Differences between Huns and Mongols?

[GeWee]

I don't know much about any of these groups of people other than that they lived during different eras, used horse archers and that Attila the Hun and Genghis (the Mongol) Khan were both ruthless warlords.
What were the differences between these peoples?
Were the Huns the ancestors of the Mongols?

[LeftEyeNine]

All I know is Huns are a pre-Turkic tribe while Mongols are not a Turkic tribe -but close- though they are generally confused with them.

For sure, we have better individuals here who would make more satisfying explanations.

[Vladimir]

For sure, we have better individuals here who would make more satisfying explanations.

Well I'm not one of them. What I know is that the Huns were a Steppe tribe that lived south of the Avars (from whom Europeans learned of the stirrup). The Mongols were exactly that, people from Mongolia.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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AFAIK it's a 17th C. humanist who suggested first that the Huns were descended from the Xiong Nu. Jurchen Fury established so firmly in another thread that the Xiong Nu were speaking a very close if not identical language to Turks (Tu Jue), Uyghurs (Hui Hu) and other turkic peoples. However, I don't know of any certain fact stating the relation, if at all, between the Xiong Nu and the Huns.

Jurcheeen!!!

Mongols are yet another Asiatic people speaking an agglutinative language similar in grammar to turkic toungues as well as such distinc speeches as Finnish, Magyar and Japanese, but lacking enough number of cognates especially in basic sets of words such as numbers, pronouns etc. to conclude a language family such as Indo-European or Semitic etc. There are striking similarities between the anatomical shapes and overall phisionomies of all Asiatic peples and common properties in the lifestyles of steppe peoples, no matter ethnicity (that is including the Indo European steppe peoples) enforced by the life conditions.

Well, yes. Somebody call Jurchen Fury over here please.
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[Watchman]

All those steppe nomads were constantly conquering each other and naturally getting pretty ethnically mixed up in the process. By what I've read there's usually considered to be a relatively clear (mainly linguistical) division between Turkic (or, for most of their history since they didn't really get rolling until what was it, around the 600s or so, "proto-Turkic") and Mongolic peoples. The Mongols obviously go to the latter group. The Huns I frankly can't recall what I read about, and don't really feel like looking if I can find any of the articles right now.

Obviously, however, the Huns can't exactly be the ancestors of the Mongols seeing as how *they* migrated to the western end of the Great Eurasian Steppe Belt in the first few centuries AD, and the Mongols were (and still are) puttering about the eastern end well into the second millenium...

'Course, they might well *share* a common ancestry in one form or another...

Incidentally, do I remember correctly that the Avars were a Mongolic people who had to migrate westwards when the emerging Turks rebelled against them and set out to build their own (and, in the fine tradition of nomads everywhere, rather short-lived) khanate instead ?

[Mouzafphaerre]

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There are, to my knowledge, more than one people referred to as Avars and probably they are not of the same stock. Let's first eliminate the modern Caucassian people, Avars, who are neither turkic nor mongolic nor from the steppes at all. Then there are the Rouran (I've also seen Juan Juan) against whom the very Turks rebelled and established their own khanate. For the stereotypical conclusions such as

in the fine tradition of nomads everywhere, rather short-lived

see below. Then there are Avars in the Eurasian steppe in the seventh century.

Now come... Though with frequent domestic turmoil and periods of certain interruption, the Turk (Türük/Tu Jue/Tu Kyu...) khanate lived from the 6th century up to the 8th, at which time it was being overthrown and short afterwards replaced by the Uyghurs, who were not so short lived and in later stages quite sedentary, and Karluks, migrating southwards becoming the seed of the Kara Khans, who were also sedentary and credited as the first turkic "state" to adopt Islam en masse. (The last ever Türük khagan, although a mere figurehead, ruled until 742.)

The house of Genghis, lthough titularly, ruled in India until mid 19th century; his offspring ruled quite long lived and sedentary statehoods in various places of the old wold: The Yuan dynasty, the Il Khans (who were actually short lived but suceeded by the Jalairids of Jebe's descent and others to last a few centuries), the Golden Khanate, whose latest successors were the Crimen Khans who were deposed in the 18th century and various petty Turkestan emirates are worth naming.
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[Watchman]

No, it's a fine tradition of pastoralists not to build overly long-lived empires. They seem to have been restless that way. How many do you know that in one form or another survived for a truly extended period comparable to what settled realms have proven capable of achieving ? And fracturing into little princedoms that by themselves might be relatively long-lived doesn't quite count - that kind of "balkanization" was the normal state of affairs for the steppe peoples, after all. I know two, and both of them turned into settled nations anyway - the Hungarians and the Turks. All the rest came apart at the seams sooner or later (whereas several settled kingdoms have an unbroken history as essentially cohesive political entities stretching back over a millenia or more), one of the longest-lived AFAIK being the Khazars who lasted something like five hundred years - until the Golden Horde rolled over them. Getting gobbled up by the next up-and-comer seems to have been a fairly common way for nomad empires to go, although plain fracturing seems to have been the most popular.

The Juan-Juan (which is apparently Chinese for "nasty crawling bugs" or somesuch, and thus presumably not what they called themselves) tend to get identified as the ancestors of the Avars, incidentally. They lasted about two hundred years on the steppes around the Black Sea and collapsed in rebellion and fractionalization following a failed siege of Constantinopole, AFAIK. I've been told there's a saying "gone like an Avar" due to the dearth of traces they left behind, apparently left a curiously lasting legacy in the form of the Slavs who fused into a relatively cohesive ethnic group and culture under their overlordship, rebelled and went their merry way when the khanate shattered.

[GeWee]

Thanks guys. I was hoping for this very flood of information when I posted here. :)

[snevets]

I have always found the suggestion pinning the huns as the xiong nu who raided china to be questionable. It seems too far a distance for casual migration over so short a time period. It would be believable if the Huns had an objective I suppose, but they didn't really. It is mostly accepted that the Huns conquered European areas less out of malice than a desire for wealth and the luxuries of the European area. It must be admitted however that the step, being a harsh climate would create similar peoples, and the step is much the same across a great distance. What I mean is that they could've been very similar people (the huns and xiong nu) without much similarity in terms of location.

[Watchman]

Casual ? By all accounts they were pushed away by other steppe peoples. The usual story really - pressure from their neighbors tended to be the easily most common reason nomad peoples started the long trans-Eurasian trek. As for the distance, caravans and travelers could cover the Silk Road in a couple of years. There's no reason why an entire nomad people could not similarly traverse virtually the entire width of the great steppe in just decade or two, especially if they're unable to secure decent pastureland along the way from its current occupiers and thus have to move on fairly soon.

Mind you, I've also read that around the time the Hsiung-Nu left their old haunts, the Huns arrived in European consciousness and the Migrations generally started going, the steppes were suffering from a period of drought which duly drove the nomads to look for new lands.

All steppe peoples were rather similar when you look at the basics - pastoral, horse-riding survivalists with a penchant for mounted archery, raiding and good organization. Permutations of thing like religion, art, equipement, favoured combat technique etc. etc. were then pretty much endless. However, the Huns were definitely new arrival from further east by the time they start appearing in records, and the only larger group known to have started migrating from near China inside suitable timeframe were the Hsiung-Nu. It is also well known that whenever a major steppe people started drifting westwards they usually ended up going all the way to the end of the steppe (and either remaining in the Black Sea region, proceeding to the Great Hungarian Plain, or going south towards Iran, Asia Minor and the Middle East when they ran out of steppe), so it's pretty likely the Hsiung-Nu and the Huns are more or less the same bunch (albeit with all the usual odds, ends and conquered subjects added along the way to the latter).

[Steppe Merc]

Watchman summed it up extremely well. Migrations happened all the time, and really the only nomads that Europeans bumped up with were forced that way by more powerful tribes (with a few excepetions, like the Mongols).

[Ludens]

Watchman summed it up extremely well. Migrations happened all the time, and really the only nomads that Europeans bumped up with were forced that way by more powerful tribes (with a few excepetions, like the Mongols).

This rather makes me wonder: if the Huns were driven out by more powerful neighbours (implying they were weak), how did they become such a treat to Europe? Had the Roman empire become that weak? Or are powerful steppe folks unstoppable except by typhoons?

[Kekvit Irae]

What were the differences between these peoples?

Roughly a thousand years.