Who Were the Huns? Pt. I: The Rise of the Xiongnu Confederacy

There has been a long standing debate among scholars about whether or not the Xiongnu who threatened Han China and the Huns who attacked the Roman Empire were the same people.

The Huns burst out of the steppe with Attila at their head, and it would seem to make sense that they are related to the Xiongnu who fought wars against China, since the Chinese drove the Xiongnu west. There are all sorts of theories about the ethnic identity of the Huns though. Were they really connected to the Xiongnu? And if so, were they actually descended from them, or not? What language did the Huns speak? There's a theory that the Huns spoke a turkic language, so if that's true, would that make the huns ethnically turkish? Certainly Attila survives in some modern turkish languages as a name, and from the surviving words we have recorded it's possible the huns spoke an Oguhric Turkic language, possibly related to Bulgar and Chuvash.

In this series I cover the most recent research on the topic.

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Видео Who Were the Huns? Pt. I: The Rise of the Xiongnu Confederacy канала The Historian's Craft