How barbarian were the Barbarians?

[recondicom]

Hailog, Recondicom

Xiongnu, as in the Black Huns? :wink:

There are recent arguments that the Xiongnu were not Huns, based on hair style and a few other recorded physical details. But, like any society, the Xiongnu had three centuries to evolve before they arrived on the Roman periphery. Who really knows what tribes they met, how they were influenced? The Black Huns (and also the White Huns) were like the Alans, and like the Goths. They were not the same people they started out as. :lol:

The dragon and pearl seems a different matter. It has evolved very little, perhaps due to its cultural position in a fixed religion... the same way the swastika remains central to the Buddha in India. In the West, the dragon and pearl appears with the arrival of the Equites Taifali (perhaps the Taifali tribe as its carriers from the East). No doubt, this dragon image had much influence in late Roman Britain, and its "reintroduction" gave rise to semi-historical phrases such as "pendragon."

I suppose we can say that the dragon, never a Celtic symbol until the late Roman/post-Roman period, was actually introduced to Europe by Eastern barbarians. The same can be said for the Jersey cow (originally Sarmatian gray cattle). :lol:

Vereni. Cow? I like the symbolic Europa riding the bull… still
Well said alanus… Apollonius of Tyana an stoic survived in Arabic.
Apollonius.
." Next they crossed the Indus and passed through countries whose coinage was of yellow and black copper and whose kings were clothed in white and despised ostentation. One evening, on a lonely river bank, they came on a brass stele inscribed with the words, "Here Alexander the Great halted."

And when they had for many days followed the course of the Ganges, when they had climbed more hills and mountains, and met the single-homed wild ass, the fish with a blue crest Eke the peacock's, and the insect from whose body inflammable oil is made; when they had avoided the tiger with the precious stone in its skull.” (They arrived and stayed for a while.)…
The wise men, on the threshold of their valley of meditation, gave them white camels on which to cross India. They returned by the Red Sea, in which the Great Bear is not reflected and where at midday men cast no shadow on the deck of their ship. They saw the country of the Orites, where the rivers abound with copper ore; Stobera, the city of the Ichthyophagi ; and the port of Balara, (Nominalia of the Bulgarian khans) surrounded with myrtle and laurel, where are found shell fish with white shells and a pearl in the place of the heart.” Khan or not Khan?... perhaps both.