Gepids

Rouran epoch Göktürk epoch Uyghur epoch Kirghiz epoch

Rouran First Göktürk Tang rule Second Göktürk Uyghur Kirghiz Huns Western Göktürk Türgesh Karluk Khazar

Rouran 400–554
First Göktürk 552–630
Tang rule 630–682
Second Göktürk 682–744
Uyghur 744–840
Kirghiz 840–924
Huns 370–469
Western Göktürk 552–659
Türgesh 699–766
Karluk 766–800
Khazar 650–969

The Gepids were a Germanic people. Jordanes counts them as kin of the Goths. In his story they came from the slowest of the three ships that brought the Goths from Scandza, and they took their name from a word for slow.^[1]

Under Attila, their king Ardaric led a countless host of Gepids in the Hunnic army on the Catalaunian Plains in 451. Attila prized him and the Ostrogoth Valamir above all his other kings for their loyalty.^[2] Jordanes writes that on the night before the battle, Gepids fighting for the Huns and Franks fighting for the Romans met in the dark. 15,000 fell.^[3]

After Attila’s death, Ardaric was the first to rise against his sons. At the battle of the Nedao in 454, the Gepids won a victory that ended Hunnic rule over the middle Danube.^[4] They took the seats of the Huns and the whole of Dacia. They asked of Rome only peace and a yearly gift, which they still received in Jordanes’s day.^[5] In 567 and 568, the Avars, allied with the Lombards, drove the Gepids out of Pannonia.^[6]

The sixth-century cemeteries of the Gepids on the Tisza and in Slavonia show a custom of the Hunnic age. Of the skulls from them, 39 are deformed by the binding of the infant’s head, in men and women alike. At Kis-Zombor, 21 of 63 skulls are deformed.^[7] The Gepids kept the custom into the sixth century, long after the Huns. It is understood as taken over from the Huns, whose subjects they had been.^[8]

References

^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 94–95, p. 78–79
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 199, p. 107
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 217, p. 112
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 260–262, p. 125–126
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 264, p. 126–127
^ Golden 1992, p. 111
^ Werner 1956, p. 15
^ Werner 1956, p. 17

Sources

Jordanes (after Priscus and Ammianus Marcellinus)

Literature

Charles Christopher Mierow, The Gothic History of Jordanes in English Version, with an Introduction and a Commentary (1915)
E. A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (1948)
Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Joachim Werner, Beiträge zur Archäologie des Attila-Reiches (1956)