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The original geographic location of Xiongnu is generally placed at the Ordos. According to Sima Qian, the Xiongnu were descendants of Chunwei (淳維), possibly a son of Jie, the final ruler of the Xia Dynasty. However, while there is no direct evidence contradicting this account, there is no direct evidence supporting it either.
The language of the Xiongnu reflects without any scholarly consensus, based on the analysis between early 19th century to 20th century different opinions were proposed; proponents of the Turkic languages included Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, Julius Klaproth, Shiratori Kurakichi, Gustaf John Ramstedt, Annemarie von Gabain and Omeljan Pritsak, while others; like Paul Pelliot insisted a Mongolic origin; Albert Terrien de Lacouperie considered them to be multi component groups.[3]
Lajos Ligeti was the first to suggest that the Xiongnu spoke a Yeniseian language. In the early 1960s Edwin Pulleyblank was the first to expand upon this idea with credible evidence. In 2000, Alexander Vovin reanalyzed Pulleyblank's argument and found further support for it by utilizing the most recent reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology by Starostin and Baxter and a single Chinese transcription of a sentence in the language of the Jie (a member tribe of the Xiongnu confederacy). Previous Turkic interpretations of the aforementioned sentence do not match the Chinese translation as precisely as using Yeniseian grammar.[4]
Recent genetics research dated 2003[5] confirms the studies[6] indicating that the Turkic peoples,[7] originated from the same area and therefore are possibly related.
The rock art of the Yinshan and Helanshan is dated from the 9th millennium BC to 19th century. It consists mainly of engraved signs (petroglyphs) and only minimally of painted images.[8] Ma Liqing compared the petroglyphs (which he presumed to be the sole extant example of possible Xiongnu writings), and the Orkhon script (the earliest known Turkic alphabet) recently, and argued a new connection between both of them.[9]
Excavations conducted between 1924-1925, in Noin-Ula kurgans located in Selenga River in the northern Mongolian hills north of Ulan Bator, produced objects with over twenty carved characters, which were either identical or very similar to that of to the runic letters of the Turkic Orkhon script discovered in the Orkhon Valley.[10] |