Archaeology New Magazine by Dario Radley - Archaeologists have unearthed a remarkable double burial in Poland, dating back 1,600 years, which marks the oldest known Hunnic burial site in the country. This discovery was made in the village of Czulice near Krakow.
Facial reconstructions of the boys who were found buried at the site. Credit: Marta Barszcz.
The Huns, a formidable group of nomadic warriors originating from Central Asia, are renowned for their devastating raids across Europe in the 4th and 5th centuries. Under the leadership of the infamous Attila the Hun, referred to as “the Scourge of God” by contemporaneous Christians, they established a vast empire that extended from modern-day Russia to France. Attila’s military prowess was so formidable that both the Eastern (Byzantine) and Western Roman empires paid him tributes to avoid his wrath.
In 2018, Jakub Niebylski, an archaeologist with the Polish Academy of Sciences, led an excavation in Czulice that unearthed the grave. This site contained the remains of two boys aged between 7 and 9 years, buried alongside an assortment of grave goods and animal remains.
The grave, an oval pit located just over two feet below the surface, contained the scattered bones of the boys, identified through DNA analysis as having distinct ancestries. One boy labeled Individual I, was of local European origin, likely connected to the Pannonian Plain in modern-day Hungary. The other, Individual II, exhibited genetic affinities with present-day Asian populations, particularly nomads from Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and was determined to be of Hunnic origin.
( KAF add. - - In the scientific article “Y-Chromosome Haplogroups from Hun, Avar, and Conquering Hungarian Period Nomadic Peoples of the Carpathian Basin,” authored by Endre Neparáczk along with a group of leading international geneticists and published in 2019 in the journal Nature, the following results were obtained from the DNA analysis of one of the Hun elite:
“Hun 3 belonged to R1a1a1b2a2- Z2124, a subclade of R1a1a1b2-Z93, the east Eurasian subbranch of R1a. Today Z2124 is most frequent in Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan, but is also widespread among Karachai-Balkars and Baskhirs.
Z2124 was widespread on the Bronze Age steppe, especially in the Afanasievo and Sintashta cultures and R1a detected in Xiongnus very likely belong to the same branch.”
Credit: Jakub M. Niebylski
The Hunnic boy’s remains were particularly notable for the artificially deformed shape of his skull, a practice common among the Hunnic elite aimed at distinguishing their social status.
This boy was buried with several valuable items, including a gold earring, silver buckles, a clay vessel, and an iron knife, indicative of his high status. In contrast, the European boy, who lacked grave goods, was found buried on his stomach, suggesting a lower social status, possibly as a servant or companion to the Hunnic boy.
(KAF add. - Yuri Alexandrovich Zuev: the term "Kyr-Kun." On the question of the ethnic origins of the Kyrgyz according to Chinese sources"
"One of the peoples whose origin and 'Turkicization' is directly linked to the westward movement of the Huns is the ancient Kyrgyz. This view was proposed at one time by A.N. Bernshtam: 'Based on the study of materials from graves of the Oglakhty complex type, the following can be established for the Minusinsk Basin (for the group of so-called Tashtyk Culture burials):
1) The graves, judging by the fabrics identical to those from Noin-Ula, dated to the first centuries A.D., belong to the period of Hunnic dominance in this area, and possibly also to the Xianbei, for whom the Minusinsk Basin, which in antiquity was called the country of Giangun (Kyrgyz), with a population of Dingling origin, was their northern border. The intermingling of Central Asian tribes with the Dinglings gave rise to the first Kyrgyz ethnic association.
2) The tribes of the country of Giangun were the northern part of the Hunnic confederation and were engaged in agriculture and pastoral livestock breeding, which was likely the main form of production. Through the Huns, the Dinglings traded with China, from which they received fabrics, mirrors, and other goods in exchange for hunting, livestock, and fishing products.
The Dinglings had fairly developed industries: ceramics, metalworking, and others.'"
In the paragraph about the ancient Kyrgyz, A.N. Bernshtam writes: "On the Yenisei, where the Europoid-type Dingling had long lived, a new group of tribes appeared as a result of the mixing of the Dingling with the Huns and Xianbei, known in Chinese sources as Ge-gun or Jian-gun" (ibid.; it should be Ge-kun, Jian-kun).
Here, different phenomena from various time periods are mixed: 1) the westward campaign of the Hunnic Chanyu Zhizhi in the mid-1st century B.C.; 2) the appearance of the Mongolic-speaking Xianbei-Sabirs in the 3rd century A.D., and 3) the chronicle does not account for the existence (rather than the origin!) of the Jian-kun (Kyrgyz) in the late 3rd century B.C.
However, some indirect data from written sources suggest that the ancient Kyrgyz were Turkic-speaking long before the Huns' (Chinese: Xiongnu) westward campaigns in the mid-1st century B.C. Since the earliest Chinese accounts of Turkic-speaking tribes refer to the Huns, as well as their descendants, the Xiongnu (Huns), and the Kyr-Kun (Kyrgyz) (Jian-kun), the author of this article believes that analyzing the terms Xiongnu and Jian-kun could shed some light on the question of the Kyrgyz's origin.
In Chinese-Tabgatch documents from the 3rd-5th centuries A.D., there are frequent mentions of tribes such as Tuguhun, Tuyuhun, Kezhuhun, etc., all sharing a distinctive final part of their names, typically represented by the same character hun, with its ancient pronunciation ghun.
According to L. Bazin, the form ghun is identical to the ancient Turkic plural-collective suffix ghun, which, in turn, traces back to the independent word kün — "female ancestor" — "human collective" — "people." This conclusion allows us to include this form of the Chinese rendition of the term ghun (*kün*) into the corpus of ancient Turkic social terminology.
If the etymology of the term kün establishes a relationship between the concepts of woman and people, initially connected by kinship ties and later by ethnic unity, then we have reason to suppose that the term kün could have become the self-designation of some Turkic-speaking tribe or clan.
Indeed, in Chinese sources from the 5th-10th centuries, we find numerous descriptions of the tribes hun — ghun and kun-u, with its ancient reading kün-ŋ — kün, whose names are quite comparable both with the hun from Chinese-Tabgatch documents and with the kün of the Orkhon texts.
The folk etymology of these and related tribes traces their origin to a common ancestor, the Xiongnu — ghun, known in phonetic sources as ghun — gunna.
The form hun first appears in Chinese sources from the 7th-5th centuries B.C. to designate the Turkic-speaking inhabitants of Mongolia. According to common opinion, it corresponds to the later widespread (3rd century B.C.) ethnonym Xiongnu-*ghun*.
The brief context in which this first mention appears is quite curious: "liu-hun-zhi-rong" — "western (in Chinese orientation, southwestern) foreigners of the six huns." From this, it follows: 1) the inhabitants of the Western Region, the ancestors of the Huns, were called by the Turkic term ghun (or kün), and 2) they were divided into six groups, each of which bore the same name.
Today, the true pronunciation of the terms Ge-kun — Ke[r]-kün and Jian-kun — Ki[r]-kün, i.e., Kyrkün, is established. Both forms are reasonably deciphered from Turkic vocabulary as kyr (or kir) — "field," "steppe," and kün — "field Huns," "steppe Huns."
For the origin of the ethnonym "Kyrgyz" from "kyrk" — "forty" and "z" — a plural form, see S.E. Malov, Monuments, p. 417; Dorji Banzarov, Collected Works, Moscow, 1955, p. 184. D. Banzarov, in our view, incorrectly restored the singular form "Kirgiz" from the plural "Kergut"; it would have been better to restore it as "Kergun." The plural form of "Kirgiz" is repeatedly found in The Secret History as "Kirgisut."
Both forms are logically deciphered from Turkic vocabulary as kyr (or kir) — "field," "steppe," and kün — "field Huns," "steppe Huns." This interpretation is supported not only by all subsequent forms of the Chinese transcription of the term "Kyrkün" up to the 6th century but also by data from written sources. For example, the anonymous Hudud al-Alam mentions the city of Kirkun-khan ("the Kyrgyz khan") north of the Tian Shan; a city with the same name and the Hirgun tribe were also known to Rashid al-Din.
The name of the Kergut tribe (the plural form of Kergun) appears in the Mongolian text of the Tsagan-Baishin inscription of the 17th century. However, researchers (V. Kotvich and G.E. Grumm-Grzhimailo) consider its comparison with the ethnonym "Kyrgyz" quite doubtful.
Finally, the name of the Hirgun River (in Siberia: Kirgun, Kyrkun), a left tributary of the Baldzhir River in northern Mongolia, is well-known and can be seen as a toponymic trace of the Kyrkün-Kyrgyz presence there. All of this makes it quite plausible to consider the existence of the Kyrkün tribe as real and to compare it with the Jian-kun (Kyrkün) mentioned in Chinese chronicles.
Some data from Chinese chronicles support the identification of the Kyrkün with the Huns, shedding light not only on this equivalence but also on the broader Hunnic question. This includes a 3rd-century A.D. chronicle, Wei Lue, preserved in the annotations to the Sanguozhi, which has yet to be fully considered by researchers.
In this work, the existence of two groups of Kyrkuns is noted. One of them (Ge-kun) is listed among the countries located north of the land of the Huns (Xiongnu!), that is, north of Ordos. In the list, it is placed between the Dingling-Dili to the east and the Xinli-Sir to the west.
This localization of the Kyrkuns coincides with the data from the Qian Hanshu and Tang Huiyao, which identified the Kyrkuns as being located on the upper Yenisei.
A more interesting report states: "The land of Jian-kun is located to the northwest of Kangju. It has a fighting force of 30,000 men. They migrate, following the grass; there are many wolves; they have good horses." - Yuri Alexandrovich Zuev: the term "Kyr-Kun." On the question of the ethnic origins of the Kyrgyz according to Chinese sources")
Author: Dario Radley | Archaeology News Online Magazine
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