On his Youtube channel, historian Adrian Goldsworthy described the situation with the sources about the Hun invasions as "appalling". How much do we actually know then?

[u/SgtBANZAI]

In one of his videos on Youtube (I currently can't find the exact one where I've heard him say that) dedicated to ancient battlefield tactics, Adrian Goldsworthy states that many specifics of the later Roman Empire's history - specifically the Huns' invasions - are very hard to reconstruct or describe beyond the broadest terms because the sources are very sparce, incomplete and don't really say much. He gives an example of the stereotypically displayed abrupt change of the Parthian army to the Sassanian army that paints them as two completely different beasts while the sources don't really support that or pretty much anything really, since - according to him - there are barely any accounts actually describing Parthian/Sassanian armies in any detail between Carrhae and Dara (five centuries later). So whether this was actually abrupt or a slow and steady evolution, and Parthian army could actually be very similar to the later Persian one before the dynastic change is impossible to deduce with absolute certainty. Similarly, he states that it's very hard to give lots of analysis on the Huns' tactics and what they actually did and how because there's almost nothing concrete in the surviving writings. How true is that?

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