whereas the Renaissance writers and explorers treated Genghis Khan and the Mongols with open adulation, the eighteenth century Enlightenment in Europe produced a growing anti-Asian spirit that often focused on the Mongols, in particular, as the symbol of everything evil or defective..." (Wikipedia)
Lecture from 2013. Closed-captions helpful.
This revisionist view of Genghis Khan could be true, I suppose, at least to a certain extent, but I find it very hard to believe that the Mongol hordes brought a "blossoming of civilization" to medieval Europe. They were more than just a cartoonish mob of mindless, bloodthirsty marauders, of course, but it seems like quite a stretch to depict the Great Khan as some kind of enlightened progressive:
"Destruction during the 13th century Mongol conquests has been widely noted in both scholarly literature and popular memory. The Mongol army conquered hundreds of cities and villages and also killed millions of men, women and children. It has been estimated that approximately 5% of the world's population was killed either during or immediately after the Turco-Mongol invasions. If the calculations are accurate, the events would be the deadliest acts of mass killings in human history." (Wikipedia)
Note: If it's true that Genghis Khan abolished torture, that would make him more humane that most of our recent US presidents.
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.
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.
Publius Quinctilius Varus is a tragic figure remembered only because of his disastrous defeat in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (9 AD), aka the Varian Disaster and "Rome's greatest defeat." I wonder what he would have thought if he'd known he would gain immortality by committing such a gigantic blunder that it would end up being named after him? There are many paths to fame, I guess, and screwing up big time is one of them.
According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), 3rd ed. revised, Varus came from a "patrician family that had been of no importance for centuries. He owed his career to the favor of Augustus," who probably regretted his choice later on when Varus lost three legions in the forests of Germany. According to Tacitus, many of the defeated Roman soldiers were enslaved or sacrificed to the Germanic gods. Not a good end to a legionary's career.
Varus must have been a reasonably competent man to win the favor of a capable administrator like Augustus. "Varus became proconsul of Africa (?7-6 BC), and then legate of Syria. When Judea revolted after the death of Herod the Great, he marched rapidly southwards and dealt firmly with the insurgents." (OCD)
"Next heard of as legate of the Rhine army [governor of Germania] in AD 9," Varus fell victim to geography and the German tribes' resistance to Roman rule:
According to Livius, "Varus and the three legions XVII, XVIII, and XIX were somewhere near the river Weser (perhaps near modern Minden) when he learned of an insurrection in the west. He decided to return to the Rhine and make a detour through the rebellious area. The only road led through a small strip of accessible land; to the south, there were the inaccessible hills of the Teutoburg forest, and to the north, marshes made progress difficult. It was the perfect place to trap the heavy legionaries."
The terrain probably made it impossible for Varus to cover his flanks, but he seems to have assumed that he wouldn't have problems from the local Germanic tribes. As it turned out, this was a mistake:
"[He] was treacherously attacked in difficult country by Arminius [chief of the Cherusci], whom he had trusted. The Roman army was destroyed ... and Varus took his own life." (OCD)
Arminius apparently lured Varus into the trap by posing as a friend of Rome and informing him of the rebellion in the west. In a disgraceful act all too familiar from recent history, Augustus blamed Varus not only for the disaster, but for the failure of his entire policy in Germany:
"Varus was made the scapegoat for the signal failure of Augustus' whole German policy. He is alleged to have been grossly extortionate in Syria, torpid and incompetent in his German command." (OCD)
This just begs the question, of course. After all, if Varus was so incompetent and corrupt, why was he given command in Germania in the first place? In any case, the defeat had major repercussions for the Roman empire, which halted its attempts to conquer the Germans and limited its frontier to the Rhine, laying the foundations for many more calamities to come.
Conclusion: If you want to go down in history, you have to either achieve great things like Thomas Edison, kill someone important (like Lee Harvey Oswald), or, like Publius Quinctilius Varus, fail in such a spectacular fashion that your name lives on forever.
"Over decades, dozens of artificially deformed 'alien-like' skulls that are more than 1,000 years old have been unearthed in a cemetery in Hungary. Now, these skulls are revealing how the collapse of the Roman Empire unleashed social changes in the region." Source: Live Science.
"During the fifth century A.D., people in central Europe practiced skull binding, a practice that dramatically elongates head shapes. These altered skulls were so drastically deformed that some have compared them to the heads of sci-fi aliens. The fifth century was also a time of political unrest, as the Roman Empire collapsed and people in Asia and eastern Europe were displaced by invading Huns, a nomadic Asian group.
"A graveyard in Mözs-Icsei dűlő, Hungary, first excavated in 1961, held the largest collection of elongated skulls in the region. A new study pieces together how skull-binding communities co-existed with other cultures during times of political instability — and how the skull-stretching tradition may have been shared between groups."
Note:Artificial cranial deformation has been practiced at different times all around the world. It's possible that the Hunnish invasions brought the practice to 5th century Hungary and the other regions in eastern Europe which they overran:
"In the Old World, Huns also are known to have practised similar cranial deformation, as were the people known as the Alans. In Late Antiquity (AD 300–600), the East Germanic tribes who were ruled by the Huns, the Gepids, Ostrogoths, Heruli, Rugii, and Burgundians adopted this custom. Among the Lombards, the Burgundians and the Thuringians, this custom seems to have comprised women only. In western Germanic tribes, artificial skull deformations rarely have been found." (Wikipedia)
Skull deformation may seem bizarre, not to mention cruel -- the process is usually started when people are still infants and unable to decide if they want to end up looking like coneheads for the rest of their lives -- but it's nothing compared to the way some idiots are modifying their bodies today.
The implied connection between the collapse of Rome and practice of skull deformation in Hungary, parts of which were in the Roman province of Pannonia Valeria, isn't as strange as it seems because this ancient form of body modification was apparently introduced by people from the east. These invasions and mass migrations were one of the major reasons the empire collapsed.
"Previously, archaeologists had hypothesized that new arrivals to Pannonia Valeria settled with people who had lived there under the Romans, based on artifacts that were found in the graves; the new evidence confirms that, according to the study."
Barbaric forms of body modification, tattooing, etc., always seem to show up in advanced cultures during the last stages of collapse.
Comment: This is a long technical paper, too complex for my fuzzy little brain. The goal of the 2016 study was "to determine the matrilineal and patrilineal origins of the Golden family members," but I can't tell if the question was ever completely resolved. It does appear that the Mongols went through a long period of genetic mixing with other Eurasian populations:
"Evidence suggests that many Mongoloid and Caucasoid nomadic tribes inhabited the present-day Mongolian plateau over thousands of years. Since Genghis Khan’s era, the Mongolian population underwent rapid and considerable gene flow from Eurasia, resulting in additional genetic admixture. Likewise, the Mongolian population was formed by the continuous admixture of indigenous tribes who inhabited the Mongolian plateau, with European and other Asian populations who inhabited regions geographically distant from Mongolia. This admixture has deeply influenced the physical appearance of modern-day Mongolian people, exhibiting both Mongoloid and Caucasoid features."
I can only wish the researchers good look at sorting out this mess.
Conan The Barbarian Wouldn't Look Like Arnold Schwarzenegger
I'm a huge fan of the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, one of the best American writers who ever lived. I like the movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as well, even the second one which is almost universally considered, with considerable justification, to be a piece of crap. The Conan of the movies is so radically different from the Conan of the Howard stories that they might as well be two different characters, but never mind that.
The scene in the clip above is from the first movie, Conan the Barbarian (1982). It shows how Conan, enslaved as a child after his village was destroyed by the forces of the evil Thulsa Doom, was chained to a mill wheel and grew into a heavily muscled giant after years of pushing the wheel around in circles.
This scene always bothered me because it seems unlikely that pushing a wheel around like that would give you the physique of a world-class bodybuilder. It's possible, I guess, at least to a certain extent. This kind of labor would definitely strength your thighs and calves, and I suppose the pushing action would have some effect on your chest, back and other muscles, but would it turn you into The Arnold? Very doubtful.
There's also the question of nutrition here. Bodybuilding, even accidental bodybuilding, requires a good diet and I find it hard to believe that the slaves pushing that wheel were fed very well. I'm not sure how old the movie-Conan was supposed to be when he was first chained to the wheel, but he must have spent at least ten years pushing it around and around in all kinds of weather. In the real world I'm guessing all that repetitious slogging would have left him extremely thin, wiry and prematurely aged when they finally released him. And he probably would have had all kinds of knee and back problems.
Around the time Conan the Barbarian was made, Arnold Schwarzenegger was 6'2" with a 52" chest, a competition weight around 235 and an off-season weight around 260. (Source: Bodybuilding.com) The guy was flat-out monstrous and even though he had the genetics for size he didn't get that big on a slave's diet. Hard labor can give you mass and make you tough and strong (if it doesn't kill you) but the one thing it doesn't do is give you gigantic, well-defined muscles like a bodybuilder. That kind of physique requires a specific type of training and it's not the same thing as training for strength.
There's a big difference between bodybuilders like Arnold, who train for size and definition, and powerlifters, who train for strength. For example, the next video shows the Georgian powerlifter Lasha Talakhaze at the 2017 Weightlifting Championship in Anaheim, California. His build is a long, long way from Arnold's, but it's fairly typical of powerlifters I've seen.
Warriors in movies are usually shown as being extremely chiseled, but that kind of physique requires long sessions of targeted exercises in the gym. It's not the kind of body that a Viking farmer, for instance, or a Cimmerian like Conan would develop as a matter of course. In the stories, Howard describes Conan as being huge and muscular with amazing endurance and lightning reflexes. He can also move across a forest floor as "silently as a panther," a talent not usually associated with sheer mass. These qualities -- speed, size, stealth, fast reactions -- aren't usually found together. In and of themselves, they're not totally unrealistic, but even if Conan combined them all in one lethal package, he still wouldn't have looked like Arnold.
There's also the question of how good a fighter someone as big and muscular as Arnold would be. If you put a sword in his hand, he could do a lot of damage -- for a while -- but he would probably gas out pretty quickly because sustained fighting requires a lot of cardio conditioning and cardio tends to work against the bodybuilder's goal of size. Runners have a completely different kind of physique and a smaller, lighter opponent can usually run circles around a bigger, slower man. For example, the next video shows the notorious MMA fighter, Conor McGregor (around 155 pounds, depending), sparring around with Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (400+ pounds), the Icelandic strongman who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones.
They're just playing around here, but it's obvious that Björnsson could crush McGregor with his bare hands if he ever got hold of him in a real fight. It's also obvious that someone as big as Björnsson doesn't have the cardio to keep the conflict going for very long. If this was a sword fight, the lighter, faster McGregor could probably beat Björnsson if he could just stay out of his reach and wear him down long enough to strike a blow, something that probably wouldn't take very long. The heavier you are, the slower you are. It's the classic size-and-brute-strength vs speed-and-agility tradeoff. Smaller fighters have an advantage over bigger, heavier opponents if they know how to use it. This is how Bronn won the trial-by-combat against the heavily armored Sir Vardis Egan in Game of Thrones. It's also how the Viper almost beat the Mountain in GOT. Unfortunately for the Viper, he got cocky and that particular fight didn't end so well for him.
Getting back to Conan, though, what would someone like him look like in real life? That's hard to say. He would be big, certainly, and muscular, but he wouldn't have the kind of physique that Arnold had in his prime. There were no bodybuilding gyms (or steroids) in the Hyborean Age. Conan was fast as well as strong, so he wouldn't look like Lasha Talakhaze, either. If he did, his stamina and fighting abilities would be limited. A real-life Conan would be big, but not too big, and he would also be lean due to his diet and the generally harsh conditions of his life. He might look something like a extremely fast UFC heavy-weight (206+ pounds) fighter, but considering his speed and agility it seems more probable that he would fit into the light heavy-weight (186-205 pounds) category. In other words, he wouldn't be a giant.
All of this, of course, directly contradicts Howard's own descriptions of Conan. For example, in the classic novella Red Nails, Conan is said to be "almost a giant in stature, muscles rippling smoothly under his skin which the sun had burned brown." In Queen of the Black Coast, he's described as a "tall powerfully built figure in a black scale-mail hauberk, burnished greaves and a blue-steel helmet from which jutted bull's horns highly polished." In The Hour of the Dragon, he's a "mailed giant" and so on. He can move over a bed of dead leaves in complete silence and he's always bounding around, as "supple as a panther." In other words, Conan somehow manages to combine the muscularity and size of a heavyweight bodybuilder with the speed, reactions and endurance of a lightweight MMA fighter, not to mention the fact that he's highly intelligent, literate and a wise ruler with a strong sense of honor and chivalry towards the weak. All told, that's a fantastic collection of attributes not normally found in the real world; but he is, after all, a fantasy character, the greatest fantasy character ever created.
Scene from The Whole Wide World (2003), based on the life of Robert E. Howard.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Ancient America, Barbarians, Books, Commentary, Videos | Permalink