Xionites Erotic

The Xionites were a nomadic people who rode into Transoxiana and Bactria, in what is now Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and northern Afghanistan, in the middle of the fourth century CE, and who were absorbed within about two centuries into the Kidarite and Hephthalite states that grew out of the same movement. What made them a group was less a language or a faith than an entrance: they came off the steppe as mounted raiders, hit the eastern frontier of Sasanian Persia hard enough that Shapur II spent years fighting them, and then signed on as his allies. The Roman officer and historian Ammianus Marcellinus saw them in person at the siege of Amida in 359, riding with the Persian army under a king he calls Grumbates, and his account is nearly all the direct testimony that survives.

Almost everything else about them is argued over. The name, Chionitae in Latin and Xyon in Middle Persian, is probably the same root as Hun, and Persian writers reused an old Avestan word for a legendary enemy nation, the Hyaona, to label them, which says how the Sasanians saw them: a recurring threat from the east wearing a familiar name. Whether they spoke an Eastern Iranian language or a Turkic one is unresolved. The states that followed them used Bactrian, the local Iranian language, on coins and in documents, which tells us more about their subjects than about them. Modern scholars usually place them at the head of the so-called Iranian Huns, a sequence running through the Kidarites, the Alkhon, the Nezak and the Hephthalites, and later Persian tradition split the Xyon into Red and White, labels usually matched to the Kidarites and the Hephthalites.

The one vivid window Ammianus leaves open is a funeral. Grumbates' son was killed by a bolt from the walls of Amida, and the Xionites stopped the war to mourn him: the body lay in state for a week ringed by ten effigies of the dead, the camp wailed, and then the corpse was burned and the bones sealed in a silver urn to be carried home. Cremation was an abomination to the Zoroastrian Persians beside them, so the scene marks the Xionites as something other than a Persian client, a steppe people keeping their own rites inside an empire that needed their cavalry. Their legacy is mostly a name and a pattern. The Huna who broke into Gupta India, the Hephthalites who killed a Persian king in battle, and the long Persian habit of calling every eastern horseman a Xyon all lead back to the people Ammianus watched grieve outside a Roman fortress.