The Truth About The Huns

The Ancients

History Hit

History

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2021

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Huns! The name of this ancient people triggers a multiplicity of responses and evokes a number of images (nearly all of them negative). They have been portrayed as a savage people, who contributed little to world history. But is this really the case? In this podcast, Tristan was joined by Professor Hyun Jin Kim to talk about the emergence of the Huns in the west in the late 4th century, and the striking geopolitical changes that their rapid expansion brought about. Hyun Jin dismantles the portrayal that all the Huns did was destroy and plunder and highlights the remarkable structure of this ancient empire. The first unified empire in Europe beyond Rome’s borders.

Hyun Jin is a Professor in Classics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Huns, published by Routledge in 2016.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's podcast
0:08.7	as you could probably guess from the title, we're talking about the Huns. In particular
0:12.9	we're going to be talking about the rise of the Huns or shall we say the western Huns,
0:17.2	the Huns which arrive in Europe in the late fourth century AED. Now we're also going
0:22.5	to be looking at the structure of the Hunnic Empire. We're going to be looking at their
0:26.7	economy. We're going to be looking at administration. We're going to be looking at the political
0:30.9	structure and so much more. Now join me to talk through this topic I was delighted to get
0:36.6	on the show. Professor Hingin Kim, a lecturer in classics at the University of Melbourne in
0:42.7	Australia. Hingin has also written a book all about the Huns so without further ado,
0:47.6	here's Hingin.
0:57.6	Hingin thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting
1:02.8	me. You are very welcome indeed because this is an incredible topic, the rise of the Huns.
1:08.3	Hingin within the space of 50 years or century or so, we see this remarkable rise of this
1:14.3	power emerging from the east to form. Can we say the first unified empire in Europe
1:19.2	beyond Roman borders? Yes, that is what happens and of course that has mystified not just contemporary
1:27.0	Romans but later historians. How could this have happened? This all goes back to the Roman
1:32.1	historian Amianus Mussolinas who presented this very distorted mythologized ethnographic
1:39.6	description of the Huns which actually is based on earlier ethnographic work that was done
1:45.8	by Roman ethnographers such as Homponius Mella and Humpäus Trogas and of course they all
1:52.5	then hark back to the great Herodotus, the Greek historian ethnographer. And so the Huns
1:58.2	were portrayed as the most primitive of all peoples who did not even have knowledge of
2:02.8	making iron. They had no metal tools. They used bones instead of iron to make their
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of History Hit and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.