The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture [Hardcover]

Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen (Author), Max Knight (Editor)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 648 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1st edition (August 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520015967
• ISBN-13: 978-0520015968
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #810,467 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Incomplete Masterpiece, April 21, 2001

By 

"rjrrjr" (Scotland, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (Hardcover)

This is a remarkable work. It has all the bearings of a lifetime's achievement, all too noticable in the unfinished nature of the book. Maenchen-Helfin died before it was finished and the book was edited together by Max Knight from the author's papers. It is encyclopedic. If you want to know anything about the Huns then consult this book, E A Thompson's "The Huns" formerly "Attila and the Huns" and P Heather's section in the Cambridge Ancient History Vol. XIII. If it's not in these books then it's not worth knowing. This book, more than the others, is indispensible but difficult to use. It is patchy and often unwieldy but breathtaking in scope and vision. I would highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to know about the Huns who also has the time to work with the book to get the information out.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece on the Huns, December 14, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (Hardcover)

This is truely a masterpiece on the Huns. The sad part is that it is incomplete. It is far superior to the work of Thompson in the Huns even in this incomplete state. The analytical methodical scholarship, typical of savants of the German school, is seen throughout the book. This is supported by the author's firsthand experience amidst the Altaic nomads. One can only imagine the out come if Maenchen-Helfen had lived longer. I do not see scholars of his stature anymore in Central Asian studies.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Important book in the history of the field, but hard to read and now dated, May 2, 2011

By 

Caleb Hanson (Wilmington, MA, US) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (Hardcover)

I've had this book for years but never read it through, only looking up specific references. But it's been cited as a basic work in so much of my recent reading on the period (Heather, Wolfram, et al.) that I felt it finally deserved a sit-down read-through. It is...problematic.

First off, Maenchen-Helfen died before completing his manuscript; Knight, the editor, did a pretty good job assembling the author's remaining notes into coherent chapters, but from time to time you run across notes like "[The manuscript breaks off here in mid-sentence]" or footnotes that lead nowhere. Not fair to judge the total worth of the book by how well it's organized, is what I'm saying.

The first half, covering the history, economy, society, and so on, of the Huns is good and readable (even if I don't always agree with it). The later chapters on religion, art, and language are less so: they become just catalogues, pages and pages of items, more than enough documentation for the one- or two-paragraph summary conclusion. If anyone out there wants to specialize in Hunnish cauldrons, or loop-mirrors, or onomastics, and to compare and contrast them with Turkic, Sarmatian, and Mongol cauldrons, loop-mirros, or onomastics, then these chapters will be crucial for them; for the general historian, not so much. The chapter on Race, mostly citing studies of skull measurements by German scholars of the 30s and 40s, is just embarrassing to read nowadays.

I was right all along: a good reference book, a great one for some particular topics of material culture; incredibly important groundwork in the field, especially illuminating the problems with our primary sources; copious notes and superlative bibliography; but ultimately the tree:forest ratio is just too high.

Which is not to say Maenchen-Helfen can't turn a nice phrase from time to time. For example:
"No Greek or Roman knew where the Attilanic Huns came from. Ammianus Marcellinus placed their home beyond the Maeotis, the Sea of Azov, 'near the ice-bound Ocean' (XXXI, 3, 1), which sheds some light on his geographic notions but none on the Huns." -- p. 444, "Early Huns in Eastern Europe."