The Xiongnu

The name Xūnyù 葷粥, the most archaic of the appellations the Chinese tradition attached to the Xiongnu. Sima Qian opens his account by tracing the Xiongnu to Chunwei, a descendant of the house of Xia, and reports that in the highest antiquity their people were called Xūnyù; Mencius too names the Xūnyù as the northern nomads whom the early Zhou ancestor King Tai bought off rather than fight.

Like Xianyun, Xūnyù is marked disputed: it is part of the Chinese effort to give the Xiongnu a pedigree reaching back to the dawn of Chinese history, not a name independently shown to denote them. The three Chinese names on this page, Xiōngnú, Xiǎnyǔn, Xūnyù, form a single tradition’s genealogy of its northern enemy, projecting one continuous people across two thousand years of frontier conflict. Whether that continuity is real or a literary construction, it is the way the Chinese chose to understand the nomads, and it is, almost uniquely, the only naming the Xiongnu received.

The name Xiǎnyǔn 獫狁, the northern enemy of the Western Zhou, against whom the war-poems of the Book of Odes were sung: the soldiers of the ode Caiwei march out “because of the Xianyun,” and the Liuyue celebrates a campaign driving them back. Centuries later Sima Qian, constructing a deep ancestry for the Xiongnu of his own day, identified them with these and other archaic northern peoples, making the Xianyun an earlier name for the same nomad stock.

The entry is marked disputed because that identification is Sima Qian’s genealogy, not a demonstrated fact. The Xianyun are real and the odes that name them are among the oldest Chinese poetry, but whether the Zhou-era Xianyun and the Han-era Xiongnu were one people or merely two waves of northern nomads the Chinese assimilated under a single ancestral scheme is unresolved. The name belongs here as the Chinese tradition’s own back-projection of the Xiongnu into legendary antiquity, a claim of continuity that the sources assert and the evidence cannot confirm.

The Chinese name of the steppe empire, Xiōngnú 匈奴, the standard designation in the Han histories and the name by which the confederation is known to history. Sima Qian’s Shiji gives them the first sustained account, opening the chapter that founded the Chinese ethnography of the nomads; the Hanshu continues it. The two characters were a phonetic transcription of a foreign name, but the second, 奴, “slave,” lends the writing a contemptuous edge characteristic of the Chinese rendering of barbarian names.

Xiōngnú is very nearly all we securely have. The Xiongnu’s own language is barely recorded, and the empire that fought the Han to a standstill, exacted tribute, and dictated terms to the founder of the dynasty is known almost entirely under the name its enemies wrote for it. The contrast with the Scythians is instructive: where the steppe nomads of the west are named in half a dozen literatures, the Xiongnu of the east are caught almost solely in Chinese characters, a great power preserved in a single tradition’s script.