Did the Northern Xiongnu Become the Huns?

As in the case of the Rouran with the Avars, oversimplifications have led to the Xiongnu often being identified with the Huns, who began to populate the frontiers of Europe by 370 C.E. The connection started with the writings of the eighteenth century French historian Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes, who noticed that a few of the barbarian tribes north of China associated with the Xiongnu had been named "Hun" with varying Chinese characters. This theory remains at the level of speculation, although it is accepted by some scholars, including Chinese ones. DNA testing of Hun remains has not proven conclusive in determining the origin of the Huns. Linguistically, it is important to understand that "xiōngnú" is only the modern standard Mandarin pronunciation (based on the Beijing dialect) of "匈奴." The sound of the character "匈" during the fourth–sixth centuries C.E. has been reconstructed as /hoŋ/. The supposed sound of the first character has a clear similarity with the name "Hun" in European languages. Whether this is evidence of kinship or mere coincidence is hard to tell. It could lend credence to the theory that the Huns were in fact descendants of the Northern Xiongnu who migrated westward, or that the Huns were using a name borrowed from the Northern Xiongnu, or that these Xiongnu made up part of the Hun confederation. The traditional etymology of "匈" is that it is a pictogram of the facial features of one of these people, wearing a helmet, with the "x" under the helmet representing the scars they inflicted on their faces to frighten their enemies. However, there is no actual evidence for this interpretation. In modern Chinese, the character "匈" is used in four ways: to mean "chest" (written 胸 in Chinese characters); in the name Xiōngnú (匈奴; "Xiongnu"); in the word 匈人 (Xiōngrén "Hun [person]"); and in the name Xiōngyálì (匈牙利; "Hungary"). The last of these is a modern coinage, which may derive from the belief that the Huns were related to the Xiongnu. The second character, "奴," appears to have no parallel in Western terminology. Its contemporary pronunciation was /nhō/, and it means "slave," although it is possible that it has only a phonetic role in the name 匈奴. There is almost certainly no connection between the "chest" meaning of 匈 and its ethnic meaning. There might conceivably be some sort of connection with the identically pronounced word "凶," which means "fierce," "ferocious," "inauspicious," "bad," or "violent act." Most probably, the word derives from the tribe's own name for itself as a semi-phonetic transliteration into Chinese, and the character was chosen somewhat arbitrarily, a practice that continues today in Chinese renderings of foreign names. Although phonetic evidence linking the Xiongnu with the Huns is not conclusive, new evidence from Central Asia might support a political and cultural link between the Xiongnu and the Huns. Translations of the term “Xiongnu” into “Hun,” and “Hun” into “Xiongnu” have been found in Central Asian sources of the fourth century. In the Sogdian Ancient Letters, the Xiongnu of Northern China are named “xwn,” while in the Buddhist translations by Dharmaraksa (b. 230 C.E.), “Huna” in the Indian text is translated “Xiongnu.” There is also archaeological evidence; Hunnic cauldrons are similar to those of the Ordos Xiongnu, and the cauldrons were apparently used in similar rituals, because they have been found buried in river banks both in Hungary and in the Ordos. Another possible link between the Xiongnu and the Huns has been detected in an old Byzantine codex dating back to the fourteenth century. Inside the codex was a list in a Slav language from the early Middle Ages, which was decoded and translated by Omeljan Pritsak professor of history and language (at Lvov, Hamburg and Harvard University) in 1955 and named: "The Old-Bulgarian King List" [16] (Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans). This contains the names and descendants of the Hun kings` dynasty. At the beginning of it is the great Mao-Tun (Modu shanyu), who established the Xiongnu Empire. Among the other descendants` names is the name of Ernakh, the youngest son of Attila The Hun. It indicates that the rulers of the Xiongnu and the Huns were from the same dynasty, which supports the possibility that Xiongnu eventually became the Huns.