The European Huns were not of Turkish origin, as previously assumed, but apparently had South Siberian ancestors, as an ethnic-linguistic study. Accordingly, Attila and his Huns did not speak an early form of Turkish, but old-arinic-and thus the same Paleosiric language as their Asian ancestors and the so-called Xiongnu. This Central Asian dynasty was therefore related to the Huns or are even its direct ancestors.
The Huns – including Attila and his ruling dynasty – once dominated Southeast Europe. The horror kingdom of this rider warrior lasted from the fourth to fifth century AD and was therefore relatively short -lived, but quite influential and a serious threat to the Romans. It is known that the Huns ancestors came from Central Asia. However, their exact ethnic and linguistic origins have so far been controversial, since no written documents have been preserved in their own language. Instead, many insights into the Huns rely on font documents in other languages that have written foreign peoples in retrospect about the Huns.
The same applies to the Xiongnu dynasty, the name of which comes from Chinese. These shepherd nomads formed a loose tribal configuration in today’s Northwest China and the surrounding area from the third century BC. The Chinese allegedly prompted their repeated attacks to build the large wall. The capital of the Xiongnu-Steppenreich, Long Cheng, uncovered archaeologists in Mongolia a few years ago. According to this, the Xiongnu also lived in Inner Asia, but a few centuries before the flowering of the Hunnreich in Europe. Due to archaeological and genetic findings, historians suspect that the Xiongnu were related to the ethnic ancestors of the Huns or identical, some of which later left the area towards Europe.
Huns and Xiongnu had the same language
It is also known that Turkish peoples expanded westwards from the seventh century AD. Therefore, it was previously assumed that the Xiongnu and the Huns ancestors also spoke a turk language. Likewise, researchers also consider a language of Mongolian or Iranian descent possible. Svenja Bonmann from the University of Cologne and Simon Fries from the University of Oxford have now examined which of these theories. For this purpose, the two researchers analyzed various linguistic sources, which contained loan words, glosses, names of the Huns as well as local and water names. From this they reconstructed the possible development and belonging to the Hunnn language.
Together, the data suggest: the Huns ancestors and the Xiongnu actually shared a common language-an early form of the so-called Arinian. However, this ancient Arinian language is neither one of the Turk languages nor the Iranian or Mongolian languages, but to the still older group of Jenissejische Languages, a sub-group of Paleosiberian languages. These were spoken in Siberia before the penetration of Uralic, Turkish and Tungusian ethnic groups. Even today there are smaller ethnic groups on the banks of the Jenissei river in Russia, which speak one Jenisenian language, as the team explains.
This common language basis for the Huns ancestors and Xiongnu dated the researchers based on the texts about 2000 years ago, i.e. around the turn of the time. “It was long before the Turk peoples hiked to Inner Asia and even even before splitting up the Urtürkische into several daughter languages,” explains Bonmann. “This old-arinical language even influenced the early Turk languages and had a certain prestige in Inner Asia. This implies that the old-Arinian well-being was the mother tongue of the rulers’ dynasty of the Xiongnu.” According to this, the Xiongnu could have been the defining and direct ancestors of the European Huns, the team concludes.
From where are the Huns migrated to Europe?
Based on the local and water names in the texts, the two researchers also reconstructed the first way in which the Hunnen ancestors emigrated to Europe. According to this, they migrated from the South Siberian Altai Sajan Mountains between Taiga and Steppe-in today’s border area of Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. In doing so, they pressed their Arinian-language stamps in Inner Asia, integrated and mingled with them over several generations, especially with Germanic and Iranian peoples. Ultimately, this led to the multilingual and multi -ethnic Huns in Europe.
Also interesting: According to the analysis, the famous Hunkönig “Attila” bears an ancient Arinian or Jenissejische name or nickname that could mean as much as “the quick, quick”. So far, “Attila” has been considered a Germanic word that can be translated as “fathers”. But that could have been an error as well as the classification of the Hunn language as Turkish -stunned, Bonmann and Fries conclude.
Source: University of Cologne; Specialist articles: Transactions of the Philological Society, Doi: 10.1111/1467-968x.12321
