Hunnic Diadems

About the year 400 a king of the “Scythians” on the Sea of Azov and the Tanais is said to have sent a crown “covered with gold and set with stones” to the church of Saint Phocas at Sinope.^[1] The “Scythians” were Hunnic tribes, and the crown was covered with gold and not made of it.^[1] Several headbands of this kind survive. They are usually called diadems, though a diadem is strictly a fillet of white stuff set with stones.^[1]

The finds

Six diadems were known by the time of the standard study of 1956.^[2] The Csorna diadem comes from western Hungary. It is a gold sheet about 29 centimetres long and 4 centimetres wide, whose edges were bent around a bronze plaque that is lost. It has garnets and red glass in cells.^[3] The Kerch diadem is gold sheet over bronze plaques. Two big round cells and a lozenge cell hold green glass, and the other 257 cells hold flat almandines.^[3]

The Shipovo diadem, from the north-west of Kazakhstan, is of thin bronze sheet over bronze plaques set with convex glass. It lay on the forehead of a skeleton under a kurgan. The plaques were lined with leather and with thin silk, and small lozenges of gilt leather lay on the silk.^[4] The absence of weapons and a clay spindle whorl in the grave indicate that the dead was a woman.^[5]

The Dehler diadem, from the lower Volga, is of bronze plaques covered with gold sheet and set with convex almandines. It lay on the skull.^[6] It was probably made about 400 or a little later.^[7] The Tiligul diadem is similar and technically poorer. It has convex almandines on the front and flat ones on the sides, and its bronze plaques are lost.^[8]

The Kara-Agach diadem, from central Kazakhstan, is of another kind. A bronze circlet 4 centimetres wide and 49 centimetres in circumference is covered with very pale gold sheet, decorated with stamped triangles in imitation of granulation. Fifteen conical bells hang from it.^[8] It lay near the skull in a stone cist under a kurgan.^[8]

The goldsmiths

Copper oxide on the skull of the Csorna burial shows that the diadem was worn without stuffing or leather lining.^[3] The gold dragons of Kara-Agach resemble a dragon from Stavropol so closely that the pieces were probably made in the same workshops, perhaps in the Bosporus.^[9] Earrings of the same type are spread over a wide area, and their forms and techniques are so closely related that highly skilled goldsmiths, handing the craft down from generation to generation in one place, must have made them.^[10] The people who buried their dead at Kara-Agach could not have made such earrings and dragons themselves.^[11] The diadems thus show a Hunnic taste that the nomads satisfied from workshops of the settled lands.

A gold plaque from Kargaly in Kazakhstan, more than 35 centimetres long and straight, was not part of a diadem. Its design is purely Chinese.^[12]

Open points

The doubts about two of the six diadems are stated in the main account. The dealer who sold the Kerch diadem did not have the best reputation, and “Tiligul” is not the name of a place but of a river.^[13] No source names a goldsmith who made a diadem for a Hunnic ruler.