Note 11 — STEPPES AND DESERTS.

p. 6.—“A brown Pastoral Race, the Hiongnu.”

The Hiongnu (Hiong-nou), who Deguignes, and with him many historians, long considered to be the Huns, inhabited that vast region of Tartary which is bounded on the east by Uo-leang-ho (the present Mantschu dominion), on the south by the Chinese wall, on the west by the U-siün territory, and on the north by the country of the Eleuthes. But the Hiongnu belong to the Turkish, and the Huns to the Finnish or Uralian race. The northern Huns, a rude pastoral people, unacquainted with agriculture, were dark brown (sunburnt); the southern Huns or Haja-telah, (called by the Byzantines Euthalites or Nepthalites, and dwelling along the eastern shore of the Caspian), had a fairer complexion. The latter cultivated the ground, and possessed towns. They are often called the white, or fair Huns, and d’Herbelot even declares them to be Indo-Scythians. On Punu, the Leader or Tanju of the Huns, and on the great drought and famine which, about 46 A.D., caused a part of the nation to migrate northwards, (see Deguignes, Histoire gén. des Huns, des Turcs, &c., 1756, T. i. pt. i. p. 217; pt. ii. p. 111, 125, 223, 447.) All the accounts of the Huns taken from the above-mentioned celebrated work have been subjected to a learned and strict examination by Klaproth. According to the result of this research the Hiongnu belong to the widely diffused Turkish races of the Altai and Tangnu Mountains. The name Hiongnu, even in the third century before the Christian era, was a general name for the Ti, Thu-kiu or Turks, in the north and north-west of China. The southern Hiongnu overcame the Chinese, and in conjunction with them destroyed the empire of the northern Hiongnu. These latter fled to the west, and this flight seems to have given the first impulse to the migration of nations in Middle Asia. The Huns, who were long confounded with the Hiongnu, (as the Uigures with the Ugures and the Hungarians), belonged, according to Klaproth, to the Finnish race of the Ural mountains between Europe and Asia, a race which was variously mingled with Germans, Turks, and Samoieds. (Klaproth, Asia Polyglotta, p. 183 and 211; Tableaux Historiques de l’Asie, p. 102 and 109.) The Huns (Οὖννοι) are first named by Dionysius Perigetes, a writer who was able to obtain more accurate information respecting the interior of Asia, because, as a learned man born at Charax on the Arabian Gulf, Augustus had sent him back to the East to accompany thither his adopted son Caius Agrippa. Ptolemy, a century later, writes the word (Χοῦνοι) with a strong aspiration, which, as St. Martin observes, is found again in the geographical name of Chunigard.