Rise And Fall Of The Huns: A Collection Of Three Hunnic Coins

$136.17

They came on horseback. They just rode in one day—no one knows from where—with their battle cries and their longbows and their bloodlust. They sacked cities and towns. They pillaged. They penetrated Europe as far West as Gaul, inspiring the Great Migration. And they kept on moving. Their king, Attila, remains one of history’s most notorious figures; and their name, one of history’s most fearsome conquerors. They are the Huns. And from their arrival in the 370s AD to their departure a hundred years later, they were the fiercest and most ferocious warriors on earth.

Little is definitively known about their origin. Were they Mongols? Scythians? Magyars? No one can say for sure. The Huns were nomads. Little archeological evidence exists of them. There are few examples of Hunnic art. From the skulls found at Hunnic burial sites, we know that they practiced cranial deformation, elongating the pliable heads of their infants. They were expert horsemen and excellent bowmen. The Romans found them ugly and uncouth.

After the death of Attila, the Huns splintered. The Kidarites, or Red Huns, moved into Bactria. The Alxon took the Punjab and other parts of India. After their defeat in the Second Hunnic War, the Huns retreated to Kashmir, where their last king, Toramana, established his base of operations. This box contains coins of the Kidarites, the Alxon, and Toramana of Kashmir

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The Huns were a nomadic people who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. According to European tradition, they were first reported living east of the Volga River, in an area that was part of Scythia at the time.^[1] By 370 AD, the Huns had arrived on the Volga, causing the westwards movement of Goths and Alans.^[2] By 430, they had established a vast, but short-lived, empire on the Danubian frontier of the Roman empire in Europe. Either under Hunnic hegemony, or fleeing from it, several central and eastern European peoples established kingdoms in the region, including not only Goths and Alans, but also Vandals, Gepids, Heruli, Suebians and Rugians.

The Huns, especially under their King Attila, made frequent and devastating raids into the Eastern Roman Empire. In 451, they invaded the Western Roman province of Gaul, where they fought a combined army of Romans and Visigoths at the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields, and in 452, they invaded Italy. After the death of Attila in 453, the Huns ceased to be a major threat to Rome and lost much of their empire following the Battle of Nedao (c. 454). Descendants of the Huns, or successors with similar names, are recorded by neighboring populations to the south, east, and west as having occupied parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia from about the 4th to 6th centuries. Variants of the Hun name are recorded in the Caucasus until the early 8th century.