The military unit Unnigardai (?????????????), mentioned in the 78th letter of Synesius of Cyrene, is an extremely controversial, even enigmatic object of study: different scholars, such as Ch. Lacombrade and D. Roques, expressed their conflicting opinions on duties, location and legal rank of Unnigardai, but never posed a question of their ethnic origin. On the basis of etymological and comparative linguistic data the author concludes that the root -?????- in the word used by Synesius reflects the Germanic origin, moreover, it is a transliteration of the Gothic word gards («house», «building») that has a very close meaning to the Scandinavian term gar?r. At the same time the -??????- component from the lexicon of Synesius definitely points to Huns and the Turkic ethnonym. Consequently, as the author supposes, the detachment of Unnigardai consisted of Huns and Goths, but the question arises about the reasons and circumstances of the establishment of this unit. In this paper, the author considers the view that Unnigardai originated from West Roman federates (Huns and Goths) who settled in Pannonia by 380 and concludes that Unnigardai could not be formed in the Western half of the Empire, because it is inconsistent with administrative, legal and, most importantly, military situation of the late Roman Empire at the turn of the 5th century.
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