The origin of the European Huns in the light of ethnogonic traditions

The publication is devoted to the problem of the origin of the ancient people known as the Huns (Huns), who dominated the steppe zone of Eastern Europe at a certain historical time and created their own unstable political entity, which included the territories of Central Europe, parts of modern Russia – the regions of the Urals, the Volga region, the North Caucasus and the Black Sea region. Until now, there is no established point of view in the scientific community regarding the ethnic origin of this nomadic people. It should be noted separately that recently in some scientific publications there has been a tendency to bring closer the ethnic origin of the European Huns and Alans, including through the possible belonging of the language of the former to the “Paleoindoiranian” or “Tokharo-Iranian” languages. In the IV century A.D., the Hunnic tribes began an active expansionist policy of conquering European territories. By this time, they had settled in the Volga region and the Pre-Caucasus and from here they directed their movement to the west. Reviewing the information of Roman historians – Ammianus Marcellinus, Priscus of Pania, Jordan, Zosima, Agathius of Myrnaea and others, we can extract some information about what contemporaries primarily noted about the origin of this nomadic people. From written sources. It can be assumed that the ethnopolitical center of the Huns, from where they began their movement to the West, was located from the Volga and further east beyond the Urals. According to the author of the publication, ethnogonic legends that existed among the nomads of antiquity and have come down to us in narrative sources can play an important role in solving the problem of the origin of the Huns. In the course of the research, the author comes to the conclusion that ancient legends are another argument in favor of the hypothesis of the proto-Turkic origin of the Huns.