The Ancients - The Xiongnu: History's First Nomadic Empire?

Episode Date: April 1, 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society, hierarchy and expansion of the Xiongnu, and in this episode he shares his findings from the archaeology and historical documents with Tristan.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

And in today's podcast, we are talking about the Xiongnu, this remarkable ancient empire in Central Asia. This was, shall we say, the origins of the Huns. We've got our future Hunnic podcast too, so stay tuned for that. But in this podcast, we are talking about the extraordinary Xiongnu that had connections with dynasties in ancient China. But we can also see links between the Xiongnu and the ancient Achaemenid Persian Empire to the west. Absolutely fascinating. And to talk through, to provide an overview of the Xiongnu, with a particular focus we'll be looking at hierarchy, the political structure and more, including globalisation.

I was delighted to be joined by Dr Brian Miller from the University of Pennsylvania. Brian is a fantastic speaker, as you're about to find out. So without further ado, here's Brian. to find out. So without further ado, here's Brian. 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 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 know, 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, you know, 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 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, well, 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 texts 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 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 the 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. 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 1700s, 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 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, this 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, in 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 Pazirik 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 Paziric 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 Shonu, they keep going during the period of the Shonu 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 cease to be made. But there's one of them that appears suddenly way down in the Gobi Altai, sitting in and 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 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. The Pazarik 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 Pazirik 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, backtrain 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. A lot of strategies, and I think in our modern understanding of nation states, I mean, 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 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 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. In the northwest areas where that Pazurik 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, 1,110. You don't have all those divisions in the Achaemenid version. But more importantly,

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 1,000 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 step society is really one of

the brilliant experiments with the Xiongnu 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 steppe 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 pit house villages scattered here and there within the Xiongnu Empire realms that are doing agriculture. We have actual remains of grains. We have iron plow shares. 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, like, was this building up and then we see an explosion of that development? Or was it that the Shomnu regime knew that in order to really make this thing stand, they had to embrace not only controlling all this inter-regional and trans-continental 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 Xiongnu 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. Trading networks, absolutely extraordinary. And using certain areas of the empire for the best

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, 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, bury it 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 Xiongnu 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.

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 our 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 the 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. now brian you have hinted at it during this podcast a few times already with the petty kings and the kings and all that the political order of the early Xiongnu Empire, what do we know about it? The descriptions that we have of the political order of the Xiongnu Empire don't appear to change too much

from the early to the late. Part of that may be just that some of the later Chinese histories go to the previous ones and just sort of recycle the magic little paragraph that describes that hierarchy. As far as what we know about how the political hierarchy and the structure is changing, there's not much of an indication of these ranks and titles changing much. But what we do see between the early and the late, as the ruling lineages, that one little royal clan called the Luandi clan survives the civil war, rises back up again and keeps control, sort of fends off all these other competing lineages that want to claim the entire Xiongnu empire and its regime.

When they come back to power, when we turn to the archaeology, what we do see is a sudden emergence of this new type of tomb, a type of tomb that wasn't there before. So before what we have seen, and there's some archaeological projects done in Mongolia now that have made some fascinating discoveries on the early tombs of the big rulers. And we know now what they are. So at that time, it was all just a little circle of stones on the surface. And so you would have really big circles or somewhat smaller circles. And when you get to the later period, now there's not just a quantitative difference,

but a qualitative difference. Now you have the rulers saying, OK, not everybody can have a tomb like this with a square shaped mound and a ramp and a chariot and all these other things. And so you see this division almost as if the uppermost echelons are trying to express themselves as being radically different from all the other local elites, because they don't want to have to deal with another challenge. So this tomb differentiation is also to emphasize differences in positions in the Xiongnu hierarchy. Yeah. So when you get to some of the frontier communities that are part of the empire, there's a site way out west in western Mongolia, in the southern part of the Altai. And it's a tiny site. The little square tombs with ramps are

nowhere the size of what they are in central Mongolia. But they're there, and they are distinctly of that sort of Xiongnu noble or royal style. But at the same cemetery, you have the normal circular graves, which are huge and almost the same size as them. So there's a play going on of, okay, I'm not allowed to have a big square tomb, but mine can be just as big as yours and have just as many good things as yours. So there's always a push and pull at all levels of an empire where you see the locals trying to exert more power and autonomy, but agreeing to participate in this regime as long as they get what they need. Well, let's go through these ranks as well. Let's start right at the top.

Who was this royal figure, this supreme ruler? What do we know about them? We know that there are only a few words in so-called Xiongnu language or Xiongnu terms that got translated for us into the Chinese documents. It's only a handful. So despite best efforts, most linguists have agreed that there's no way to reconstruct the Xiongnu language. But luckily, for the most important term, we know that chanyu, which was their term for their ruler, meant magnificent one. So there was an idea of there was a supreme ruler. And as the letters from the Xiongnu were sent to the Han court,

we see this language embellished with, I am the magnificent one, the son of heaven, which is exactly what the Chinese ruler was calling himself. So whether or not they had this idea of heaven worship that was existing already in Mongolia, whether they said, we worship heaven, you know, Tengri, but we're going to make the same claim as you just to put you off and say, you know, we're your peers, or maybe we're more powerful than you are. So there's some of that

diplomatic play in the language of the letters. But we know that there was a supreme ruler. Now, it wasn't so much of when that ruler dies, the next son takes over or the eldest son has to take over. All it had to be, and this pattern of what's called the Khurultai, which happens later in the Mongol period, we know about the famous, the death of Genghis Khan, all the armies come back. But what was most important is keeping that supreme rulership in the hands of one family. So when he died, they all came back and they elected the next person. It could be a son, an uncle, a brother, but it had to stay within that family. So even though there were sometimes tensions, maybe a brother versus an uncle would take over

and there would be factions and all the tension, the empire didn't break apart because it stayed within that family. And the crisis, the big civil war in the middle of the course of the Xiongnu empire, was a crisis because other lineages way on the fringes were actually claiming power. And so they were trying to kick out that other lineage group. And so what happens when that ruling lineage family, the Luandi, finally take control over again, the ruler comes back into Mongolia, takes power again. He says before he dies, when I die, my first son takes over. When he dies, my second son takes over. When he dies, my third son takes over. And so it was some effort to make sure that there was

no tension whatsoever and trying to give a little bit of peace and order so that after he died, the regime went on. This is only one little hint of maybe other things that were probably being put in place. But you get this idea from the sudden emergence of a radically different form of tomb for the uppermost echelons, this idea of like, OK, I'm going to change the way inheritance goes, that there may have been some new policies within the empire to try and remedy the problems that led to the civil war. And so after this supreme ruler and his immediate family, what is the next uppermost echelon of society? The ones in these big square tombs, they start to change a lot of their big lavish prestige goods. I mean, I had said in the early period, you have the emergence of

a singular form of status recognition. If you are part of the network of Xiongnu elites, you wear a big buckle that looks like this. You could have a yak or a horse, but that yak and that horse and that horned beast is the same wherever you are in the empire. You see a sudden change in the form of all the objects that express your participation in this empire. And it's a shift away from step traditions without completely abandoning them, where you would have these mythical step beasts or a horse or a yak or something else. And you have a shift towards anything that is exotic and very cosmopolitan like. There's a shift in technology as well, whereas before you had all these open work cast bronze pieces. Now everything is about just simple iron,

mass produce it, and slap a little bit of gold foil on it. There are a lot of discoveries being made very recently by a Japanese Mongolian project and a few others that have been unearthing these actual iron industry sites with furnaces and everything else. And doing the metallurgic analyses at these sites, they've been finding that this is not a Chinese recipe for doing iron. This is a very northern type of recipe. So we can see that they were developing their own ways of producing goods. And so to shift over and say, okay, now we're going to mass produce all these belts and everything else for the local elites would make sense. The other part that's happening with this shift toward more cosmopolitan and exotic is this idea of if we can't control

what's going on, and we mean this uppermost echelon, there's plenty of evidence of some of these belt pieces were being produced locally. The early style bronze things were being produced locally. And so you have all these sub regions within the empire making their own belts, suddenly making claims were autonomous. And now we're going to claim that we rule the empire. What the upper echelons were trying to do is say, OK, if we can't control all of that, what can we control? And what they can control is the very long distance trade. So we will encourage everybody to start embracing more exotic goods. Chinese goods were already coming into the Xiongnu empire. You'd have like little bronze Chinese coins on your belt. The little things were making their way in. later period, suddenly you have a lot more Chinese goods than you have before. And you have a lot more goods coming from all over the place. Little inclinations of things coming from Central Asia, maybe even as far as the Mediterranean, were seeping their way into the steppe. But now the

amount is just like we've never seen before, such that you have some tiny little community way up in the mountains. And one of the graves that we excavated up there in Western Mongolia, we found a woman who has two pieces of different Chinese mirrors broken apart, which is what the Xiongnu did with the Chinese mirrors in her grave. But she also has very normal style belt pieces, these big rings on her belt. And she also has a whole necklace with little ceramic beads. And then in that necklace is a tiny little faience bead which in the make of that faience glass and the style of it is totally coming from traditions in the Mediterranean world and how somebody at that low level would have

these goods shows the degree to which it's not just the big rulers who have all these fancy goods, all the way down to the very local elites they were participating in and gaining economically from their access to these very global networks that were part of the sort of Silk Road era. Does that really emphasize actually the importance, not just of these upper echelons of the Xiongnu society, but also these lower elites as well, these local rulers, these people more on the frontiers, but you say they're still able to embrace the globalisation, these global networks from perhaps as far away as the Mediterranean. It was definitely part of, I would say, the purposeful new strategies of the upper echelon,

because there were certain goods that the lower levels were not allowed to have when you look at for example the case of chinese made chariots or chinese style chariots there are some new metals analysis that show that the shongnu were trying to make some of their own versions of chinese chariots which again is a play on like we don't need them anymore we can make our own chinese style chariots but those chariots are only appearing in the square tombs and not even in all of the square tombs. By and large, the bigger the tomb, the greater the chance that they would have it. The tradition of burying a vehicle was definitely a normal step tradition. You can see it down to these tiny little local elite graves where they take apart part of an ox cart and they put it over the grave.

So the idea was not a Chinese tradition, but the idea would be my vehicle, the body of the dead is taken to the tomb with, is something very exotic. This sounds really extraordinary, the political complexity of this all, going from the one royal ruler's family, as it were, but going all the way down through these levels down to local leaders. It sounds like a remarkable form of government for this first step empire. It's really phenomenal. And the heavy amount of fieldwork that's been done in Mongolia in the past several decades, especially now that more and more people are doing real surveys where you get out there with a group of people, you all have your compass and your GPS,

and you're walking in lines to go up and down all the little valleys, mapping every single site you can. There's a couple of valleys where this has really taken off. And they're able to look at, even on the very local level, within one valley, there was clearly one family or group that had control. and they had the biggest cemetery and there were some other families in there but you can do thanks to this really fine-tuned archaeological work you can start to just as we had this idea from the text of the building blocks of empire the chief of 10 the chief of 100 the chief of thousands that same sort of building block thing can move up as well. You can see how there were definitely like ranks of more powerful families in one valley than the

others. And then what you can do is you pull out, you see the relationship between one valley versus another valley. And quickly, just before we go on to the late period, especially digging really into that, you mentioned what the archaeology is telling us so much more about this and some of these extraordinary finds. Are they telling us more about women in the Xiongnu Empire? Women were obviously very powerful as they were in a lot of pre-modern societies. The fun part about doing genetics studies, which really will tell you exactly if you've got good preservation of the bone, the sex of the individual, is it's giving confirmation to things that we had started to understand better.

And that is the biggest belt pieces, the most fantastical with, you know, animal combat and wild power is actually on women, not on men. And in a lot of cases, you see more investment in the dress of these women and in a lot of areas even in the early time periods you see the mobility of women between distinct communities there's a cemetery in what is now northern china and this is an early period cemetery so it's very telling that you can see some local burial traditions, and then you have some very non-local burial traditions, which are clearly coming in from the steppe, from central Mongolia area. And at the same time, you have this influx of the normal belt style of I am a Xiongnu elite. And you have a lot of them, the vast majority of them that have that sort of Xiongnu style belts are the women at the site.

That's astonishing. And that's partially thanks, as you say, to this amazing scientific data that we're now also able to gather. Yeah. There have always been methods where you can look at different parts of the human body, the pelvis mainly, to say, oh, man or woman, but sometimes you're not that fortunate. Most of these graves are looted from the Xiongnu time period. A lot of them looted during the time period of the Xiongnu regime, but especially afterwards. And so sometimes all you have is, you know, a piece of the belt here or, you know, a leg bone there, maybe just a jawbone. But I think the ability to do really fine-tuned genetic analyses has sort of backed up what we started to get an inclination of.

Now let's keep going on with the Xiongnu story, and you've talked about it in passing as this interview has been going on, but let's talk about this great change that we see. At roughly the turn of the millennium, Brian, what is this monumental shift that we see? The monumental shift somewhere around 50 to 30 BC, so just before the turn, is the sudden emergence of these big tombs of a totally different nature, a shift away from the technology of prestige goods from openwork bronze to flat iron pieces with gold or silver

foil. There's a radical shift in the material culture going on, but we can see, and luckily from the histories, and this is one of the ways in which the histories are of great value to us, that if we had none of these documents, we may have looked at the early, what we now call the early Shonu period, and say, well, these are some local kingdoms that are talking to one another. There's not really a big unified regime quite yet. And then you get to the later period and you realize, oh, this is definitely a unified regime. This is a huge polity. Now we have the emergence of empire. But thanks to these documents, we know that there was something going on. And so really what it does is it forces us to reconsider how an empire can change radically over time.

And even when we look down into China, you can see a radical shift from the early Han dynasty to the late Han dynasty. These are normal growths that empires go through. And so the idea that you would have a Xiongnu empire of a particular form rise up in one year, then it stays the same, and then suddenly one year it's just totally gone. Doesn't really work. We have to think about these things as very lively entities, political entities. And a key reason this huge shift in the tombs from bronze bling to iron bling, are these extensive trade routes? Yeah, because what is happening is the more people and the more polities, I should say, are getting involved in this trade, the more it just snowballs into huge quantities of these goods coming and going and altering the demands.

just sort of riding on the coattails of the more classic civilizations. Even in the case of, say, Xinjiang, the Western regions, as it was called at the time, the Xiongnu were the first to go out and put an enclave there to try and collect taxes and all this stuff. And then when the Chinese come out as well, they say, oh, well, what were the Xiongnu doing? Oh, they put an enclave there? Okay, we'll go like one or two valleys over, we'll put an enclave there and try to collect taxes ourselves. So you can see the Xiongnu are developing a lot of things in order to try and control huge arms of trade. And one of the pieces of evidence that is very telling as to the fact that these big square tombs are reflecting the uppermost echelon of an empire, the central kings and lineages in control of this huge regime is when the Xiongnu empire ends, and we know how it ends right around 100 AD, is that suddenly from,

thanks to radiocarbon dating, we see these big square tombs just seem to disappear overnight, relatively speaking, archaeologically speaking, they're just gone. But the local, the sort of lower echelon style of how you bury a Xiongnu participant elite, the sort of ring graves, it goes on for a century or more because local elites and all these networks that were existing before the Xiongnu regime came about, they continue on and they are invested in a particular way of expressing power and prestige, and they carry that on. There's nothing that would tell them that there's not going to be a regime that's going to come back in another generation. Once they're invested in that,

and they get great benefits from having that sort of network, even though it's not as centrally controlled, and maybe not as efficient in the later eras, they are invested heavily in that. And so, of course, they continue these traditions on. Absolutely, because it's astonishing, especially what you're saying right near the start of the interview, how the trading networks, they predate the Xiongnu Empire, but also from what you just said there, they also survive after the demise of the Xiongnu Empire too. Yeah. I mean, it's a question of intensity and what's coming through, but it's always there. I mean, from what you've said about the strong new empire in the last 50 minutes to an hour or so,

it sounds really astonishing the longevity of this empire, how it's able to survive, how it's able to thrive, its flexibility. It seems to be absolutely crucial for it being able to survive for such a long amount of time and withstand these quite significant transitions. Yeah, it's all about how Apolite adapts, how adaptable is it. And there was something happening with the revival of that one particular lineage that took control again, that allowed them to move on. But you can see from the archaeological record, as well as a little bit from the historical, that they had to implement some changes. They needed to do something new if they were going to re-serve power and maintain that power. There have been a lot of people that have said, oh, the Xiongnu is the longest lasting and all the others don't last very long.

Well, when we look at the case of the Turks, the Eastern Turkic Empire, there we have the same type of thing. Their interim period, their civil war period is a little more long lasting, and we have labeled them as different political entities. But when you look back at the Xiongnu, it's the same type of thing. It's just that they adapted, they moved on. And this life cycle of an empire of 100 to 200 years, you can see in a lot of ways, even the Han Chinese empire itself had its own civil war and the ruling lineage was ousted

and had to come back and reclaim its own empire. And the fun part about that is that when the Xiongnu were going through their own civil war, one of the people from that ruling lineage came down, lived in North China and said,

please, please help me. I'll do anything. I will say you are the bigger power. You are the bigger brother, which is part of the language of diplomacy amongst them. As long as you give me support. The Chinese did. They thought, OK, now we've got him in our border so we can do all the stuff. And now he's kowtowed to us. Well, eventually he gains power and he goes back into the step and just ignores them. Well, eventually he gains power and he goes back into the steppe and just ignores them. And so when it comes to the Chinese Civil War, the Xiongnu start to help out the old ruling Han lineage. They start to make some claims of their own.

There's a local leader in North China and the Xiongnu back him up by saying, well, there's so much intermarriage between the Han and the Xiongnu courts. I technically have blood that goes back to the Han lineage, so I can claim the Han throne. All these little politics are going on. And so when the new Han regime reclaims power over the whole empire, the Xiongnu say, we helped you out just like you had helped us out. So it's time you were paid the favor. Now we're the bigger power. And the Chinese, of course, don't like that language. But you can see how emboldened and powerful this new Xiongnu regime is. So when we look at some of the histories that seem to be relatively radio silent as time goes on after that civil war era in the Xiongnu time period, there are a lot of people that have said, well, once the civil war happens, war with China happens, the Xiongnu are never the same afterwards, they just sort of peter off into existence. And the nice thing about the archaeology is it gives a radically different narrative that,

if anything, they're more powerful than they ever were, which forces us to go back to the historical documents and say, is that really true? And search for hints here and there to say, actually, even the documents themselves don't say that. It's only historians after the fact that are saying that narrative. There you go. Sorting the fact from the fiction, the Xiongnu becoming, can we say they were becoming more global? Absolutely. And looking at the Xiongnu, of course, the empire does fade away, but it leaves a significant

legacy. It leaves a significant legacy in a lot of ways, the way any initial empire does. It's the same for the Qin in the case of China. There had been no real empire before. But once there was one, then it was there. And could there be another one? Yes, there could. It had worked before.

So you see regions of the world where empires come and go. And it's the same, I would say, for the Eastern steppe, for Mongolia, that once there is that memory of a huge regime that exerted power over all of Eurasia, that you could revisit that again. You have little things like the decimal system pop up again and again. You have this idea of a singular, magnificent one ruler who is elected in a sort of Khurtai way coming up again and again. Yeah, that whole idea that it may have started with one powerful ruler in one valley in Mongolia, then moving over to take over the next valley, and then the next, and then it snowballs from there. That memory, that strong new memory, do you think it has a significant impact on one of the most famous Mongolians of all time, Genghis Khan?

Absolutely. They had this idea that this is our legacy, but we've become even greater. Some of the records from the Mongol era that talk about their hordes, and it's important to remember that the word horde, which relates to Urdu, the word for palace, is not about the military unit so much as the ruler's tent and his entourage and everything like that. And when it describes this like big royal tent encampment, the description is we have tents that were so great, greater than the Xiongnu ruler. Like, oh, wow. They are not comparing themselves to anyone else, but the Xiongnu ruler, the first ever, that that's their point of reference. And in diplomacy language, all the way into the early medieval period, the later medieval period, every time people are talking

back and forth between China and Mongolia, they're always referencing, well, what happened when the Han and the Xiongnu fought each other? This is what happened. This is our political precedent, like, you know, quoting an old court case and bringing it in saying, well, that's the way we should do it. Fascinating. There you go. The Xiongnu, the people who Genghis Khan and the Mongols looked up to. Brian, that was an absolutely amazing chat. Last of all, your book on the Xiongnu is called? It's called The World's First Nomadic Empire and it should be out next year sometime. Fantastic.

Well, best of luck with that and best of luck with all your research. Brian, once again, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. It was a delight

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