The Huns and the Xiongnu were the same ethnic and political group
the verdict
CONTESTED
contested - evenly split
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
5 sources for · 3 against
Scholarly opinion is sharply divided regarding whether the Huns and the Xiongnu were the same ethnic and political group. Some historians and genetic studies argue for a direct political and ancestral continuity, while others emphasize a lack of decisive historical and genetic evidence connecting the two groups.
The Avars settled the Carpathian Basin in 567/68 CE, establishing an empire lasting over 200 years. Who they were and where they came from is highly debated. Contemporaries have disagreed about whether they were, as they claimed, the direct successors of the Mongolian Steppe Rouran empire that was destroyed by the Turks in ∼550 CE. Here, we analyze new genome-wide data from 66 pre-Avar and Avar-period Carpathian Basin individuals, including the 8 richest Avar-period burials and further elite sites from Avar's empire core region. Our results provide support for a rapid long-distance trans-Eurasian migration of Avar-period elites. These individuals carried Northeast Asian ancestry matching the profile of preceding Mongolian Steppe populations, particularly a genome available from the Rouran period. Some of the later elite individuals carried an additional non-local ancestry component broadly matching the steppe, which could point to a later migration or reflect greater genetic diversity within the initial migrant population.
The origin of the Xiongnu and the Rourans, the nomadic groups that dominated the eastern Eurasian steppe in the late first millennium BC/early first millennium AD, is one of the most controversial topics in the early history of Inner Asia. As debatable is the evidence linking these two groups with the steppe nomads of early medieval Europe, <i>i.e.</i> the Huns and the Avars, respectively. In this paper, we address the problems of Xiongnu-Hun and Rouran-Avar connections from an interdisciplinary perspective, complementing current archaeological and historical research with a critical analysis of the available evidence from historical linguistics and population genetics. Both lines of research suggest a mixed origin of the Xiongnu population, consisting of eastern and western Eurasian substrata, and emphasize the lack of unambiguous evidence for a continuity between the Xiongnu and the European Huns. In parallel, both disciplines suggest that at least some of the European Avars were of Eastern Asian ancestry, but neither linguistic nor genetic evidence provides a sufficient support for a specific connection between the Avars and the Asian Rourans.
Hun, Avar and conquering Hungarian nomadic groups arrived to the Carpathian Basin from the Eurasian Steppes and significantly influenced its political and ethnical landscape, however their origin remains largely unknown. In order to shed light on the genetic affinity of above groups we have determined Y chromosomal haplogroups and autosomal loci, suitable to predict biogeographic ancestry, from 49 individuals, supposed to represent the power/military elit. Haplogroups from the Hun-age are consistent with Xiongnu ancestry of European Huns. Most of the Avar-age individuals carry east Eurasian Y haplogroups typical for modern north-eastern Siberian and Buryat populations and their autosomal loci indicate mostly un-admixed Asian characteristics. In contrast the conquering Hungarians seem to be a recently assembled population incorporating un-admixed European, Asian as well as admixed components. Their heterogeneous paternal and maternal lineages indicate similar supposed phylogeographic origin of males and females, derived from Central-Inner Asian and European Pontic Steppe sources.
and that the various "Iranian Huns" were similarly identified with the Xiongnu. Kim believes that the term Hun was "not primarily an ethnic group, but a
The Huns were a nomadic people who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe between the 4th and 6th centuries CE. According to European tradition, they were first reported living east of the Volga River, in an area that was part of Scythia at the time. By 370 CE, the Huns had arrived on the Volga, causing the westwards movement of Goths and Alans. By 430, they had established a vast
Today, there is "no general consensus" and "scholarship is divided" on the issue of a Hun–Xiongnu connection. Recent supporters of a connection between the Huns and Xiongnu include Hyun Jin Kim and Etienne de la Vaissière. De la Vaissière argues that ancient Chinese and Indian sources used Xiongnu and Hun to translate each other, and that the various "Iranian Huns" were similarly identified with the Xiongnu. Kim believes that the term Hun was "not primarily an ethnic group, but a political category" and argues for a fundamental political and cultural continuity between the Xiongnu and the European Huns, as well as between the Xiongnu and the "Iranian Huns".
... The Huns are beyond doubt the political and ethnic inheritors of the old Xiongnu empire'22 on both linguistic grounds and the evidence of their distinctive cauldrons, while on the other hand Ursula Brosseder rejects the link between the ...
A geographical area, not a political entity, the steppe connects the western and eastern parts of the Eurasian land mass. As such, it is always open, subject to constant movement between Asia and Europe. Warwick Ball tells the story of that movement from prehistory to the present. From nomadic peoples to conquering empires, from tales of Amazon women to art nouveau, and from golden grave goods to the formation of countries that still exist today, Ball shows how the steppe has continually shaped Europe's destiny. Ultimately, he shows that the steppe and the movement of peoples across it are so crucial that they question the very idea of 'Europe' as a separate cultural and historical construct.
In the last year two publications shed new light on the linguistic and genomic history of ancient Uralic speakers. Here I show that these novel genetic and linguistic data are compatible with each-other and with the archaeological inferences, allowing us to formulate a very plausible hypothesis about the prehistory of Ugric speakers. Both genetic and archaeological data indicate the admixture of the Mezhovskaya population with northern forest hunters in the late Bronze Age, which gave rise to a "proto-Ugric" community. This finding is consistent with the linguistic reconstruction of the proto-Ugric language. Genetic data indicate an admixture of proto-Hungarians with early Sarmatians and early Huns, and I show that the first admixture can be reconciled with the formation of the Gorokhovo culture and its integration into the early Sarmatian Prokhorovka culture, while the second admixture corresponds to the transformation of the Sargat and Sarmatian cultures due to Xiongnu invasions.
The Huns appeared in Europe in the 370s, establishing an Empire that reshaped West Eurasian history. Yet until today their origins remain a matter of extensive debate. Traditional theories link them to the Xiongnu, the founders of the first nomadic empire of the Mongolian steppe. The Xiongnu empire dissolved, however, ~300 y before the Huns appeared in Europe, and there is little archaeological and historical evidence of Huns in the steppe during this time gap. Furthermore, despite the rich 5th to 6th centuries current era (CE) archaeological record of the Carpathian Basin, the cultural elements of connections with the steppe are limited to few findings and even fewer solitary eastern-type burials. In this study, we coanalyze archaeological evidence with 35 newly sequenced and published genomic data for a total of 370 individuals-from 5th to 6th century CE contexts in the Carpathian Basin including 10 Hun-period eastern-type burials, 2nd to 5th century sites across Central Asia and 2nd c. before current era (BCE) to 1st c. CE Xiongnu period sites across the Mongolian steppe. We find no evidence for the presence of a large eastern/steppe descent community among the Hun- and post-Hun-period Carpathian Basin population. We also observe a high genetic diversity among the eastern-type burials that recapitulates the variability observed across the Eurasian Steppe. This suggests a mixed origin of the incoming steppe conquerors. Nevertheless, long-shared genomic tracts provide compelling evidence of genetic lineages directly connecting some individuals of the highest Xiongnu-period elite with 5th to 6th century CE Carpathian Basin individuals, showing that some European Huns descended from them.
linguistic, or ethnic connection between the Xiongnu and the Huns: instead, it was the manner of political organisation that made both "Huns". The equation
The origin of the Huns and their relationship to other peoples identified in ancient sources as Iranian Huns such as the Xionites, the Alchon Huns, the Kidarites, the Hephthalites, the Nezaks, and the Huna, has been the subject of long-term scholarly controversy. Ancient Greek and Roman sources do not provide any information on where the European Huns came from, besides that they suddenly appeared
Joseph de Guignes (1757) first proposed a connection between the European Huns and the Xiongnu on basis of the similarity between the nomadic lifestyles of both peoples and the similarity of their names. In making this equation, de Guignes was not interested in establishing any sort of cultural, linguistic, or ethnic connection between the Xiongnu and the Huns: instead, it was the manner of political organisation that made both "Huns". The equation was then popularized by its acceptance by Edward Gibbon in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789). David Curtis Wright derives the commonly repeated myth that the Great Wall of China was built to repel the Xiongnu from a passage in Gibbon. Gibbon argued, from his reading of de Guignes, that the Iranian ("White") and European Huns derived from two distinct divisions of the Xiongnu that survived the destruction of their regime near China proper. After Gibbon, this thesis quickly became widely accepted among various historians of the Huns.
In the nineteenth century, the question was mostly debated by linguists who sought to relate the name and language of the Xiongnu or Huns to one another. Because language was closely associated with ethnicity to nineteenth-century scholars, it became necessary to prove both the physical descent of the Huns from the Xiongnu and that they had shared the same language. While the theory of Xiongnu origins remained popular, a number of scholars raised objections because they believed that the Huns spoke a…
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