The Pillar That Names the Enemy

Everything we know about when this crisis started comes from the stone a king raised to mark surviving it.

First, a correction

The Hunas who pressed into Gupta India in the middle of the fifth century were not the same force that had torn through the Roman frontier under Attila a few decades earlier and thousands of miles west.

The shared name invites that reading. The evidence does not support it.

Both came out of the wandering tribal groups of Central Asia. And they were kin in the loose way distant branches of one large, scattered people usually are.

But the Hunas who reached India - usually named as the Alchon Huns or Hephthalites - came by a different route from the Huns who reached the Danube.

Treating them as one army fighting on two continents at once flattens a better and truer history into a tidier one.