“The Steppe World and the Rise of the Huns” ― Étienne de la Vaissière (2015)

The text delves into the origins of the Huns and their ties to the Eurasian steppe world. It explores the significance of the Huns’ name and its association with the link to the Xiongnu empire, two nomadic groups that played pivotal roles in the political landscape of Inner and Central Asia. The text further investigates the evidence supporting the Huns’ potential migration routes. It examines the relationship between the European Huns and the Inner Asian Xiongnu, outlining the three stages of their history: the imperial Xiongnu, their northern descendants, and the subsequent groupings resulting from their migrations in Europe as well as Central Asia.

The author contends that the Huns, who entered Europe in the fourth century, identified themselves with the name “Xiongnu” as indicated in Chinese sources. The text also touches upon the misconception of three successive waves of Huns in Central Asia, providing evidence of their presence from the onset of the Hunnic invasions. Additionally, the text confirms the identification of the Chionites as Huns in both Western and Chinese accounts.

Dynastic histories, notably the Weishu, offer crucial insights into the political history of Inner Asia. The Kidarites and Hephthalites emerged as prominent nomadic dynasties in Central Asia during the 4th and 5th centuries, with the Hephthalites possibly originating as vassals of a northern power, such as the Avars. Archaeological findings, such as the distinctive bell-shaped cauldrons, suggest a north Altaic origin for the Hunnic groups that invaded Central Asia and Europe.

Moreover, the text explores the continuity of rituals and culture from the Minusinsk region to Hungary, supported by archaeological evidence and textual sources. It underscores the significance of the Altai region as the starting point for the Hunnic migration to Central Asia and the West, with climate change potentially influencing this movement.

Étienne de la Vaissière “The Steppe World and the Rise of the Huns,” in The Cambridge Companion to THE AGE OF ATTILA, 2015.

The origin of the Huns in the steppe is a topic that has occupied historians for hundreds of years. In 1776, Joseph de Guignes wrote, at the beginning of the preface to his Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols, et des autres Tartares occidentaux: “I propose to present in this work the history of an almost unknown people, which at different times established powerful kingdoms in Asia, Europe, and Africa. The Huns... who originated in a country in the North of China, between the rivers Irtish and Amur, gradually took control of all of Great Tartary.” The argument of this founding father of Orientalism was based on nothing more than the similarity of the lifestyle of the European Huns, who invaded Roman Europe in the first half of the fifth century, and the nomadic Xiongnu, the chief enemy of the Qin and Han Chinese dynasties. The great nomadic empire formed by the Xiongnu in the Ordos region and Mongolia lasted from the third century BCE until the first century CE, before its ultimate defeat in Mongolia in 155 at the hands of other nomads, the Xianbei (map 2). The far eastern provenance of the Huns was also of great interest to intellectuals in the nineteenth century, who thought in terms of nation, people, bloodlines, and language. Through detailed analyses of Chinese sources, these scholars tried to find more precise parallels between the name Hun and Xiongnu. They sought to pinpoint some of their tribal names, to identify their language, and to reconstruct the trajectory of their movement from Asia to Europe. In the face of this quest for origins, the study of the Huns who established themselves on the Hungarian plain in Europe, and especially what archaeology could reveal about them, seemed less important.

In reaction to this situation, O. Maenchen-Helfen, a Sinologist with a deep knowledge of Soviet archaeology and ethnology, tried after the Second World War to change the approach of research on the Huns of Europe. He strongly criticized the philological character of previous scholarship and its emphasis on names as well as its lack of interest in archaeological realities. He sought to create a new field of Hunnic studies that was disengaged from the question of origins.[1]

[1] Otto Maenchen-Helfen, “The Legend of the Origin of the Huns,” Byzantion 17 (1945) 244–251; Maenchen-Helfen, “Pseudo-Huns,” Central Asiatic Journal 1 (1955) 101–106; Maenchen-Helfen, “The Ethnic Name Hun,” in Studia Serica Bernhard Karlgren Dedicata, ed. Soren Egerod (Copenhagen, 1959) 223–238. In distinguishing the question of origins from that of the organization of Attila’s empire, this Companion to the Age of Attila validates Maenchen-Helfen’s approach.

In the following pages, while I acknowledge the force of Maenchen-Helfen’s arguments, I offer a primarily political hypothesis that addresses the still open question of origins and of whether or not the Xiongnu in any way were connected to Attila’s empire.[2] I argue that a group of Hunnic tribes, once part of the former Xiongnu Empire, actually migrated westward in the middle of the fourth century, two centuries after the Xiongnu state collapsed in Mongolia. This does not mean that the Huns who arrived in Europe had not changed considerably in the course of their long migration. The complexity and fluid character of ethnogenesis is an accepted fact, seen especially in the formation of confederations on the steppe. The language of the Huns might have changed, too; Maenchen-Helfen was right that we cannot prove that their spoken tongue remained the same. What I will try to show in this chapter, however, is that in the course of their migration the Huns kept their name as a political reference point, and that this perceived connection is of great historical importance for understanding the Hunnic domination of the tribes of the Pontic steppe. Precise evidence from the early medieval steppe shows that migrating tribes made use of their prestigious name with its powerful reference to the imperial past to rule over smaller tribes less blessed by fortune and history.[3]

[2] On this point see Hyun Kim, The Huns, Rome, and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge, 2013).
[3] See the famous story narrated by Theophylact Simocatta on the fleeing Avars in the middle of the sixth century: Michael Whitby and Mary Whitby, ed. and trans., The History of Theophylact Simocatta: An English Translation with Introduction and Notes (Oxford, 1986) 189–190.

The origins of the Huns and their links to the world of the steppe are pertinent political questions that scholars have approached differently. I will attempt to clarify their conflicting opinions, first regarding events in the fourth century and the arrival of the Huns in Europe, and then moving on to the links of the Europe-based Huns to the Central Asian steppe in the fifth century.

Did they come from beyond the Volga?

The first challenge is to prove that the Huns did indeed arrive from beyond the Volga, and that they did so in Late Antiquity, not earlier. The classical sources place the origins of the Huns beyond the Sea of Azov but say very little more, and one might easily envisage a local ethnogenesis or at least a very ancient arrival in the region. Some Soviet scholars took this position.[4] The fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus places the Huns far to the Northeast (31.2.1): “The people of the Huns, but little known from ancient records, dwelling beyond the Maeotic [Azov] Sea near the ice-bound ocean.” He adds, furthermore, that the Huns went as far as the lands of the Alans North of the River Don (31.2.12–13), “which divides Europe from the measureless wastes of Scythia [the steppe].” Jordanes, writing two centuries later in Constantinople, also placed the Huns’ origin to the East of the Sea of Azov, between the Volga and the Don Rivers (Get. 5). But Ammianus, notably, adds: “This race of untamed men, without encumbrances, aflame with an inhuman desire for plundering others’ property, made their violent way amid the rapine and slaughter of the neighbouring peoples as far as the Halani [Alans],” and defines some limits to the North of the Alans: “The river Tanaïs [Don], which separates Asia from Europe. On the other side of this river the Alans... inhabit the measureless wastes of Scythia” (Amm. 31.2.12–13). The Huns clearly arrived in the Don-Volga region and were not native to it. No classical source contradicts Ammianus’ assertion that the Huns were completely unknown to the Mediterranean world before the 370s, and that they appeared quite suddenly. The date conventionally assigned to their crossing of the Volga is around 370, but it could have been somewhat earlier. It is not known how much time the Huns spent in the region between the rivers Volga and Don, but it was undoubtedly less than a generation. No source, however, explains the reasons for their advance into the West. We may conclude that the Huns arrived in the Volga-Don region, having come from somewhere far to the East unknown to the Greek, Latin, and Syrian observers of the fourth century.

[4] Otto Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns (Berkeley, 1973) 447 n. 21.

We may know the region where the Huns arrived, but not their point of origin or the path they took to reach the West. I believe that the Huns had an origin in Inner Asia, and more precisely from the regions surrounding the Altai Mountains; all the archaeological and textual evidence points in this direction, as we will see. They could have taken any number of routes to reach the Don-Volga area from their far-eastern point of origin. Perhaps, they crossed the Turgai Plateau if they came via Central Asia. (map 2.) An alternate route could have brought them down the Volga from the North, a detour from their point of origin in Asia. In this scenario, the Huns left the Altai, traversed the northern steppe, crossed the Ural Mountains where the city of Yekaterinburg now lies, and then pushed South along the Volga.[5] Their steppe way of life, however, precludes a northern origin in the forest zone. We turn now to eastern evidence for their eastern origins and their relation to the empire of the Xiongnu.

[5] Miklòs Erdy, “An Overview of the Xiongnu Type Cauldron Finds of Eurasia in Three Media, with Historical Observations,” in The Archaeology of the Steppes, ed. Bruno Genito (Naples, 1994) 379–438.

The Huns and the Xiongnu: The Central Asian Evidence

To address the question of the connection between the Huns known to Europeans in the West and the Xiongnu, we must examine two fundamental texts, written in the region of Dunhuang and Gansu on the borders between Central Asia and regions populated by Chinese (Han) people at the end of the third century and beginning of the fourth, by two direct witnesses, Zhu Fahu and Nanaivande.

The first text is a translation, composed by Zhu Fahu (his Chinese name), also known as Dharmarakṣa (his Indian name), a Buddhist monk and one of the main translators of Buddhist texts in China in the third century.[6] Zhu Fahu’s family, which had come from Bactria (northern Afghanistan) and had lived in Dunhuang for generations, was typical of the wealthy merchants who had established Buddhism in China. Zhu Fahu moved to central China and participated fully in Chinese culture but maintained very close ties to Central Asia. He knew many of the languages of the region and regularly returned to Dunhuang.

[6] Emil Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China (Leiden, 1972) 65–70.

In two of his translations into Chinese of canonical Indian texts, Zhu Fahu renders the name of the Huṇa people as “Xiongnu” (Taisho Tripitaka, 11.310, 3.186).[7] “Huṇa” was not a common word in any Indian language, and his two mentions of it are the oldest known. The name reappears later in inscriptions that designate invaders from the Northwest who attack India in the fifth century, and in literary texts such as the Mahābharata. In one of Zhu Fahu’s texts, the Tathāgataguhyasutrā, the Huṇa are cited in a list that identifies the major peoples of Asia and those neighboring India: the Saka (from Seistan), Parthians, Tokharians (from Bactria), Greeks, Kamboja (mountain people of the Hindu Kush), Khasa (mountain people of the Himalayas), Huṇa, Chinese, Dards (from the Upper Indus), and others. The rest of the list enumerates ever more imaginary peoples. The structure of this list is absolutely clear. It begins by cataloguing all the foreign peoples that the Indian authors whom Zhu Fahu was translating could name. At the end of the list, these groups are juxtaposed with others who were either imagined or who came from a far distant and semilegendary past. The Huṇa would not have been placed in the first part of the list if they were not a people with an ethnic and geographic reality on the order of the Parthians, Bactrians, Greeks, and Chinese. The text indicates that the Huṇa were among the great peoples at the time of the list’s original composition, which can be dated to the first century BCE or slightly thereafter. The list places the Huṇa among the political powers that bordered the Chinese in this period. Could they be the Xiongnu?

[7] See Sylvain Lévy, “Notes chinoises sur l’Inde, V: Quelques documents sur le bouddhisme indien dans l’Asie centrale,” Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 5 (1905) 253–305, esp. 289. See also Étienne de la Vaissière, “Huns et Xiongnu,” Central Asiatic Journal 49.1 (2005) 3–26, esp. 11–13.

As noted above, Zhu Fahu used the word “Xiongnu” to translate the term “Huṇa” into Chinese. This is not a vague, generic Chinese formulation. All the terms in the Indian text are rendered word for word, either by translation or transcription.[8] Zhu Fahu did not consider Huṇa a generic name; he could easily have placed them further down the list, among the semihistoric peoples. He also could have simply transcribed the name, as he did the name of the Dards, or eliminated it and replaced it by another, as he did with many names. On the contrary, the use of the name Huṇa in these texts has a precise political reference to the Xiongnu and the period when they were the great nomadic adversaries of China and the principalities of Central Asia. It was perfectly logical for the Indian writers to include them in their lists, and perfectly normal for Zhu Fahu to render the name as “Xiongnu.”

[8] Only the names exclusively connected to the Indian way of looking at things are replaced by others: just as the Pahlava are replaced by the Arsacid Parthians (Anxi), the Tukhara by the Yuezhi (the invaders of Bactria), the Yavana by the Greeks (Daqin, roughly eastern Roman Empire, in other words, the Hellenistic world), and the Chinese by the Qin.

The second text is a letter written by a Sogdian merchant named Nanaivande, who, like Zhu Fahu, came from the circle of Central Asian merchants who traded between China, the steppe, and India. The Sogdian traders came from Sogdiana, an Iranian-speaking land of settled peoples located between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, and were the main merchants on the Silk Road from the fourth to the ninth century.[9] The letter allows us to equate one name with another, as in Zhu Fahu’s text, though this time in reverse. In 1948, the Iranologist W. Henning published a copy of a letter dated to 313, which was sent by Nanaivande on the route from Gansu to Samarkand. This letter describes in apocalyptic terms the raids by Xwn (the accurate Sogdian transcription of what the western sources called Hun) on the main towns of northern China, ruining its economy and trade. Henning demonstrates beyond all possible doubt that the Xwn raiders from North China described in the letter were those that contemporary Chinese texts called Xiongnu, the very people who were at that time destroying the Qin dynasty.[10] We see, then, that around the year 300, “Xiongnu” was only the Chinese transcription of the name Hun used by the extremely well-informed members of the Central Asian mercantile communities who traveled the length and breadth of Asia.[11] “Hun/Xwn/Huṇa” were the exact transcriptions of the name that the Chinese, always eager to play on words and to condemn their great enemies from the North, had rendered as “Xiongnu,” “howling slaves.”

[9] Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (Leiden, 2005).
[10] Walter B. Henning, “The Date of the Sogdian Ancient Letters,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 12.3–4 (1948) 601–615. Nicholas Sims-Williams and Frantz Grenet, “The Historical Context of the Sogdian Ancient Letters,” in Transition Periods in Iranian History, ed. Philippe Gignoux (Paris 1987) 101–122; La Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, chap. 2.
[11] On these mercantile and monastic communities, see La Vaissière, Sogdian Traders, chap. 3.

All the contemporary sources agree that the Huns of Europe of the fourth and fifth centuries were called Huns by everyone who encountered them, and that they used this name to refer to themselves. Furthermore, the name Hun never changes among all the populations affected by the extremely rapid advance of the Huns, whether in Europe or South of the Caucasus, proving that it was the Huns themselves who diffused the name. If the contemporary sources are correct, the Huns of Europe arrived there bearing the name that the Chinese transcribed as “Xiongnu,” that is, “Hun.”

Huns and Xiongnu: Some Attempted Counterarguments

Only a reinterpretation of the use of the word “Xwn” by the Bactrian monk Zhu Fahu and the Sogdian merchant Nanaivande could sever the link between the Xiongnu and the Huns. Some commentators have tried to do so by invoking the accident of phonology[12], or the bad conservation of manuscripts.[13] Others have claimed that the word “Hun” was simply a generic term that had lost all precise meaning, because it was applied to so many tribes.[14] The examples of generic use that these scholars cite, however, all come from sources written after the great invasion and so obviously cannot be used to refute earlier texts. While it is true that the term “Hun” became generic after the fifth century, that does not mean that it was so before then. Only the Iranologist H. Bailey has proposed a coherent line of refutation of the thesis that there was a link between the Huns and the Xiongnu.[15] He advances the hypothesis that the Sogdian “Xwn” was a name for the Hyaona, who were an enemy people mentioned in the Avesta, the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism. Bailey’s idea is attractive, but lacks a philological basis. His thesis, nonetheless, was elaborated recently by S. Parlato.[16] According to her, the word had a literary, epic character, and was spread through the steppe by the bards from the Parthian empire. In the steppe world, she claims, the term was received with enthusiasm and served as a generic term for any nomadic and demonic enemy. In other words, it was not the Huns who migrated, but a generic name that spread across the steppe in the context of a culture that spoke Iranian languages.

[12] Paolo Daffinà, “Chih-chih Shan-Yü,” Rivista degli Studi Orientali 44.3 (1969) 199–232.
[13] Maenchen-Helfen, “Pseudo-Huns.”
[14] Denis Sinor, “The Hun Period,” in The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, ed. Denis Sinor (Cambridge, 1990) 177–205, here 179.
[15] Harold Bailey, “Harahuna,” in Asiatica: Festschrift Friedrich Weller (Leipzig, 1954) 12–21.
[16] Sandra Parlato, “Successo euroasiatico dell’etnico ‘Unni,’” in La Persia e l’Asia Centrale da Alessandro al X secolo (Rome, 1996) 555–566.

This hypothesis is not convincing, however. The steppe was not Zoroastrian, and it is hard to see how a secondary figure in the Avestic literature could have acquired such a presence. The theory overestimates the influence of these hypothetical Parthian minstrels wandering across the steppe in causing a name derived from Hyaona to be adopted from Asia to Europe. Moreover, if “Hun” was a generic term of Iranian origin, why would the Huns of Europe use it to refer to themselves? If one thing is clear, as Maenchen-Helfen showed years ago,[17] it is that the Huns did not speak Iranian languages. “Hun,” then, cannot be a generic Iranian term.

[17] Maenchen-Helfen, “The World of the Huns,” 376ff. and 443.

I have demonstrated thus far that the Huns who arrived in Europe from 370 onward called themselves by the name transcribed in Chinese as “Xiongnu.” Maenchen-Helfen cautioned against such reasoning on several occasions, because it relied entirely on the evidence of names to establish identity. He argued instead that only ethnographic and archaeological evidence should be taken into account. His thesis is unacceptable, however. The political implications of a name must never be ignored; otherwise, one would have to dismiss as negligible a good part of the history of political ideas. If the Rhomaioi of Byzantium could claim to be the political heirs of the Romans, then the Huns could equally claim to be the heirs of the Xiongnu. The steppe has the right to have political ideas and history, and we must not deny the Huns those important aspects of their identity.

In Central Asia

The Hunnic period of Central Asia’s history lasted until Turks achieved preeminence in the 560s, and the details of this period’s political history remain very confused. In this section, I argue against the long-held belief that there were three successive waves of Huns in Central Asia, that of the Chionites in the 350s, the Kidarites in either the 370s or much more probably the 420s,[18] and the Hephthalites, whom Procopius calls the White Huns, around 450 (Proc. 1.3.2–8). Instead, Chinese textual evidence shows that these groups had in fact been in Central Asia from the beginning of the great Hunnic invasions of the fourth century, and that some of them had stayed there for a generation before they crossed the Volga, while others stayed for a while to the North of the Caspian Sea. I will consider each group in turn.

[18] Pace Joe Cribb, “The Kidarites, the Numismatic Evidence,” in Coins, Art and Chronology, vol. 2: The First Millennium CE in the Indo-Iranian Borderlands, ed. Michael Alram (Vienna, 2010) 91–146.

The Chionites. In the 350s, the great Persian king Shapur II (r. 309–379) probably fought invading nomads at the Amu Darya river, which marked the Northeast frontier of the Sasanian empire. That, at least, is what is implied by Ammianus Marcellinus, who was always attentive to the whereabouts of the Persian king of kings. At the same time, the dynasty of Kushanshah, a vassal of the Sasanids based in the territory of modern-day Afghanistan, came to an abrupt end. In 356, Ammianus gave the name Chionites to these eastern enemies of the Persians. In 359, however, after the Chionites had changed sides and made a new arrangement with the Persians, Shapur brought a force of them under the command of their king Grumbates to the siege of Amida, modern-day Diyarbakir (Amm. 16.9, 17.5, 18.6, 19.1).

The name “Chionites” is an Iranian plural form (with final -t) of “Hyon,” a deformation of “Xwn” influenced by the name “Hyaona” mentioned earlier. In a similar manner, western writers in medieval times gave the name “Tartars” to the Tatars, the dominant element in the armies of the Mongol Empire, confusing them with the name of the ancient river of Hell from which they seemed to have emerged.

Chinese sources confirm the identification of Chionite and Hun. The dynastic histories, and especially the history of the northern Wei, called the Weishu, are the key to understanding what went on in Inner Asia in the middle of the fourth century. The northern Wei, who were themselves of nomadic origin, took special interest in Mongolia and Central Asia. Although the original chapter of the Weishu devoted to the Western neighbors of China was lost and later reconstituted from various quotations in Chinese historical literature by imperial scholars, some additional data from the original Weishu have been preserved in other works, especially an encyclopedia published in 801, the Tongdian. The Weishu mentions the conquest of Samarkand by the Xiongnu three generations before 457, which – if we use the traditional Chinese calculation of thirty years to a generation – places this conquest around 367, the same time that the Persians were fighting the Chionites (Weishu, 102.2270).

The Armenian historian Faustus of Byzantium tells us that Shapur II renewed the fighting against Chionite Huns on the eastern front in 368, using Armenian troops, and that he was strenuously attacked on several occasions by a “king of the Kushans” who reigned over the Bactrians (Faustus 5.7, 5.37).[19] Another Armenian text mentions the combat of the Armenian prince Babik of Syunik, sent by Shapur very probably also into Central Asia against a Hun called Honagur.[20]

[19] Translated in Nina Garsoïan, The Epic Histories Attributed to P’awstos Buzand (Buzandaran Patmut’iwnk) (Cambridge, Mass., 1989) 187–198 and 217–218.
[20] Movsês Daskhurants’i (or Kałankatvats’i), in The History of the Caucasian Albanians by Movses Dasxuranci, trans. Charles J. F. Dowsett (Oxford, 1961) 63–64; also Stephannos Orbelian, trans. in Marie-Félicité Brosset, Histoire de la Siounie par Stephannos Orbelian (St. Petersburg, 1864–1866) 24–25.

The Kidarites: While some numismatists would like to place them in the 370s,[21] it is very clear from the combination of the Chinese and classical sources that the Kidarites were the dominant nomadic dynasty in Central Asia from the 420s to the 470s.[22] Even while maintaining their Hunnic identity, the Kidarites engaged and promoted the local past of the sedentary people they ruled, and they built cities on the Hippodamian grid plan in their empire. They also revived the title of king of the Kushans, assuming it for themselves.[23] We find this title on a seal bearing the inscription “King of the Oghlar Huns, king of the Kushans, prince of Samarkand”[24] that was made some decades after their installation in Central Asia.

[21] Most recently Cribb, “The Kidarites.”
[22] Kazuo Enoki, “On the Date of the Kidarites (I),” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 27 (1969) 1–26.
[23] Frantz Grenet, “Regional Interaction in Central Asia and North-West India in the Kidarite and Hephtalite Period,” in Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples, ed. Nicholas Sims-Williams (London, 2002) 203–224.
[24] Ahmad ur Rahman, Frantz Grenet, and Nicholas Sims-Williams, “A Hunnish Kushan-Shah,” Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology 1 (2006) 125–131, here 128.

The Hephthalites: The Tongdian also tells us that another group of Huns, the Hephthalites, arrived from the Altai Range sometime after the year 360.[25] They were destined to play an important role in the political history of Central Asia between 450 and 560. The Hephthalites and their subordinate confederation of tribes seem to have been more oriented to the nomadic world than the Kidarites. At least until the 520s, the Hephthalites continued to live as nomads in the high plateaus of what is now Northwest Afghanistan. The Alkhon tribes, who dominated the southern wing of the Hephthalite confederation, lived mostly in southern Afghanistan and in Northwest India. They issued coins showing their leaders with cranial deformation, their skulls elongated into a dome shape, presumably to distinguish themselves from other local peoples.[26] It is possible that the name Alkhon, if one accepts “Al-” as the Turkic for scarlet, means “the red Huns,” those of the South, as opposed to the White Huns of the East (the Hephthalites), in a geographic scheme of colors native to the world of the steppe.

[25] Étienne de la Vaissière, “Is There Any ‘Nationality of the Ephthalites’?,” in Hephthalites, ed. Madhuvanti Ghose and Étienne de la Vaissière, Bulletin of the Asia Institute 17 (2007) 119–137.
[26] On the Alkhon, see Klaus Vondrovec, The Coinage of the Iranians Huns and Their Successors from Bactria to Gandhara (4th to 8th Century CE), Studies in the Aman ur Rahman Collection, vol. 4, Vienna, forthcoming.

Thus, we see on the basis of the Tongdian and other materials that the Hephthalites, far from being a new wave of nomads, had been one of several groups of Huns that had been in Central Asia from the middle of the fourth century at the beginning of the great invasions. There are, therefore, no grounds for arguing in terms of successive waves; what we have are dynasties or tribal groupings coming to power in succession among the nomads who arrived in Central Asia during the second half of the fourth century. There was just one massive single episode of migration in the years 350–370, perhaps followed by some more limited movement during the fluid circumstances of the following decades.[27]

[27] La Vaissière, “Is There Any Nationality?”

Between Central Asia and Europe

Our sources locate these different groups (Chionites, Kidarites, Hephthalites, and others) in Central Asia, but say almost nothing about the connections that the Huns may have retained with the steppe, North of sedentary Central Asia, in modern Kazakhstan, or with the Huns of Europe. The Kidarites are mentioned unreliably by Priscus as being on the eastern shore of the Caspian around 468 (Prisc. 51). Moreover, nothing is known of the northern reach of the Hephthalite empire. That it included Sogdiana, between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, is certain, but we do not know if the empire controlled the nomadic groups of present-day Kazakhstan. One trace of a northern connection dates reliably to the years 440–460 and shows that the Hephthalites were originally subjects of a power from the North, probably the Avars. We learn this from Chinese texts that mention an incursion into Central Asia made by the Rourans, the dominant power of Mongolia in the fifth century and the early sixth, where they fought against Kidarites and subjected the Hephthalites (Weishu, 102.2275, 2277; Beishi, 97.3210; Liangshu, 54.812). An Armenian geographer refers to this same episode when he mentions the Hephthalites, the Warkhons, and the Alkhons not far from the Zeravshan River, on which the Sogdian capital Samarkand was situated. If the Alkhons lived further to the South in Afghanistan, the Warkhons are very probably the Rourans – the “Avars” of later sources. Byzantine writers of the second half of the sixth century call them Ouarchonitai or Varchonites (Menander 19.1).

Another piece of evidence from the same period makes a connection between Central Asia and the Pontic steppe. In 463, after the disintegration of Attila’s empire, new tribal groups began to appear in the steppes. One of these groups passed through Central Asia. The fifth-century historian Priscus (Prisc. 40) writes: “At this time, the Saragurs, Urogs and the Onogurs sent envoys to the eastern Romans. These tribes had left their native lands when the Sabiri attacked them. The latter had been driven out by the Avars who had in turn been displaced by the tribes who lived by the shore of the Ocean.” Theophylact Simocatta, the early seventh-century Byzantine historian, mentions an Onogur city named Bakath, which was destroyed by an earthquake. Since Bakath is a Sogdian name, we may infer that the Onogurs had spent some time in Central Asia.

The different groups of Huns were firmly based in Central Asia at the middle of the fourth century. Thus, they bring a unity of time and place to the question of the origins of the Huns of Europe. To summarize my argument so far, I have demonstrated that around 350, a group bearing the name Huns was active in the Kazakh steppe, some of whom moved South and others West, and that a Chinese text precisely ascribes to the Altai the origin of the migration of some of these tribes.

In the Altai Mountains and the Minusinsk Basin: The Question of Cauldrons

We have seen that one Chinese source on Central Asia, the Tongdian, wrote that among those making the great migration of the 350s, the Hephthalites at least originated in the Altai region. It is, thus, logical to search in that region to see if these Chinese texts can be confirmed by archaeology or other texts.

The archaeological evidence from Central Asia is woefully meager. Hunnic cemeteries are poorly known,[28] and very little other material survives. Given the current state of knowledge, the Weishu text can neither be confirmed nor invalidated. The archaeological aspect of Hunnic/Xiongnu settlement in Central Asia is simply missing.[29]

[28] See, however, Daniel Schlumberger, “La nécropole de Shakh tépé près de Qunduz,” Comptes-rendus des séances de l’année: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 108.2 (1964) 207–211.
[29] On Xiongnu archaeology, see most recently Ursula Brosseder and Bryan K. Miller, eds., Xiongnu Archaeology: Multidisciplinary Perspectives of the First Steppe Empire in Inner Asia (Bonn, 2011).

The archaeological evidence for the Huns of Europe is quite different, however, and permits us to draw important inferences about their origin in East Asia. The chief evidence comes from the cauldrons that the Huns may have used for cooking, ritual purposes, or both. People of the steppe had used cauldrons since much earlier times, but the Hunnic vessels are quite distinctive, constituting a true archaeological marker.[30] They are bell-shaped and crudely made, with squared handles surmounted by ornaments in the shape of mushrooms. This evidence shows clear links to Inner Asia (that is the Altai Mountains, Mongolia, southern Siberia, and the northern part of China). A concentration of similar cauldrons occurs on the northern flank of the Altai Mountains and the Minusinsk Basin (map 2). In the Minusinsk region, furthermore, there are petroglyphs depicting the cauldrons, with the same protuberances on the handles, though these are rounded not squared. In Hungary as well as Asia, these cauldrons were buried near springs or rivers, indicating a continuity of ritual and culture from the Minusinsk region to Hungary.[31]

[30] Toshio Hayashi, “Hunnic Cauldrons,” in Studies on Ancient Cauldrons: Cultic or Daily Vessels in the Eurasian Steppes (Tokyo, 2011) 341–382.
[31] Erdy, “An Overview.”

In the absence of a complete typology of the evolution of the cauldrons’ forms and their archaeological contexts, however, these observations must remain inconclusive albeit extremely suggestive. When the archaeological evidence is augmented by textual material to which we now turn, the case becomes virtually certain. This archaeological evidence, supported by the text that has the Hephthalites coming from the Altai, indicates a North Altaic provenance of the Hunnic groups who invaded Central Asia and Europe from 350 onward.

The Text of the Weishu

One other passage in the Weishu mentions that at the beginning of the fifth century, “remains of the descendants of the Xiongnu” (Weishu, 103.2290) were to be found far Northwest of the Rouran, that is, in the area of the Altai. The quality of this information is beyond question. The Weishu is very parsimonious in its use of the term “Xiongnu,” and these Xiongnu are the only ones in a list of neighbors of the Rouran. There are about forty occurrences of the term “Xiongnu” in the text, the greatest number of which are related to the Xiongnu of the South who settled in China, or to rhetorical comparisons with the Han Chinese. Mentions of contemporary Xiongnu still in the Altai as opposed to those in China are extremely rare. In chapters 102 and 103, which are dedicated to the countries of the West and North, that is the whole of the Xiongnu Empire, there are only three mentions in all. One is the text cited above; the second is found in the famous passage on the conquest of Samarkand by the Xiongnu (Weishu, 102.2270); and the third describes the struggles between a Kidarite king in Bactria and the Xiongnu (Weishu, 102.2277).[32] The fact that the Weishu mentions “remains of the descendants of the Xiongnu” is an extremely important piece of information. It had been argued that the Xiongnu identity totally disappeared in Inner Asia after their defeat of the second century, so that the European Huns could not have come from these regions, but this passage of the Weishu proves that this argument is false. The Xiongnu did indeed survive to the far North, albeit beyond the range of vision of the Chinese sources. That they did not form an empire, and were no more than weakened descendants of the ancient Xiongnu matters little; they had conserved their tribal identity.

[32] In this case, the Xiongnu here are probably the Warkhon mentioned in the Armenian geographical treatise, that is the Rouran/Avars, who incorporated the Xiongnu into their confederation.

We see, then, that three facts (the genetic connection between the cauldrons, the texts on the Hephthalites, and the text on descendants of the Xiongnu) all point to the Altai region as the starting point of the Huns’ migration to Central Asia and to the West starting in the middle of the fourth century. This conclusion is supported by some entirely independent scientific data that shows that during this period the Altai was the place of dramatic climatic change.

The Climate Hypothesis

Recently published findings regarding accumulations of pollen in the lakes of the Altai Range tell of a sharp drop in temperatures combined with a rise in humidity that lasted from the middle of the fourth century through the sixth, causing significant change in the vegetation. Likewise, from 340, glaciers advanced in the valleys.[33] The accumulated snow destroyed herds of the high plateaux; although the Mongolian horse is able to dig through the snow to feed, this capacity is strictly limited by the depth of the snow cover, and contemporary ethnography has shown the enormous impact that prolonged winters and their blizzards can have on herds of horses – eight million horses, 20 percent of the stock, died for this reason in Mongolia in the winter of 2010. Chinese sources report Hun invasions from the Altai happening exactly in the middle of the fourth century, without giving any reason for their incursions. For a long time scholars specializing in nomad studies have postulated a major climatic event as the explanation of the size of the Hun migrations. We now see that such an event is well supported by rigorous paleoclimatological studies conducted quite independently of the work of historians. Quite plausibly, additional factors contributed to the destabilization of Hun societies in the Altai region, but little is known of them. The North slope of the Altai was beyond the reach of knowledge for the Chinese observers, the only exception being the Weishu text mentioned above.

[33] Frank Schlütz and Frank Lehmkuhl, “Climatic Change in the Russian Altai, Southern Siberia, Based on Palynological and Geomorphological Results, with Implications for Climatic Teleconnections and Human History since the Middle Holocene,” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 16 (2007) 101–118.

We know, meanwhile, that the Rouran/Avar kaghanate became active in the fourth century, even if its power only truly began to develop at the end of that century. We may interpret the passage from Priscus quoted above as a brief summary of the history of Inner Asia in the fourth century: the Sabiri could be the Xianbei (from Chinese characters pronounced *Sarbi at the time), chased out of Mongolia by the developing power of the Rouran/Avars, and chasing in their turn the tribes further West.[34] In this case, the Hunnic groups cited by Priscus (Saraguri, Urogi, and Onoguri) paused in the Kazakh steppe before moving further westward in the middle of the fifth century.

[34] An idea already put forward by Omelian Pritsak, “From the Säbirs to the Hungarians,” in Hungaro-Turcica: Studies in Honour of Julius Németh, ed. Gyula Káldy-Nagy (Budapest, 1976) 22 and 28–30. Many thanks to Peter Golden for this reference.

It is, thus, likely that we can recapitulate the historical trajectory of the Huns in the same way. The Huns were a confederation of peoples fleeing from their ancestral homeland, whose incursions into the West would disrupt the old patterns of the distribution of the nomadic tribes throughout the entire Kazakh steppe, creating a new nomadic landscape under the leadership of the Hunnic tribes. They left the North Altai in a context of major climatic change that caused distress among local societies and which undoubtedly would have had political consequences of which we have not even the most basic knowledge. Absorbing other tribal groups that they encountered along the way, the Huns bore down on the Kazakh steppe in the mid-fourth century. While one part of them, Chionites, Kidarites, Oghlar, Hephthalites, and Alkhon, established themselves in Sogdiana and Bactriana, other groups followed a route to the West and reached the Volga. Still others perhaps, remained in the steppe and did not reach the West until the middle of the fifth century. The admittedly tenuous evidence permits us to conclude that throughout this migration from the Altai to Europe they carried the old name of the most prestigious empires of the eastern steppe, the empire that the Chinese called Xiongnu.

The Huns and the Shattered Empire

The problem, then, has shifted from the relationship of the Huns and the Xiongnu in the fourth century to the relationship of the fourth-century Xiongnu to the second-century Xiongnu. We possess a coherent set of independent textual and archaeological set of proofs for the fact that the Huns came from Inner Asia and bore the name transcribed by the Chinese as “Xiongnu.” Whether they were the direct descendants of the Xiongnu of antiquity, as they claimed, is another question that historians have barely touched upon. What was the relationship between these fourth-century Xiongnu/Huns North of the Altai to the Xiongnu/Hun empire of antiquity? They called themselves Xiongnu/Huns, and that is how they were known by their neighbors in the Altai; it must be stressed that the extreme paucity of documentation does not allow us to go much beyond this. Very little information is available on the tribal reorganizations of Inner Asia after the final defeat of the Xiongnu/Huns in 155 by the Xianbei. The Xianbei, who were for over a century the dominant group on the steppe, are known to have incorporated Xiongnu/Huns into their ranks.[35] Likewise, the dominant power from the fourth century onward, the Rouran, justifiably bore a double name in the Byzantine sources as we have seen; they were the Varkhon, that is, the Avar Huns. Apparently, the break-up of the Xiongnu empire led to the inclusion of its tribal groups in the multiple political entities that succeeded them in the region. The Rouran khaganate was such an entity, associating Xiongnu/Hun tribes with War/Avar tribes. The name Xiongnu had not become generic in Inner Asia in the third or fourth century but in this case belongs to this specific historical moment. It is not surprising that some groups refused to be included in the larger groupings, but kept the name Xiongnu for themselves. We do not yet know how these Xiongnu established themselves and maintained their identity in a zone of settlement on the North slopes of Altai and in the Minusinsk Basin, that is to say, quite far to the Northwest of what had been the heart of their ancient empire. These are understudied historical questions. Only careful research into the archaeology of the two centuries of history on the Mongolian steppe that separated the end of the Xiongnu Empire and the Hun migration will be able to show how this happened.

[35] Peter Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (Wiesbaden, 1992) 69ff.

A Three-Stage History

Some clans or tribes of actual Xiongnu origin politically dominated the Huns of Europe – Attila’s Huns – but they had long been chased from the Xiongnu homeland in Mongolia and the Ordos region to the Northwest, to the Altai region. It is only this point of separation in time – these “missing” two centuries – that prevents us from identifying them directly with the imperial Xiongnu of an earlier era. We must conceptualize a history in three stages: first there were the imperial Xiongnu, whose empire ended in the second century; next, we must distinguish these imperial Xiongnu from their northern descendants, who were based in the secondary core of the Altai Mountains and the Minusinsk Basin in the fourth century; third, we must in turn distinguish these northern Xiongnu from the groupings that resulted from the migration from there and established themselves in Central Asia and in the West. Despite all of the internal cultural developments and recombination of tribes and peoples implicit in this movement, we can be certain of political and to some extent cultural continuity among the Xiongnu-Huns.