Сувары

A stunning biography of history’s most infamous warlord, Attila the Hun. For a crucial twenty years in the early fifth century, Attila held the fate of the Roman Empire and the future of all Europe in his hands. He created the greatest of barbarian forces, and his empire briefly rivaled Rome’s. In numerous raids and three major campaigns against the Roman Empire, he earned himself an instant and undying reputation for savagery. But there was more to him than mere barbarism. Attila was capricious, arrogant, brutal, and brilliant enough to win the loyalty of millions. In the end, his ambitions ran away with him. He did not live long enough to found a lasting empire—but long enough to jolt Rome toward its final fall. In this riveting biography, masterful storyteller John Man draws on his extensive travels through Attila’s heartland and his experience with the nomadic traditions of Central Asia to reveal the man behind the myth.

Thomas Allsen is one of the foremost historians of the Mongol empire. His latest book breaks new scholarly boundaries in its exploration of cultural and scientific exchanges between Iran and China. Contrary to popular belief, Mongol rulers were intensely interested in the culture of their sedentary subjects. Under their auspices, various commodities, ideologies and technologies were disseminated across Eurasia. The result was a lively exchange of scientists, scholars and ritual specialists between East and West. The book is broad-ranging and erudite and promises to become a classic in the field.

Attila the Hun has been known to the world for centuries as a bloodthirsty tyrant and as little else. In this piece of historical reconstruction, Patrick Howarth shows how wrong the judgement of the world has been.

This is a history of the Huns in Europe from their first attacks on the Goths north of the Black Sea to the collapse of their central European empire after the death of the legendary Attila. In the only connected narrative account of the rise and fall of the Huns in English, Professor Thompson reconstructs their campaigns in detail from disparate and often fragmentary sources. In the process, there emerges a clear picture of their dramatic successes, and failures, against the non-Roman peoples of central and eastern Europe, and of their many invasions of the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire.

The diversion of scholarship on ethnicity by political forces has been studied in Nazi Germany, where folklore became central to national self-perception and consequently suffered from uncritical enthusiasms. Who Gets the Past? is one of the first studies of this phenomenon in another arena.
In the Middle Volga region of Russia, the intellectuals of two ethnic groups are engaged in a protracted competition for the right to claim descent from various ancestries, most dating back to the first millennium A.D. Archeologists from both the Chuvash and the Tatar ethnic groups are attempting to present evidence connecting the groups with Turkic-speakers, Finnish-Ugric groups, Bulgars, or Sarmatians. At stake, according to Victor Shnirelman, are both territorial and political advantages.
Who Gets the Past? tells how and why, from the Stalinist period to the present, these intellectuals have made different, sometimes self-contradictory, claims on the past. The Soviet legacy of reinforcing and politicizing ethnic identities is largely responsible for the original extent of the competition, according to Shnirelman. But the importance of ethnic claims since the Soviet breakup has only contributed to its persistence.