Riding Round the Dead

Several sources describe peoples of the steppe who mourned a dead man on horseback, riding round his body or the tent in which it lay.^[1] Jordanes, following Priscus, records it at the funeral of Attila in 453.^[2] The Zhou Shu records it among the Göktürks of the sixth century.^[3] An Armenian history describes Huns north of the Caucasus galloping at the graves of their dead in 682.^[4] At the Tang court a crown prince had his servants ride round him while he played a dead Göktürk khan.^[5] Setting these reports side by side is a modern comparison. The sources themselves do not connect them, and none of them says that one people took the rite from another.

Attila’s funeral

After Attila died in 453, his body was laid out in a silken tent in the middle of a plain, as a spectacle to be admired.^[2] The best horsemen of the whole Hunnic people rode round the place where he lay, in courses after the manner of the circus games. They told his deeds in a funeral song.^[2] Jordanes gives the song. It calls Attila the chief king of the Huns, son of Mundzuc, lord of the bravest peoples, who died not by an enemy’s wound nor by the treachery of his own, but among his people unharmed, happy and without pain.^[6] When they had mourned him with such laments, they held the strava over his tomb with great feasting and buried him at night.^[7]

It has been doubted that the horsemen can have ridden round the tent and sung at the same time.^[8] The courses after the manner of the circus may have been horse races, which many peoples have held at burials. The short version in Jordanes would then have run several parts of the rite together.^[8]

The Göktürk funeral

The Zhou Shu sets out the Göktürk funeral in order.^[3] The body lay in a tent. The sons, grandsons and kin of both sexes killed sheep and horses and set them before the tent as an offering.^[3] Then they rode their horses seven times round the tent, 繞帳走馬七匝.^[3] Each time they came to the door of the tent, they cut their faces with a knife and wept, so that blood and tears ran together. They did this seven times and stopped.^[3] The burial waited for its season. On the day of the burial, the kin made the offering again and rode and cut their faces as at the death.^[3] The Bei Shi repeats the passage.^[9]

The Sui Shu has the circuits but not the horses.^[10] In its account the kin go round the tent crying aloud, 遶帳號呼, and gash their faces, seven times and no more.^[10] Whether they went on foot or on horseback, the Sui Shu does not say.^[10] The Tongdian of 801, which abridges the Zhou Shu, keeps the face-cutting and leaves the riding out.^[11]

A Tang prince’s mock funeral

The Göktürk rite was known at the Tang court. The Xin Tang Shu says that Li Chengqian, the crown prince of the emperor Taizong, loved the speech and the dress of the Göktürks.^[5] He chose servants who looked like the Hu, dressed them in sheepskins and braided their hair.^[5] Five of them made up one camp, and they pitched felt tents. He made five wolf-head standards and lived in a felt yurt himself.^[5] They boiled sheep and cut the meat with their own knives.^[5]

Then the prince played a khan who had died.^[5] He had his people wail and weep, cut their faces, and gallop their horses round him.^[5] Suddenly he rose again. If he had the empire, he said, he would lead tens of thousands of horsemen to Jincheng, loosen his hair, give himself to Ashina Simo and serve him as a shad. That would be a joy.^[5] His attendants whispered to one another that it was uncanny.^[5] In 643 his plot to seize the palace was betrayed. He was deposed.^[5] The scene shows the Göktürk funeral as the Tang court knew it: the wailing, the cut faces and the riders circling the dead.

The Huns north of the Caucasus

Israyēl, a bishop of Caucasian Albania, travelled north over the Caucasus in winter to the Huns beyond Derbent.^[12] The Armenian dates put his journey in the winter of 681 to 682.^[13] The History of the Caucasian Albanians describes the rites he found there.^[4] Over their dead the Huns beat drums and whistled. They cut their cheeks and limbs with sabres and daggers until the blood ran.^[4] At the graves men fought naked with swords, man against man and troop against troop, and many wrestled.^[4] Others performed swift gallops on horseback, wheeling this way and that, while some wept and wailed.^[4] The History calls these rites satanic. Its account is that of an opponent. These gallops, like the riding of the Göktürks, have been counted among the horse races held at burials.^[8]

The Gaoche

The Wei Shu records riding in circles among the Gaoche, but not round a dead man.^[14] The Gaoche, the “high carts”, were a people of the northern steppe whom the later histories count among the Tiele. The Gaoche buried their dead seated upright in a pit, with arms outstretched as if drawing a bow, a sword at the belt and a lance under the arm, as in life. They left the pit open.^[14]

The riding came at other times.^[14] When men were killed by lightning or by an epidemic, the Gaoche prayed for good fortune. If all then went well, they held a sacrifice of thanks.^[14] They killed many animals and burned the bones. They rode round in circles, up to several hundred times, while men and women of all ages gathered.^[14] Those whom fortune had spared sang and danced, and the families in mourning chanted laments and wept.^[14] The autumn after a lightning strike brought a second rite, the thunder rite.^[14] The Gaoche met at the place where the lightning had struck, buried a ram, lit a fire and drew their knives. A woman shaman spoke prayers.^[14] Then the riders galloped round in troops, a hundred times before they stopped.^[14] Under the Wei emperor Wencheng, the five Gaoche tribes gathered, tens of thousands strong, for a great sacrifice to heaven. They raced horses, killed victims and circled round singing.^[15] The Bei Shi has the same text.^[16]

The Tongdian, abridging this passage in 801, dropped the sentence on lightning and epidemic. In its text, therefore, the riding follows directly on the open grave.^[11] Read there, the Gaoche seem to ride round their dead. The Wei Shu does not say so. One modern account reads the Tongdian in this way, as riding round the open pit.^[17] Riding round a sacrifice is recorded for the Xianbei as well.^[18] Yan Shigu, a Tang commentator of the Han Shu, wrote that at their autumn sacrifice they set up willow branches where no trees stood and rode round them three times.^[18] He took the custom for a remnant of the rite at Dailin, the autumn assembly of the Xiongnu.^[18]

The Kirghiz

The Kirghiz, the Xin Tang Shu says, did not cut their faces in mourning.^[19] They went three times round the body weeping. Then they burned it and gathered the bones, and after a year they made the grave.^[19] The text does not say whether they rode.^[19]

The Tongdian of 801 describes the same funeral without the circling.^[20] When a Kirghiz died, it says, they only wailed three times. They did not cut their faces. They burned the body, gathered the bones and raised the grave mound after a year.^[20] Where the Tongdian has three cries, the Xin Tang Shu, compiled in the eleventh century, has three circuits. Whether its compilers had another report or rewrote the older phrase, the texts do not show. Both note the face-cutting the Kirghiz did not practise. The Tongdian says that their customs were broadly those of the Göktürks.^[21] One modern writer reports that the Tang Huiyao has the Kirghiz cut their faces after all. This would set it against both texts.^[22] The Chinese writers described the Kirghiz funeral against the Göktürk one.

The comparison

Set side by side, the reports give riders round the dead among the Huns of 453 and the Göktürks of the sixth century. They give riders at the graves among the Huns of the Caucasus in 682. The Gaoche rode round sacrifices, not round the dead. The Kirghiz went round the body without a word about horses. Jordanes and the Chinese historians knew nothing of each other’s work. No source links Attila’s funeral with the rites of the eastern steppe.

Opinions differ. One holds that there is nothing in the Hunnic rites to which analogies could not be found throughout Eurasia. The association of burial and games, it notes, reaches from Greece to the Bashkirs on the Volga.^[23] The hunt for parallels would then be futile. The strava over Attila’s tomb was a Hunnic custom.^[23] A different explanation takes the circuits and the arrows at a Göktürk burial for a rite that sends the dead man’s soul up to Heaven. It draws on a Buryat rite in which many put on white clothes, ride nine times round the prepared grave, shoot arrows at the sky and cry out weeping. The Chinese sources of the Göktürks have seven circuits.^[24] Whether the Huns and the Göktürks shared any descent is argued in the debate over the Huns and the Xiongnu and the debate over Turkic origins. A shared way of mourning does not decide it. What remains is a set of separate reports of mourning on horseback, each written by an outsider about one people.

References

^ Jordanes; Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ a b c Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 256, p. 124
^ a b c d e f Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ a b c d e Movsēs Dasxurancʿi, book II; Dowsett 1961, p. 156
^ a b c d e f g h i j Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 80
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 257, p. 124
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 258, p. 124
^ a b c Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 277
^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
^ a b c Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ a b Tongdian, juan 197
^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi, book II; Dowsett 1961, p. 154–155
^ Dowsett 1961, p. 154
^ a b c d e f g h i Wei Shu, juan 103
^ Wei Shu, juan 103; Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 98
^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 98
^ Ecsedy 1984, p. 284
^ a b c Shiji, juan 110
^ a b c Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
^ a b Tongdian, juan 200
^ Tongdian, juan 200; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
^ Ecsedy 1984, p. 283
^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 278
^ Ögel 1995, p. 286

Sources

Jordanes (after Priscus and Ammianus Marcellinus)
Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 98, 99 (after Wei Shu, Zhou Shu and Sui Shu)
Tongdian, juan 197, 200 (after Sui Shu and Zhou Shu)
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 80, 217 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Wei Shu, juan 103
Movsēs Dasxurancʿi, book II
Shiji, juan 110

Literature

Charles Christopher Mierow, The Gothic History of Jordanes in English Version, with an Introduction and a Commentary (1915)
Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973)
Charles J. F. Dowsett (trans.), The History of the Caucasian Albanians by Movsēs Dasxuranci (1961)
Ildikó Ecsedy, Ancient Turk (T'u-chüeh) Burial Customs (1984)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) II (1995)