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The Huns were a nomadic group of people who are known to have lived in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia between the 1st century AD and the 7th century. They were first reported living east of the Volga River, in an area that was part of Scythia at the time; the Huns' arrival is associated with the migration westward of a Scythian people, the Alans. They were first mentioned as Hunnoi by Tacitus. In 91 AD, the Huns were said to be living near the Caspian Sea and by about 150 had migrated southeast into the Caucasus.〔Gmyrya L. ''Hun Country At The Caspian Gate'', Dagestan, Makhachkala 1995, p. 9 (no ISBN but the book is available in US libraries, Russian title ''Strana Gunnov u Kaspiyskix vorot'', Dagestan, Makhachkala, 1995)〕 By 370, the Huns had established a vast, if short-lived, dominion in Europe. In the 18th century, the French scholar Joseph de Guignes became the first to propose a link between the Huns and the Xiongnu people, who were northern neighbours of China in the 3rd century BC. Since Guignes' time, considerable scholarly effort has been devoted to investigating such a connection. However, there is no scholarly consensus on a direct connection between the dominant element of the Xiongnu and that of the Huns. Priscus, a 5th-century Roman diplomat and Greek historian, mentions that the Huns had a language of their own; little of it has survived and its relationships have mainly been considered the Altaic languages. Numerous other ethnic groups were included under Attila's rule, including very many speakers of Gothic, which some modern scholars describe as a lingua franca of the Empire. Their main military technique was mounted archery. The Huns may have stimulated the Great Migration, a contributing factor in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.〔"However, the seed and origin of all the ruin and various disasters that the wrath of Mars aroused ... we have found to be (the invasions of the Huns)". Ammianus 1922, XXXI, ch. 2〕 They formed a unified empire under Attila the Hun, who died in 453; their empire broke up the next year. Their descendants, or successors with similar names, are recorded by neighbouring populations to the south, east and west as having occupied parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia approximately from the 4th century to the 6th century. Variants of the Hun name are recorded in the Caucasus until the early 8th century. ==Origin== The Huns were "a confederation of warrior bands", ready to integrate other groups to increase their military power, in the Eurasian Steppe in the 4th to . Most aspects of their ethnogenesis (including their language and their links to other peoples of the steppes) are uncertain. Walter Pohl explicitly states: "All we can say safely is that the name ''Huns'', in late antiquity, described prestigious ruling groups of steppe warriors." The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who completed his work of the history of the Roman Empire in the early 390s, recorded that the "people of the dwell beyond the Sea of Azov near the frozen ocean".〔''Ammianus Marcellinus: The Later Roman Empire'' (31.2.), p. 411.〕 Jerome associated them with the Scythians in a letter, written four years after the Huns invaded the empire's eastern provinces in 395. The equation of the Huns with the Scythians, together with a general fear of the coming of the Antichrist in the late , gave rise to their identification with Gog and Magog (whom Alexander the Great had shut off behind inaccessible mountains, according to a popular legend). This demonization of the Huns is also reflected in Jordanes's ''Getica'', written in the , which portrayed them as a people descending from "unclean spirits"〔''The Gothic History of Jordanes'' (24:121), p. 85.〕 and expelled Gothic witches. Since Joseph de Guignes in the , historians have associated the Huns who appeared on the borders of Europe in the with the Xiongnu ("howling slaves") who had invaded China from the territory of present-day Mongolia between the and the . Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen was the first to challenge the traditional approach, based primarily on the study of written sources, and to emphasize the importance of archaeological research. Thereafter the identification of the Xiongnu as the Huns' ancestors became controversial. The similarity of their ethnonyms is one of the most important links between the two peoples. The Buddhist monk Dharmarakṣa, who was an important translator of Indian religious texts in the , applied the word Xiongnu when translating the references to the Huna people into Chinese. A Sogdian merchant described the invasion of northern China by the "Xwn" people in a letter, written in . Étienne de la Vaissière asserts both documents prove that Huna or Xwn were the "exact transcriptions" of the Chinese "Xiongnu" name. Christopher P. Atwood rejects that identifiction because of the "very poor phonological match" between the three words. For instance, Xiungnu begins with a voiceless velar fricative, Huna with a voiceless glottal fricative; Xiungnu is a two-syllable word, but Xwn only has one syllable. The Chinese ''Book of Wei'' contain references to "the remains of the descendants of the Xiongnu" who lived in the region of the Altai Mountains in the early . According to De la Vaissière, the Chinese source proves that nomadic groups preserved their Xiongnu identity for centuries after the fall of their empire. Both the Xiongnu and Huns used bronze cauldrons, similarly to all peoples of the steppes. Based on the study and categorization of cauldrons from archaeological sites of the Eurasian Steppes, archaeologist Toshio Hayashi concludes that the spread of the cauldrons "may indicate the route of migration of the Hunnic tribes" from Mongolia to the northern region of Central Asia in the 2nd or , and from Central Asia towards Europe in the second half of the , which also implies the Huns' association with the Xiungnu. The Huns practiced artificial cranial deformation, but there is no evidence of such practise among the Xiongnu. This custom had already been practiced in the Eurasian Steppes in the Bronze Age and in the early Iron Age, but it disappeared around . It again started to spread among the local inhabitants of the region of the Talas River and in the Pamir Mountains in the .〔 In addition to the Huns, the custom is also evidenced among the Yuezhi and Alans. The lengthy pony-tail, which was a characteristic of the Xiongnu, was not documented among the Huns. When writing of the relationship between the Xiongnu and Huns, historian Hyun Jin Kim concludes: "Thus to refer to Hun-Xiongnu links in terms of old racial theories or even ethnic affiliations simply makes a mockery of the actual historical reality of these extensive, multiethnic, polyglot steppe empires". He also emphasizes that "the ancestors of the Hunnic core were part of the Xiongnu Empire and possessed a strong Xiongnu element, and the ruling elite of the claimed to belong to the political tradition of this imperial entity." Taking into account the historical gap between the Chinese reports of the Xiongnu and the European records of the Huns, Peter Heather states: "Even if we do make some connection between fourth-century Huns and first-century (), therefore, an awful lot of water had passed under an awful lot of bridges during 300 years worth of lost history." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Huns」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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