What Distinctive Features of Lifestyle and Social Organisation Characterised the Huns and Were Those Characteristics an Advantage or a Disadvantage in Their Interaction with the Roman Empire?

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What distinctive features of lifestyle and social organisation characterised the Huns and were those characteristics an advantage or a disadvantage in their interaction with the Roman Empire? The Hunnic people of the Eurasian steppe have been reserved a position of intrigue and interest within the scholarly narrative of the Later Roman Empire. Whilst the longevity of their activity and dominion was short-lived, the permeating legacy and impact of this nomadic society has been regarded as significant in the decay, and ultimately collapse, of the Western Roman Empire. The emergence of the Huns upon the fringes of the Roman Empire, during the mid 4th century, predicated a period of barbarian invasion and regional instability, a legacy that would outlive their own narrative; as a contemporary made note, they were “the sea bed and origin of all this destruction and of the various calamities inflicted by the wrath of Mars”. The Huns were a nomadic people of pastoral tradition and culture, seasonally migrating and traversing the vast expanses of the great Eurasian steppe in search of grazing for their livestock. Their distinctive behaviour and customs, although not entirely alien to Roman scholars, are explicitly highlighted throughout materials of the period, associating such rustic existences with gross barbarity and animalistic outbursts of arbitrary violence; being as they were “at the mercy of the maddest impulses”. Although the emotive rhetoric may dilute the substance of the material, what it definitively highlights is the nature in which their nomadic existences influenced their relationship with the sedentary civilisation of the Roman Empire. With their seasonal migrations, an extensive pastoral economy, sparse population density and tribal political organisation, the Hunnic nomads were in almost every respect the opposite of the Roman, centralised, bureaucratic

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