"... With the exception of the significant, but in fact comparatively brief, interlude of Arab Muslim and Tang Chinese dominance between the seventh and ninth centuries ad (roughly 200 years), the millennium that we identify as the Dark Ages-cvm-Middle Ages was without a doubt the era of Turkic supremacy. In this world order Inner Asia formed the core and Europe, China and the Middle East merely the periphery. Such a reality was difficult to accept for most historians in both the West and also the East. No Sinocentric or Eurocentric writer could ever admit that their world was of secondary importance in the grand scheme of things and that the ‘nomadic’, steppe barbarians, whom they despised, were at one stage even in the distant past their superiors and overlords. ..."

"... They already possessed a highly sophisticated political culture while still in Inner Asia and, far from being passive recipients of advanced culture from the West, they passed on important elements of Central Eurasian culture to early medieval Europe, which they helped create. Their expansion also marked the beginning of a millennium of virtual monopoly of world power by empires originating in the steppes of Inner Asia. The rise of the Hunnic Empire was truly a geopolitical revolution. ..."

"... The monumental works of intellectual giants such as Max Weber and Arnold Toynbee, never mind distant luminaries of the past, the likes of Rashid, Ibn Khaldun, Sima Qian and Herodotus, are well and truly relics of the past. Those who dare to engage in work that is broadranging enough to be categorized, perhaps, as world history, do so with fear that their work may be castigated for lacking specialist knowledge or be lampooned as a random collection of trivial generalizations. However, fortunately (or alas!) for those historians who engage in the history of the fourth and fifth centuries ad (i.e. Late Antiquity), the centuries characterized by the rise of steppe empires and the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire, departmentalization and selective specialization are wishful thinking and in fact wholly inappropriate. ..."

From "the Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe" (Cambridge University Press) - Historian Prof. Dr. Hyun Jin Kim