Differences between Huns and Mongols?

**Mouzafphaerre** · 01-05-2006, 00:40

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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** · 01-05-2006, 01:10

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.