Xiongnu Erotic

The Xiongnu were the first steppe empire, a confederation of mounted nomads who ruled the Mongolian Plateau from the late third century BC until it broke apart in the first century AD. The northern half scattered west. The southern half settled inside China, where its descendants founded short-lived kingdoms before dissolving into the population of Shanxi and Shaanxi. What made them a people was not shared blood or a single language but allegiance to the chanyu, a ruler whose title claimed birth from Heaven, and the army around him: everyone counted off in tens, hundreds, thousands and ten thousands, under Left and Right Wise Kings in the east and west. Modu, who seized the throne in 209 BC by having his father shot down by archers drilled to fire wherever his own arrow flew, crushed the Donghu, broke the Yuezhi, retook the Ordos, and in 200 BC trapped the founding Han emperor at Baideng. The settlement that followed set the pattern for a century: Han princesses sent north as brides, with annual shipments of silk, grain and wine, in exchange for a quiet border that rarely stayed quiet.

Chinese chroniclers wrote the name with characters that read as an insult, and what the Xiongnu called themselves is unknown. So is their language: a few dozen words survive in Chinese transcription, and Turkic, Mongolic, Yeniseian and Iranian have all been proposed without a winner. Ancient DNA shows why: the population blended East Asian and West Eurasian ancestry in nearly every proportion, and some of the richest graves, stone-faced terraces with long ramps, held women. They were not pure nomads: the walled settlement at Ivolga south of Lake Baikal grew millet and worked iron, and the elite tombs at Noin-Ula are full of Han silk and lacquer. Religion ran through the chanyu, who bowed to the rising sun each morning and the moon each evening. The whole confederation gathered in the fifth month to sacrifice to Heaven, earth, ancestors and spirits, and again in autumn to count people and herds. Sima Qian noted that the young ate first and the old got leftovers, that a man married his father's widows, his own mother excepted, and his brothers' widows, and that one chanyu drank from the Yuezhi king's skull. The empire fought Han Wudi's armies to exhaustion after 133 BC, fractured in civil war, split for good in 48 AD, and lost its northern heartland at Ikh Bayan in 89 AD. Its legacy is the template every later steppe power copied, from the Turks to the Mongols, who claim them as ancestors. Whether they were also the ancestors of Attila's Huns, as Sogdian letters calling both by one name suggest, stays open.