The Huns

The Avestan Xiiaona-, the hostile people of the Yašts’ epic layer, whose king Arəǰat̰.aspa wars against Vištāspa, the royal patron of Zarathustra himself; scripture makes them the archetypal enemies of the faith at its founding moment. Who, if anyone, the historical Xiiaona were is beyond recovery, and their placement in this atlas at all rests on what became of the name rather than on any identification of the original bearers: the disputed label is carried by the whole chain, not merely a link. The script rendering is the letter-by-letter normalization from the transliteration that this atlas uses for Avestan.

The entry is here because it is the seed of the strangest transmission on the Huns’ page: a name from the legendary wars of scripture, perhaps a thousand years older than Attila, that late antique Persia reapplied to the Chionite invaders of its northeast, whom Greco-Roman sources connect to the Hunnic world. If the connections hold, the family’s oldest form predates its referent by a millennium, a name waiting in scripture for a people to arrive and claim it; if they fail, the word belongs to a vanished Bronze Age enemy and its presence here is the record of Persia’s great creative misidentification. Either way the entry teaches the same lesson from the opposite direction as the rest of the family: elsewhere the Huns’ name traveled to meet the writers, but in Iran the writers had the name first, and the Huns traveled into it.

xwn occurs in the second of the Sogdian Ancient Letters, a merchant’s report abandoned in a Dunhuang watchtower around 313 CE, describing catastrophe in China: famine in the capitals, the emperor fled, and Luoyang sacked by the xwn. The events are known from the Chinese side, and the people who sacked Luoyang in 311 were the Southern Xiongnu; the Sogdian writer, that is, calls the Xiongnu by a name that looks exactly like “Hun,” six decades before any Hun appears on Rome’s horizon. The disputed label belongs not to the reading, which is secure, but to what the word proves, since it is the single strongest piece of evidence in the old question of whether the Huns of Europe descend from the Xiongnu of the Chinese frontier. The rendering uses the Old Sogdian letters this atlas employs for the language.

This is the linchpin entry of the whole page, three consonants doing more work than any monument in the family. If xwn is the Xiongnu’s name in Iranian mouths, then the same name traveled the length of Eurasia in a century, and the peoples at its two ends were joined at least by a label and perhaps by blood; if it is coincidence, the entire Hun-Xiongnu edifice rests on air. The atlas records the Xiongnu on their own page, under their Chinese names, and leaves the bridge between the pages exactly as wide as this word: one merchant’s noun, written in a moment of panic, on which fifteen centuries of argument have balanced.

The Middle Persian Xyōn, the Zoroastrian books’ name for the steppe enemy, inherited directly from the Avestan Xiiaona- of the entry beside this one. In the epic Ayādgār ī Zarērān the Xyōn are the scriptural foe of Wištāsp’s holy war; in the fourth century the name walked out of scripture into the field, for the Chionitae whom Ammianus watched besieging Amida in 359, allied troops of Šābuhr II under their king Grumbates, are the Xyōn in Greco-Latin dress, real steppe invaders of the Iranian northeast wearing the old sacred ethnonym. The apocalyptic Zand ī Wahman Yasn then counts the Xyōn among the peoples of the world’s last ages. Book Pahlavi has no Unicode encoding, so the entry carries transliteration only; the disputed label covers the relation of these Chionites to the Huns of the West, which is precisely what scholarship cannot settle.

The entry documents the strangest mechanism on the page: Persia is the one civilization that did not need to borrow a name for the Huns, because its scripture had one waiting. Whether that is because the Xiiaona legend preserved a real ancient people whose descendants returned, or because priests fitted a new enemy into an old prophecy, or because the names Xyōn and Hun are at bottom the same word, is the eastern half of the identification dispute this page exists to hold. Rome met the Huns and invented monsters; Persia met them and recognized, or thought it recognized, something foretold.

The Latin Hunni, fixed in the language by Ammianus Marcellinus, whose final book opens with the most famous ethnographic set piece of late antiquity: the Hunnorum gens, barely known to old records, dwelling beyond the Maeotic marshes, exceeding every measure of savagery, seared cheeks, lives spent on horseback, a people he presents as the seed of all the ruin his history must then narrate. Jordanes, a century and a half later, embroiders the portrait with the Gothic legend that the Huns were born of witches exiled to the steppe and unclean spirits, hatred doing the work of ethnography.

The entry preserves the Western name at the moment of maximum incomprehension. Ammianus reaches for every trope of monstrosity precisely because the Huns arrived outside all the categories Rome sorted barbarians with; the portrait tells us little about Huns and a great deal about a world receiving a blow it could not classify. The name’s afterlife kept that charge: Hunni became Latin Christendom’s permanent shorthand for the scourge from the east, revived for Magyars in the tenth century and, as an insult, for enemies into the twentieth. Few names in this atlas have done so much work with so little content; from Ammianus forward, Hunni has meant less a people than the fear of one.

The Greek Oûnnoi, the eastern empire’s name for the people on its Danube, and the form under which the Huns received their one intimate portrait. Priscus of Panium traveled with the embassy of 449 to Attila’s own encampment and wrote down what he saw: the wooden palace, the protocol of the feast, the king’s studied plainness among gold-decked lieutenants, and a Greek merchant gone native who lectured the historian on the empire’s failings. A second-century Choûnoi in Ptolemy is sometimes claimed as the name’s first flicker, but the identification is too uncertain to build on, and the working history of the Greek form begins with the Hunnic crisis itself.

Where the Latin entry beside this one preserves terror, the Greek preserves acquaintance. Priscus is the only classical author who met Huns as hosts rather than as rumors, and his fragments are the reason anything humane is known about them at all: diplomacy, not war, produced the record. The pairing is the page’s lesson in how names take their color, the same people in the same decade rendered as monsters by a historian who saw them across a battlefield’s distance and as canny negotiators by one who drank at their table. The name a people gets depends on the door through which its recorder arrived.

The Classical Armenian Hon, plural Honkʿ, the standing name for the Huns in the fifth-century historians and their successors. Armenia met Huns not across a distant frontier but through the Caucasus passes at its shoulder: Pʿawstos already sets Hun contingents in the wars of fourth-century kings, and the historians of the following centuries know the Honkʿ of the north, the Caucasian Hunnic peoples of the Derbent corridor, as raiders, mercenaries, and eventually as a mission field, for it was to these Huns that Armenian churchmen carried Christianity, and an Armenian bishop’s seventh-century report from their country north of Derbent is among the closest surviving looks at any Hunnic society.

The Armenian form is the family’s longest-serving working name. Rome’s Hunni outlived its referent as rhetoric; the Armenian Honkʿ stayed attached to actual neighbors for centuries after Attila’s empire dissolved, because the Caucasian Huns remained a fact of Armenian life long after the European ones became a memory. On a page dominated by names that hardened into symbols, this entry is the ethnonym as a tool kept in daily use, worn smooth by proximity: for the historians of Armenia the Huns were never the end of the world, merely the other side of the mountains.

The Sanskrit Hūṇa, attested from the mid-fifth century when the name enters the epigraphy of the embattled Gupta empire: Skandagupta’s Bhitari pillar records his violent collision with the Hūṇas, and within two generations the inscriptions name Hūṇa kings, Toramāṇa and the temple-burning Mihirakula, ruling in India itself. The invaders were the Alchon and their successors, the “Iranian Huns” of the northwest, kin to the Hephthalites treated on their own page rather than to Attila’s horde; Sanskrit tradition also knows the Śveta-hūṇa, the White Huns of the historians. The name then outlived the invasions by centuries, settling into the epic catalogues and the lists of northwestern peoples as a standing item of Sanskrit ethnography.

The entry shows the name’s southern branch doing what the western branch did at the same moment, and to eerily similar effect: in the same generation that Hunni came to mean the destroyer of Rome’s order, Hūṇa came to mean the destroyer of India’s classical golden age, two literatures independently making one steppe name the sound of an era ending. That the two literatures meant different armies, joined only through the contested middle links this page’s Iranian entries carry, is the family’s central irony. East and west, “Hun” became the word for the world before it broke; the peoples who broke it may never have shared more than the name.