Hunnic Cauldrons

The Hunnic cauldron is a vessel of cast copper with a cylindrical or bell-shaped body, a solid conical stand and lugs on the rim.^[1] Eighteen of them are known from places between Silesia and the High Altai.^[2] The vessels are assigned to the Huns.^[3]

The finds

A study of 1896 separated this small group of vessels from the hemispherical cauldrons of southern Russia, which had until then passed for Scythian. A series of papers from 1913 onward argued that the Huns had made them.^[3] Both the spread of the vessels and the circumstances of the finds leave no doubt that they were cast by Huns for Huns.^[3]

The cauldron from Jedrzychowice in Upper Silesia is 55 centimetres high.^[4] The one from Tortel in Hungary is 89 centimetres high and 50 centimetres across, and it stood at the foot of a burial mound.^[5] Another Hungarian cauldron, from the Kapos valley, is 52 centimetres high with a wall 0.8 centimetres thick and weighs 16 kilograms. It was found in a peat bog.^[5] A cauldron from a lake at Desa in Romania is 54.1 centimetres high.^[6] Further finds come from the Perm region, from the Komi region and from the shore of Lake Teletskoe in the High Altai.^[7] The Kyzlasov chapter of the UNESCO history counts cast bronze cauldrons of the Hun type among the objects found far to the west of the steppe zone, with weapons and harness in the polychrome style.^[8]

Several of the cauldrons come from peat bogs, a marsh, lakes or the foot of a burial mound.^[9] Of the eighteen finds only the cauldron of Jedrzychowice was reported from a grave, and even that report is open to doubt.^[10]

Manufacture

The metal of the cauldrons is mostly copper with impurities, and the alloy is uneven. In the cauldron of Jedrzychowice the ingredients are so unevenly mixed that the copper is almost pure in some places and tin predominates in others.^[11] Two fragments from Romania are copper with about a quarter red copper oxide, and one of them has 4 percent lead.^[11] Where the Huns got the copper is not known. Its poor quality suggests that the smiths themselves heated and reduced the ore with charcoal or wood, using blast air in some form of furnace.^[12] Had they remelted Roman bronze vessels, the result would have been much better.^[13]

The vessels have flaws and crude shapes. They still show that the Huns had metalworkers who could cast, and that those metalworkers were professionals.^[13] One older view denies that nomads work metal at all. The cauldrons refute it.^[13]

Clay copies of a Hunnic cauldron of the Verkhnii Konets type have been found at Altyn Asar on the Syr Darya in Kazakhstan. They show the seams where the sections of the casting mould met, and the rings of the pendants on the body of the copper vessel appear on them as dots.^[14] The copies suggest that the originals were cast in moulds made in sections.

Use

The cauldrons are of moderate size, smaller than the great cauldrons of the Scythians. They were cooking vessels for boiling meat, and the meat was lifted out with a hook.^[15] The solid stand was less efficient than a tripod or a perforated stand, but it helped to save fuel, which was always scarce in the steppe.^[15] The common view that nearly all Eurasian cauldrons were sacred vessels has been doubted, because the great cauldrons of the rock pictures of the Minusinsk basin are drawn out of scale and the settlements drawn beside them could not have held so many sacrificial vessels.^[16]

A cauldron was used for generations and was repaired. A Kazakh proverb says that a man lives fifty years and a cauldron can serve for a hundred.^[17] The find context of a cauldron therefore gives only the earliest date at which it can have been lost.^[17]

Origin

The cauldrons cannot be derived from the Scythian and Sarmatian cauldrons.^[18] They are close to the cauldrons of northern China, Mongolia and the Ordos region.^[19] The cauldrons from the Xiongnu graves of Noin Ula and the Kiran river have almost hemispherical bodies with raised wavy lines, which the Hunnic cauldrons do not show.^[20] Cauldrons from the borderlands of northern China are as a rule squatter, with round handles and perforated stands. Plain rectangular handles like those of Jedrzychowice and Osoka also occur on the cauldrons of the Ordos.^[18] If the Hunnic cauldrons are not direct descendants of the Ordos cauldrons, they are at least their cousins, and some of the Ordos cauldrons were cast by and for the Xiongnu.^[18]

The cauldron of Noin Ula has an alloy of 90 percent copper, 7 percent tin and 2 percent lead. This is close to the alloy of the Chinese mirror from the same mound, and the cauldron was probably cast by a Chinese in the service of the Xiongnu.^[18] The farther west the cauldrons were cast, the more they differ from their prototypes.^[21] The author concludes that the Hunnic cauldrons originated on the northern and north-western borders of China, and that the crude copper cauldrons tie the Huns to the area of the Xiongnu confederation.^[22]

Open points

Only one fragment from Bosneagu and one from Sucidava have been analysed, and the cauldron of Ivanovka has no record of where it was found.^[23] The cauldrons from Lake Teletskoe, Solikamsk, Osoka and Verkhnii Konets lie far from the Hunnic camps of the Danube, so the vessels from the north need not prove the presence of Huns. They point instead to relations between the northern tribes and the ancestors of the Huns.^[22] How the copper reached the smiths, and where the Hunnic foundries stood, no source says.

References

^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 306, 326
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 327
^ a b c Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 306
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 308
^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 309
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 310
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 316–320
^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 320
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 308–310
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 327–328
^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 321
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 322–323
^ a b c Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 323
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 336
^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 326
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 326–327
^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 334
^ a b c d Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 332
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 331
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 331–332
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 333
^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 337
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 321, 336

Literature

Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973)
B. A. Litvinsky; Zhang Guang-da; R. Shabani Samghabadi (ed.), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. III (1996)