Note 11 — ON STEPPES AND DESERTS.

p. 5—“A tawny tribe of Herdsmen.”

The Hiongnu (Hioung-nou), whom Deguignes and with him many other historians long believed to be identical with the Huns, inhabited the vast Tartarian tract of land which is bordered on the east by Uo-leang-ho, the present territory of the Mant-schu, on the south by the Chinese wall, on the west by the U-siün, and on the north by the land of the Eleuthes But the Hiongnu belong to the Turkish, and the Huns to the Finnish or Uralian race. The northern Huns, a rude people of herdsmen, unacquainted with agriculture, were of a blackish 81brown complexion. The southern Huns, or Hajatehah called by the Byzantines Euthalites or Nephthalites, and inhabiting the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, had fairer skins. These pursued agriculture, and dwelt in towns. They are frequently termed White Huns, and d’Herbelot even regards them as Indo-Scythians. In Deguignes^[CN] an account will be found of the Punu, the leader or Tanju of the Huns, and of the great drought and famine which led to the migration of a portion of the nation northwards about the year 46 A.D. All the details, given in his celebrated work regarding the Hiongnu, have been recently submitted by Klaproth to a rigid and learned scrutiny. From the result of his investigations it would appear, that the Hiongnu belong to the widely diffused Turkish races of the Altai and Tangnu mountain districts. The name of Hiongnu was a general name for the Ti, Thu-kiu or Turks, in the north and north-west of China, even in the third century before the Christian era. The southern Hiongnu submitted themselves to the Chinese, and in conjunction with the latter destroyed the empire of the northern Hiongnu, who were in consequence compelled to flee to the west, and thus appear to have given the first impulse to the migration of nations in Central Asia. The Huns, who were long confounded with the Hiongnu (as the Uigures were with the Ugures and Hungarians) belonged, according to Klaproth,^[CO] to the Finnish race of the Uralian mountains, which race has been variously intermixed with Germans, Turks, and Samoiedes.

The Huns (Οὖννοι) are first mentioned by Dionysius Periegetes, a writer who was able to obtain more accurate information than others regarding the interior of Asia, because, as a learned man and a native of Charax on the Arabian Gulf, he was sent back to the East by Augustus, 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 again met with in the geographical name of Chunigard.