Dan Snow's History Hit - The Xiongnu: History's First Nomadic Empire?

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD, the Xiongnu inhabited the area surrounding Mongolia. They influenced the later Hun Empire, and had connections with Ancient China and Persia, but what do we know about them? Bryan Miller has been investigating the society, hierarchy and expansion of the Xiongnu, and in this episode from our sibling podcast The Ancients he shares his findings from the archaeology and historical documents with Tristan. You can listen to the full episode here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History It. It's that time when, once a fortnight, we give over an episode of this podcast to our sibling podcast, The Ancients. The hit podcast hosted by the brilliant Tristan Hughes, in which he looks at ancient history. Not just your Mediterranean basin here, folks. It's not all the Battle of Cannae here. It's not all Hannibal crossing the Alps. It's not all Cicero, anyway. It's not all the Battle of Cannae here. It's not all Hannibal crossing the Alps. It's not all Cicero anyway. It's also ancient civilizations stretching from Mesoamerica to the warm waters of the South China Sea, or in this case, the marginally colder, in fact, very much colder waters of the Yellow Sea. This is a... Do you know what? This is what I love about history. I've never heard of the subjects this episode. That's the reason I wanted it on my feed.

about history. I've never heard of the subjects this episode. That's the reason I wanted it on my feed. This is a podcast about the Chongnu, history's first nomadic empire, between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD. As China was forming to the south, the Chongnu inhabited an area that roughly corresponds to Mongolia. They are critical in the later movement of the Huns to the west, and the oft-lamented effect that had on the Roman Empire of the West but they also had huge connections with ancient China and Persia we're all global historians now everybody everyone's global historians and the ancients is a symptom of that fascination come for Julius Caesar stay for the Chongnu that should be the new tagline of the ancients if If you enjoy this episode, well, two things you've got to do. One is this is actually the

first half of a monster episode. So please go and check out the second half. You want to hear more about the leadership, the role of women, the demise of the empire. That continues wherever you get your podcasts on the ancients feed, just Google the ancients. But if you wish to listen to other podcasts, and if you wish to get involved in little history hit check our tv channel historyhit.tv it's like netflix but it's all history no messing around with other things that aren't very interesting this is all history this is the place where you need to be head over to historyhit.tv for a small subscription you enter a world where true history fans can drink their fill of the good stuff. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy this episode with the brilliant Tristan

talking about the Xiongnu Empire. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. Now, this is an amazing topic, the Xiongnu. Well, first of all, can we say that they are ancestors of the Mongols? And is this the first nomadic empire that we know of? As far as what is the first nomadic empire, I would say yes, without getting into long discussions of what is an empire, what is not an empire.

The real issue of what empires are, is they're political beasts that spread across multiple economies, multiple cultures, multiple regions, and really bring it into one unified system, economic system, political system, social system, to varying degrees. And what we see the Xiongnu regime doing is just that. And the other issue of an empire is it is centrally controlled. There is like a small group of people of lineage groups of clans that are kind of control of everything that's happening. So in that regard, yes, it is an empire. And could we say that they are the predecessors of Genghis Khan and the Mongols that we know so well from the Middle Ages? In a very long drawn out fashion, yes, I would say definitely. A lot of the things that they're doing in the Xiongnu period are definitely the early

experiments and things that pick up and pick up speed. I mean, there are a lot of regimes in between the Xiongnu and the Mongols, clearly, you have the Turks and the Uyghurs and other people. But each time they sort of pick up on the traditions of what was started in the Xiongnu, and they definitely have a memory. They have a very strong political memory of there was a regime a long time ago. Let's return to that, which again, we see the world over. You go from the Rome-based empire to the Holy Roman Empire. There is a memory of that kind of thing going on. Amazing. Well, let's dive into it. First, a bit of background. I want to talk about our sources, first of all, for the Xiongnu and their literary sources in particular. I mean,

what literary sources do we have for the Xiongnu? There's basically two major categories of literary sources, and these are all being written by the Chinese. That should be said outright. There are beginnings of some symbols that later on lead to a full-blown writing system, but not quite at the time of the Xiongnu. And so what the Chinese are creating, the vast majority of what we have and what people have looked at for reconstructing the history of the Xiongnu are these documents and formal like histories, encyclopedic histories made at the court of the Chinese empire. The famous Sima Qian and his records and all these other things, debates at court that happened. So there's a whole genre of that. And these are texts that

are inherited over time, but have been altered and commentaries are added to them as we go. But then there's a whole other genre of historical records that is what people have called the excavated texts or the unearthed documents. And the vast majority of those are coming from these frontier garrisons that the Chinese erected. And these are also just as interesting. And there's plenty of scholarship that has looked at what are these things saying the narrative at court isn't saying. One of the most famous findings by a historian is that the word Xiongnu is really not the name of an ethnic group or a people, it's the name of a dynasty. And so as far as like what these people were called, they were called Hu. And so all these documents at the frontier that the Chinese were writing talk about, oh,

the Hu people are coming down and raiding us. And only when they write to the court, the Chinese court, did they say, yes, yes, the Xiongnu, they have to give the informal dynastic name. And so there's all these interesting differences that we can look at. So that really the traditional sources that people have put a lot of emphasis on and have translated is more about the Chinese, Mongolian, or Han and Xiongnu court-to-court relations, border-to-border issues, imperial army-to-imperial army kind of issues, rather than the kind of really detailed introspection that we get from the frontier documents, talking about small raiding parties, talking about trading caravans coming from the steppe down to trade at border markets and even go beyond the walls into other areas. We can see that they're

bringing felts to trade for Chinese silk, a lot of really interesting details. And so in that regard, the historical sources are still of great value and can add a lot to the discussion. Well, you mentioned the archaeology just there. How is the archaeology and yourself, you've done lots of work on this. How is the archaeology helping us to determine, let's say, evaluating the literary sources that we have available? The interesting part about archaeology is part of it is the source itself, the material, but a lot of it has to do with how you approach that material. Even in the case of archaeology of the Xiongnu, it began in the end of the 1800s, early 1900s,

with the Soviet investigations, the same way that a lot of people approach the text. It was all about the big tombs, the lavish goods, the rulers of this empire, without any real understanding of what was happening, how the empire was structured, what was happening at the lower levels. And so as archaeology went on over time, there were more sites discovered looking not just at the big royal tombs, and as real scientific method archaeology in the field and in the lab had progressed, we've got a much better understanding of all the levels of society, the intricacies of the economy. And so in that regard, I think the material record and the way we have approached it and have changed the way we approach it is really what's adding to the picture.

I mean, does it feel as if the literary sources that we have surviving, whether it's from the Chinese court or even from the frontiers, does it feel more as if this is an outside view looking in at the Xiongnu and the archaeology we're looking at the Xiongnu from within its own territory. In most ways, yes. I mean, there is Eric Wolfe's famous book about the people without history and trying to say, well, what do they actually think? And in that regard, the Xiongnu aren't making their own records. So there is a lot, but there's plenty of work even on the other side of Eurasia when people have been looking at Herodotus and how he wrote about the Scythians and trying to understand what's the valuable information in those documents. If we can understand the lens through which Herodotus and other so-called Greeks were looking through

to try and understand the Scythian phenomenon and all the different groups that went under that broad term Scythian, then we can maybe pull out some of the details. And I think some of the value of the texts can be just as the way we've looked at material records, archaeological records. We get a lot more depending on the methods and the questions we ask. I think the same thing can be argued for the texts. For instance, there's a nice neat paragraph about the whole structure of the Xiongnu Empire. And it is the emperor, these are the high kings, these are the middle kings, these are the lowly kings. And it's a nice, neat paragraph. And people just sort of took that as face value. But when I went to the text wondering about what about the lower levels, these like very underlying political substrata, the kinds of things that

we were looking at when my colleagues and I were going to the field and excavating small local elite cemeteries. Just by the question I was asking, I started to find little bits of data scattered everywhere that once you collect it together, you see this representation of a whole category that actually is called out as a category of name kings. In other words, lowly kings, and they use that word because the Chinese didn't know what else to call them. They had to use their own words for ranks and such but they all have names which means that they are of established lineages so you can see that these kind of name kings and other lineages that aren't the royal imperial ones are around and have a certain degree of power and once you see that existence that's the thing that comes back to haunt the Xiongnu

empire. And about halfway through this massive civil war that explodes is actually not because the Chinese went to war with the Xiongnu and they brought the Xiongnu to its knees. Decades after the war with the Han have subsided, that's when this interior problem comes out. These little local lineages and regional powers start to rise up and claim the empire for themselves. Well, we'll definitely get onto those internal problems as this podcast goes on. But first of all, of course, we're talking about the Xiongnu Empire, but just talking about the Xiongnu just before it becomes an empire, as it were, I mean, what do we know from the early archaeology about the Xiongnu? And what do we know about

Xiongnu society at that time? Before the formal empire emerges around 200 BC, there's a lot going on in the Eurasian steppe and in Inner Asia. And by Inner Asia, I mean, from the Altai Mountains, the eastern end of the steppe, as we would call it. There's lots of things happening in the so-called Scythian era about tiny little kingdoms rising up. Even in the Altai Mountains, the famous kingdom of Pazarik, you have these really powerful rulers, these huge tombs with decorated horses. Their bodies are tattooed. They've got silk and mirrors coming from China. They've got all these tapestries coming up from Persia. It's a really strong presence of local regional power. And this idea that you could start to control trade routes and reach out

was a definite, attractive political model for the groups that eventually established the Xiongnu dynasty and regime. But within what is now Mongolia, where the real heart of the Xiongnu dynasty and regime. But within what is now Mongolia, where the real heart of the Xiongnu empire rose up, you don't see a lot of those things. And it is very interesting, why didn't the eventual steppe empire sit right where those other kingdoms were? And I think some of the more subtle understandings by doing a lot of regional surveys and really taking in the whole data, there's several archaeologists who have looked at this period inside Mongolia and have discovered that there were already networks brewing. That before this so-called Scythian era elsewhere in Eurasia, in Mongolia, each valley was sort of its

own little power base and everybody had little tombs and monuments for the big chiefs. But as you got into this few centuries right before the Xiongnu Empire, suddenly you have one valley seems to be more powerful than all the rest. And all the rest go, you know, as far as their monuments go a little more silent. And so you had already this growing network of one region is controlled by one valley. And so you have this momentum of really tightly woven networks that are spanning all of the eastern steppe and this idea of building blocks of regions. And so all the Xiongnu had to do was go into that, be very opportunistic and find a way to unite all these regions into one political

conglomerate. It's extraordinary what you're saying there with all of that, but also what you're saying about how these extensive networks predate the rise of empire. They absolutely do. And some of my colleagues have asked me, well, why central Mongolia? Why was that the heart of the Xiongnu empire? Why wasn't it the Altai, where you have these big pazaric tombs and such? And when you take this notion of power is coming from the control of networks, most empires, when you really look at them under the microscope, that's how they're rising up. That's how they're gaining power, by controlling trade and controlling the ability to create these very diverse economies. And central Mongolia, even though all around it in the centuries leading up to the Xiongnu Empire, you already had people experimenting with complex

hierarchies of so-called kingdoms. You had a lot of these step groups already engaging in agriculture. And you can see from a lot of the scientific analyses of human bones that they are eating grains. So all these things are happening around Mongolia to a greater degree, but not inside. And so the interesting thing that happens if you take this sort of network approach is central Mongolia sat right at the most ideal point to start to expand, to bring in all the networks that were sort of westward with bridging from China to Persia. And it sat also not just on this east-west axis that most people think about when they think about the Silk Roads era that comes on later. But there's a massive and very important axis north to south. We know from the time of Russian colonialists in the 17-1800s that the fur trade was very, very important. And this kind of thing was likely happening at that

time as well. We even know from Chinese documents that one of the most important things in trade and consumption amongst the nobles in China was fur, not just gold, but fur. And so Central Mongolia, which eventually becomes the sort of seat of this new empire, was perfectly positioned in the east and west and north and south trade routes to sort of reach out and bring them all together and control them in a centralized fashion. Absolutely. As you say, it feels very much like a crossroads. You mentioned Persia in the West. I'm guessing that's Achaemenid Persia. You've got China in the East, India to the South, and you said you've got the first to the North. I never really thought of that. But yeah, trade-wise, it's got everything going for it. Yeah, it just was really about once a political entity expands even more and even more. And now it's like, well, we're not just going to take over the Altai and the Tien Shan sort of routes from the forest step down into Persia.

Now we're going to control everything. Well, you mentioned taking over there and let's talk about Xiongnu expansion. I'm guessing the Xiongnu expanding from their nucleus in central Mongolia, it's not a peaceful expansion. No, it is not in a lot of ways. But like all empires, the way they expand is different for each region. So in some places in parts of North China, where there are already what is now northern China, and the so-called Great Wall region, there were already powerful local nomadic groups. And we know a lot of them by names. And when the Xiongnus start their conquests, and we're very fortunate that the Chinese wrote down every detail they could, because we have to remember, you would

ask the question about literary sources. The Chinese wrote so much about the Xiongnu, because it was a peer empire. It was a regime that was challenging them and was really throwing them for a loop. So they wanted to write everything they could about the Xiongnu to understand them so that they could undermine them clearly and figure out how to defeat them politically, militarily, and economically. So we have a lot of the details of what these conquests were, these early expansions. And for North China, they went down in and beat these local kings and said, okay, now you're part of the empire. And that's it. You can stay, you can keep control over your little regions in the Great Wall area, but you're now

part of our empire. And that relative autonomy is interesting in that case, because it does come back to haunt them. In the civil war, in the middle of the Xiongnu empire and the history of the life of this imperial beast, we see those exact groups named again rising up. Other areas were a little bit more violent. It's not surprising that the more violent expansions were occurring in the areas to the north and west of central Mongolia in those areas where they had the big Pazarik tombs. And so in order to take control of those, if you have really powerful elites that might challenge you in a problematic way, what do you do? You kill them or you move them, forcibly move them. And so some of the normal Pazarik ways of burying their own elites, where you have like a whole

horse next to the coffin. These types of traditions, there's not a lot, very few, but they're popping up in central Mongolia. So we can see that this idea of like the Shonu came into the area, they forcibly squashed all of those. And so that type of burial tradition ceases to exist in the Altai. But the lowest social level that we had seen before the rise of the Xiongnu, they keep going during the period of the Xiongnu Empire. It's that upper

crust that has just disappeared. And they're popping up a little bit here and there. And the same for some of the burial traditions that we see in what is now Tuva area, right before the emergence of the Xiongnu empire, those also just ceased to be made. But there's one of them that appears suddenly way down in the Gobi Altai, sitting in amongst a cemetery that's otherwise completely Xiongnu in style. So it makes sense that some areas you would negotiate, okay, you can keep your power. And other areas we say, well, you're just too much of a challenge, or we're just going to destroy you utterly. And from the text, the first big conquest that they made was actually eastward against groups in what is now called Manchuria that they went in and killed all the

kings completely. So it varies on the strategy. You're listening to The Ancients on Dan Snow's history hit. Brian Miller is telling Tristan all about the Xiongnu more after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed

not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. The Pazirik Kingdom that you mentioned earlier and just now, was that one of the big powers on the block in Central Asia, which the Xiongnu take over?

But at the same time, after they take over, we do see aspects of the Pazarik culture in Central Mongolia. We see a couple of little graves here and there. But as far as significant amounts of Paziric culture, there's definitely a takeover of what art historians refer to as animal art, this animal style art. And we already see some of these big horned stags where the horns of the stags also have falcon heads

and all these composite mythical beasts that are really part of the artistic vocabulary of power in a lot of these Scythian era places like Pazurik. But the interesting thing is they pick up on that and they incorporate that. And you can see, especially in the early period of the Xiongnu, a lot of their big belt buckles and all the things that any local elite who is a participant in this new regime would be wearing. Added to that, you suddenly see an emergence of domestic animals being a significant component of that art. They were around and you saw every once in a while some horses and camels and such.

But this wild world, both real and mythical beasts, was the strongest component of art of power before the rise of the Xiongnu Empire. And so now what you see with belts is you see camels sometimes, but by and large, you see lots of horses grappling each other and yaks. Now, camels is a very interesting one. So I know camels, they're in ancient Bactria, ancient Afghanistan. Is this the main influence for camels in the art, do you think? Camels were already, and we know this from archaeological excavations, back-train camels were already prevalent in northwest China

and all over across into the northern China part, which is the famous Great Wall region. They were already there before the Xiongnu Empire appeared. So these were significant animals, and to find them in the art before and especially during is not a total surprise. Okay, fair enough. So we've heard about the Xiongnu creating this empire, expanding in the east, in the south, taking over the Paziriks in the west and northwest. So what happens next when they've just created this empire as it were? How does it last?

There are a lot of strategies. And I think in our modern understanding of nation states, that's the first thing that we have to sort of remove is this idea that a political entity like an empire is created on an exact year. And then everyone in that realm gets the memo, gets a little text message that says, now you're under this regime. Now you dress like this and you act like this. So from the radiocarbon datings that we have of these earlier Xiongnu tombs, they're not really expanding back with this obvious political culture of a new style of belt and dress. They're not dating back exactly to 200 BC. There seems to be a little bit of a time lag. And so you can see as this new regime expands, there are plenty of stories of regimes after the time of the Xiongnu all over the world, all over Eurasian steppe as well, where you have one leader rises up, he creates what seems to be a powerful emergent regime, and then he dies and the whole thing falls apart with it. The famous Attila the Hun,

it's the same story. It doesn't last that long. And so what's interesting to see is you have the fortune of the first few rulers of this new Shong regime were long-lasting. Their reign was long-lasting, their life was long-lasting. So you had a little bit of continuity of rule. And they start to implement a lot of these different institutions and policies. It's hard to know from the historical documents what some of these would have been. But archaeology, as I said before, you get a little inkling of that. And so there is the creation of this material reflection of political culture. Everybody has to dress the same way. This is what a belt looks like if you're a participant in this political regime. But there was some allowance for local traditions. Sometimes the way they buried their

dead, the way they made their little grave pits changed from region to region. But there was an allowance as long as you were a loyal participant. It didn't really matter. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai

warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. So there are certain things that are embraced across the empire, as it were, thanks to the

longevity of the first few rulers, but there are also local traditions that still remain very prevalent. Yes. In the northwest areas where that Pazuric group had been, and then in Tuva, you can see an adherence to some local traditions. The way you position the body, all these things, the idea of these little ceramic bowls for burning something, we're not really sure, that only exists in that area, but nowhere else in the Xiongnu Empire. And yet you see their belts, and it's the same belt, the same necklaces, everything. Remarkable. And just keeping on like this structure of this first Xiongnu Empire a bit longer, you mentioned a bit earlier, the Persian Empire, the Achaemenid Persian empire, and this is something I found really astonishing from your work. What links do we start seeing

between what was the Persian empire and this first Xiongnu empire? In the earlier periods, a few historians who have done their due diligence and looked at the existence in the Achaemenid empire of a decimal system and thought like, well, you know, there are a lot of things that are moving. We know that the Paziric kingdom was interacting directly with the Achaemenids. And it's very possible that these kinds of ideas were making their way eastward. But if it was, at the very least, you could say it's not just a wholesale copying. There are a few things, for instance, the decimal system of the Xiongnu is 10,000, 1,000, 110. You don't have all those divisions in the Achaemenid version.

But more importantly, the Achaemenid decimal system was meant only for their military. What the Xiongnu do is they take this notion of a decimal system and they adapt it, adding several ranks, and I would say a few more decimal places, so to speak, in order to really be pervasive. And the titles of these, you know, a chief of 1000 cavalry, when they're described of who they were and what they had with them, they're always talked about, not in terms of how much cavalry they had, even though that's their title, they're talked about in terms of how many households do they have under them. And that's the real key, is that this is not just a military division. This is a socio-military division. And so this idea that you could mobilize

in a very systematic fashion the entire steppe society is really one of the brilliant experiments with the Shomgnu regime. And it's that word experiments that you say there, is that absolutely crucial in this first Xiongnu empire to the many things that they are trying? I would say, yeah, there are a lot of, even though I've made the whole argument that the Xiongnu didn't just appear out of nowhere, it wasn't like this black void up in the step and suddenly, oh, there's nomads and they're beating us. But there are a lot of things that are strangely new, even though in the time period before the Xiongnu Empire, it seems like in a lot of regions around them, the Eurasian steppe areas, you had pockets of

agriculture, of significant agro-pastoral economies popping up. When you get to the Xiongnu Empire period, suddenly there are these permanent pithouse villages scattered here and there within the Xiongnu Empire realms that are doing agriculture. We have actual remains of grains. We have iron plowshares. We have huge storage pits. We have everything. And so there's a little bit of a chicken and egg thing going on where you wonder, was this building up and then we see an explosion of that development or was it that the shogun regime knew that in order to really make this thing stand they had to embrace not only controlling all this inter-regional and transcontinental trade but they also wanted to invest in having all these different types of resources and so you have this idea of some

areas are better for goats, some areas better for horses or camels, that you could be trading all these different types of livestock across and control that trade. So that when you get to the Shonu period, not only do you have this sudden emergence of these villages that have permanent pit houses sitting along the riversides here and there with remnants of grains, you have the isotopic studies of human remains scattered throughout the empire. And now suddenly, you see that within central Mongolia, now you have people actually, not all of them, but a good number of communities are now consuming grains. The vast majority would have been millet, but there's some wheat and barley evidence as well.

That trading network is absolutely extraordinary. And using certain areas of the empire for the best suited resources, also astonishing. But what I also found really fascinating from what you're saying there is this gelling of society with the military in this system that they've sort of adopted from the Persians. It's possible. There are definitely people that would caution us against that equation of, oh, they just took it. But the other thing to think about when the Xiongnu empire rises up, when the Han empire rises up, when the new Parthian empire is rising up, this sort of age of empires is contemporary with the real first flourishing of what we call the Silk Roads era. But before

what we think of as the Silk Roads emerged, there were already people and ideas going everywhere. And so it wouldn't be surprising if one of the many ideas was this idea of military units with a decimal structure. And how does this military system influence the Xiongnu warrior, influence the education, the military education of someone within the Xiongnu empire? The little we know about how soldiers were trained, it's a somewhat romantic vision, but it may be pretty close to the truth. All these stories that the Chinese wrote down of anyone in the Xiongnu empire, all these northern nomads, they learn how to ride from a young age by riding

a sheep and shooting a bow and arrow at small little rodents. And then as they get older, they build up to foxes and eventually, you know, there they are riding through the steppe. And this idea of all men everywhere are trained as mounted archers. And if we are to take that at face value, that's a very important statement because one of the biggest things in kingdoms and empires eventually is this dichotomy between military forces that are trained soldiers. That's their job versus the random farmer that is told, oh, now you have to run off to war. But the idea that every single male in that society was a trained warrior and ready to go off, all you then would have to do is mobilize that in a very systematic fashion, be able to say, all right, I'm a chief of 10,000. I go to all my chiefs of 1,000 beneath me and tell them, okay, bring your armies.

So that this idea that how in the world did the Xiongnu do this? Because they don't have many people compared to China. They were able to mobilize their entire society in a way that China hadn't picked up on yet. You've preempted my next question, which is how does this military society, this military technique differ to that of China in this period? There's technology issues. I mean, the Chinese were using mostly crossbows and the Xiongnu were using mostly composite bows. And there are definitely a lot of interesting stories, little juicy legends in the stories about the Xiongnu, one of which is when Modun, the first Xiongnu ruler, was rising up. He developed, and I'm sure it was actually already around, but he developed this idea of a howling arrow where you take a little piece of bone, you put some holes through it, and you put it right underneath the arrowhead. So as it flies through the air, it makes this little whistling sound.

And the Chinese describe it as like the cry of a bird. So if you have one of these screeching through the air, the other soldiers with their bows on their horses can hear it and know where to fire. And so there's an idea of like, oh, this is how you train soldiers. But another part of it was this idea of intimidation. If you have an entire group of cavalry on the other side of a hill and the Chinese can't see them, and then suddenly you have this screeching volley of arrows coming over, it's extremely intimidating. And so when you look at some of the tomb art in nobles in China, you can see depictions of warfare between the Chinese and the Xiongnu. And you see all these like little hills where the Xiongnu archers are hiding. And some of the little tidbits that are scattered throughout the Chinese documents,

because remember, there were always people from the Chinese empire defecting northward and vice versa. So you had this knowledge. And when one of the people came back to China, the Chinese emperor asked, well, what did you learn? What did you learn? And he said, well, every time the Chinese armies are heading up north to try to invade, the Xiongnu wouldn't know exactly where they're going to go because the Xiongnu know the rivers and the valleys and the best routes. And they go to that valley where they know the Chinese army is going to come. They sacrifice a few animals buried into the ground in order to curse that valley. And by the way, they also curse all the tribute that they send to you, the emperor.

So we see a lot of this playfulness going on. I mean, it's very interesting. So it sounds like the Xiongnu military is very mobile, is very flexible. It's not afraid to, let's say, give up certain pieces of land because that actually more suits its military ideology compared to the Chinese ideology? I would say it's not necessarily giving up of land. It's more about you weren't permanently on that land, but they had a real notion of who was allowed to be there herding their animals. Some people have talked about the notion of how would you control all these mobile pastoralists if they can just vote with their feet? Oh, well, they can't. You can't just up and move to the next valley because the people already in the next valley will say, what are you doing here? And so there's a lot to be said for you can have a flourishing of a pastoral economy if you can have people that are there on the ground and

maybe even higher up saying, all right, you can move here. You can move there. You had a really bad winter. Fine. You're allowed to go over there for this winter and come back. And so the management of all that was extremely important to taking what could be what people have called sort of the fragile economy of pastoralism and give it a lot more security. And so as far as what the were willing to give up, you could come into a territory and you can't just raise the agricultural fields. Although there are some mentions where the Chinese have come in and found some of the agricultural fields of the Xiongnu and tried to burn them down. But there's even some stories where the Chinese armies have come into the steppe. They have achieved the grand

victory of finding the camp of the Xiongnu ruler. And they kill off all the camels, they burn all of his cheese curds, and they claim victory. But where is the Xiongnu ruler? He escaped in the middle of the night with a bunch of donkeys. And then he comes back and he makes the Chinese chase him all over the steppe to the point where they're exhausted and all of their horses are dead. And they go back to China and they tell the emperor, we've exhausted all the horses you gave us and tell all these nobles who are donating horses to the imperial army, we've lost your horses as well. So running rings, as it were, around them, the Xiongnu are able to be very, very mobile. Yeah. And so you can move your big seats of power. And when we talk about the Xiongnu being a nomadic empire,

it's not so much that every single household was extremely mobile in their pastoral strategies. Most were not actually, just staying within these valleys. But it was these units of power and administration that were very mobile in themselves. So they could constantly be moving around and you couldn't track them down. And is it this being able to move your seats of power in this Xiongnu empire, is this another key to its success as an empire, as a nomadic empire? Very much so, I think. And we even know from some of the history documents that they would sort of put these enclaves and have a presence way out. There's even a lake in the middle of what is now Xinjiang that we know the Xiongnu went out to,

and they put a general out there to collect taxes from all the local communities in what later became known as the Silk Roads areas. And granted, taxes was not in the form of grains. It was in the form of sheep and sheep hides. And that's one of the telling things when people talk about the Xiongnu were dependent on the other areas for grain, that you can't have an empire without grain. The grain, I say, is not so much they had to have grain in order to have an empire, but the embracing of small farming communities was all about diversification of the economy.

And the more you diversify the economy, the more stable it is. And so they bring in all these taxes for not just diversification of economy, but for surplus. The more surplus you have as the rulers, the more attractive you are to local people who will agree to participate in your regime. There you go. There you go. Very clever. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of our sibling podcast, The Ancients, with the brilliant Tristan Hughes,

who we call the Tristorian in the office. If you want to listen to more Ancients, and I'm telling you there's plenty of them, the guy's a machine, just simply go to wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to The Ancients. you