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When the Huns appeared on Rome's northern frontier in the late 4th century, Roman writers described it as a shock, like a rupture in history. They wondered where the Huns came from and whether anyone had ever seen them before. That question still hasn't gone away.
But the reason it's hard to answer even now isn't because the evidence is missing necessarily. It's because the evidence has made the picture a lot more murky. Almost everything ancient authors tell us about the Huns comes from outsiders, mainly Roman writers. Aianis Marcelinus famously portrayed the Huns as alien and almost subhuman people without cities, laws, or agriculture. His account helped cement the idea that the Huns appeared suddenly from nowhere.
"They are all without fixed abode, without hearth or law, or settled mode of life, and keep roaming from place to place like fugitives, accompanied by the wagons in which they live. In wagons their wives weave for them their hideous garments. In wagons they cohabit with their husbands, bear children, and rear them to the age of puberty. None of their offspring, when asked, can tell you where he comes from, since he was conceived in one place, born far from there, and brought up still farther away. In truses, they are faithless and unreliable, strongly inclined to sway to the motion of every breeze of new hope that presents itself, and sacrificing every feeling to the mad impulse of the moment. Like unreasoning beasts, they are utterly ignorant of the difference between right and wrong. They are deceitful and ambiguous in speech, never bound by any reverence for religion or for superstition. They burn with an infinite thirst for gold, and they are so fickle and prone to anger that they often quarrel with their allies without provocation more than once on the same day and make friends with them again without a mediator."
But when we compare that with the account of Prriscus of Panium, who actually visited a hun court in the fifth century, we get a different portrayal. Prriscus describes hierarchy, diplomacy, gift exchange, and political restraint. The contradiction tells us more about Roman reactions to Han power than they tell us about the Huns. So texts are insufficient to answer the question we have.
Archaeology ought to be the place where the origins of the Huns become clear. It deals with physical evidence. But the Huns and earlier inner Asian groups like the Shyang New were nomadic or semi-nomeadic societies. They didn't build cities or monuments. If the Huns had migrated west as a single people from inner Asia into Europe, we would expect to see a clear archaeological trail. Maybe evidence of settlements, new everyday objects, and the replacement of local traditions. That isn't what archaeologists find.
Across regions associated with the Huns, especially in the Carpathian Basin, most of the settlements and cemeteries show continuity. Local pottery continues as normal. Housing patterns remain the same. Burial customs largely follow earlier Sarmatian, Gothic, or Roman period traditions. There's no sign of population replacement.
But there are some other signs. In a small number of graves, usually isolated or in very small clusters, we see step associated markers, partial horse burials, north south grave orientation, certain weapons, cauldrons, and in some elite cases, artificial cranial modification. These graves often use existing local features though rather than being new monuments. Shyang new elite burials in Mongolia, such as those at Noon, are large and architecturally complex, emphasizing hierarchy through deep pits and structured layouts. Han period graves in Europe, are far simpler. They lack monumentality, lack satellite burials, and are embedded in local cemeteries. So archaeologically this does not look like an inner Asian burial system transplanted into Europe. They seem to have placed step elite symbols selectively into a new social environment.
Artificial cranial modification shows how easily this evidence can be misread. It's sometimes labeled a hun trait but osteoarchchaeological studies show it appears in Eastern Europe before the Hun period and among multiple groups including Sarmatians and Allens. That means that when it appears in hun period graves, it's signaling that the inter dead are elites, not their ethnicity. The same is true of portable artifacts, bronze cauldrons, composite bows, horse gear, and animalstyle ornaments circulated across the Eurasian step for centuries. None of these objects belong uniquely to the Huns, and none originated with them. In Europe, they almost always appear alongside Roman glassware and local ceramics. The assemblages are always mixed. Rather than tracing a clean migration route from Mongolia to Europe, the archaeological record shows circulation of objects and practices within long-standing step networks. There's no evidence for mass east to west migration. There's no uniform hun culture spreading across Europe. Archaeology points to elite intrusion into these areas without demographic replacement. And because of the scarcity of the material, archaeology struggles to tell us where the Huns came from.
For a long time, historians supposed that the Huns were connected to the Shang New of Inner Asia. Works by scholars like Nicolola Kosmo showed that the Shang new operated as a step empire built on mounted elites, tribute relationships, and political dominance over ethnically diverse populations. Those same patterns appear among the Huns centuries later. The problem is that there are roughly 400 years between the collapse of the Shyang New Confederation and the appearance of the Huns in Europe. No written or archaeological record bridges that distance. So for decades, the Shang New Hun connection remained plausible but unprovable.
What about language? Can historical linguistics tell us the origin of the Huns? Well, we don't have Hun texts, unfortunately. What we have are fragments of their language, mostly names, titles, and short glosses preserved by outsiders, especially Chinese historians writing about the Shiang new and a single short verse attributed to another related group centuries later.
For much of the 20th century, the dominant assumption was that the Shiang new and possibly the Hans spoke an early form of Turk. This seemed reasonable. Later step empires that truly spoke Turk languages ruled many of the same regions and several political titles associated with step elites appear in Turk contexts. Some names recorded in Chinese sources can also be reconstructed in ways that resemble early Turic forms. All of these reconstructions depend on Chinese transcription practices. Characters used to approximate foreign sounds. Those transcriptions compress phonetic distinctions, obscure vowels, and reflect Chinese pronunciation rather than the source language. As a result, the same written form can often be reconstructed in multiple ways. A word that looks Turk may just as easily be a lone word, a shared title, or a later projection from better attested Turk empires.
This uncertainty led some scholars to explore a very different possibility that the ruling elite of the Shong New spoke a language related to the Yanisan family. A small group of Paleociberian languages once spoken along the Yanice River in Siberia. Today only one Yanisan language survives. It's called K. Others such as Ain and Pmpok disappeared in the early modern period. The idea that the Shong- New elite might have spoken an early Yanisan language goes back to the midentth century when certain linguists noticed that some Chong New words recorded in Chinese sources fit Turk phenology poorly but aligned more closely with Yanisan patterns.
In more recent decades, scholars such as Alexander Voven revisited this material using stricter historical linguistic methods. Voven argued that the short verse attributed to the J, a group linked in Chinese sources to Shang New ancestry, fits Yanisan grammar better than Turk. He also suggested that some Shang New vocabulary may represent Turk loan words reshaped by Yanisan morphology, pointing to a multilingual elite rather than a single dominant language. More recent attempts have tried to synthesize names, titles, loan words, and place names into a broader model in which both the Shiang New and the European Huns were part of a longlasting political tradition whose elite language may have belonged to an extinct southern branch of Yanisan. But it's still not decisive. We're trying to reconstruct languages spoken more than a thousand years ago from a handful of fragments preserved indirectly by outsiders.
And there's a deeper issue that affects all of these theories. Everything we know about step empires points toward multilingualism because these were coalitions. The elites would marry across groups, absorb new followers from other tribes, and borrow words freely. In that context, asking what language the Shangnu or the Huns spoke may be the wrong question. They probably spoke several.
At this point, probably good idea to bring up another question that often comes up. If the Huns ruled the Carpathian basin in the fifth century and the Hungarians settled there centuries later, are the Hungarians descendants of the Huns? Medieval Hungarian chronicers certainly thought so. From the Gesta Hungaram onward, Hungarian elites trace their origins back to Attilla, presenting the Hungarians as the rightful heirs to the Hanik legacy. Attilla became not just a historical figure but a founding ancestor. But this is where it's important to distinguish historical memory and actual history.
Archaeologically there's a gap of several centuries between the disappearance of the Huns and the arrival of the Hungarians. The intervening period includes the Aar Slavs and other groups with no documentary or material evidence of continuous Hun communities surviving into the 9th century. Linguistically, Hungarian is a uralic language unrelated to any language proposed for the Hans. So, there isn't a linguistic bridge that would suggest direct descent.
Now, let's talk about DNA. For a long time, genetics was treated as the tool that would finally settle the question of where the Hans came from. In practice, it's made things a little bit more complicated. A 2018 Nature paper analyzed ancient genomes from across Mongolia, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. And what that study showed is now foundational. Populations across the Eurasian step were mobile and repeatedly mixed over long periods of time. Mobility and ad mixture were the norm. The shiong new were shown to have had not only an East Asian component but also a western Eurasian one.
A 2020 cell paper analyzed genomewide data from 214 ancient individuals from Mongolia and the Bol region spanning about 6,000 years. For the Shiang new period specifically, they argued that the empire formed through the mixing of previously distinct populations already present in and around Mongolia. Their main point was that the Shang new were genetically heterogeneous from the beginning. Not a single biological population expanding outward. By the time the Shangn new empire appears in the record, that biological mixture is already built into it.
A 2021 study published in human genetics analyzed the genes of persons buried in a new cemetery and they had a substantial western genetic component which the authors attributed to schithiberians whom they had conquered and intermarried with. Noting also that shung new hloypes were found in Avars and early medieval Hungarians. They also concluded that Shang knew were ancestors of the Huns and Avars, but that there was a great deal of ad mixture. A 2023 science advances study pushed that further by showing that this diversity was visible not just across the empire as a whole, but also at imperial and local scales within Shangu communities.
Turning our attention now to the Huns, a 2022 current biology paper looked at ancient DNA from three groups who entered the Carpathian basin at different times. The Huns in the fifth century, the Avars a few centuries later, and the early Hungarians in the 9th century. What they found is that in each of these periods, there was a small group of people with ancestry tracing back to the eastern step in regions like Mongolia. That core group, as they call it, was always a minority. Most of the people living in the Carpathian basin during each of these periods were genetically local, descended from earlier European populations. The newcomers didn't replace the population. They became part of it and over time mixed with it.
The most important recent contribution here is a 2025 PNAS study which compared genomes from late Shangnu context in Mongolia with individuals buried in Hun period contexts in the Carpathian basin alongside material from Central Asia. What they found confirmed that most people buried in Hun period Europe are genetically local. They show continuity with earlier Western Eurasian populations including Sarmatian and Roman period groups. There's no evidence for a mass migration from inner Asia into Europe, but a small number of individuals stand out. These tend to be people buried with elite markers, horses, weapons, or other step associated practices, and they carry higher proportions of Northeast Asian ancestry. In a few cases, the study identified long identical by descent DNA segments linking these individuals to people from late Shong Newu contexts. So there's a real genealological connection, but it applies to a very small subset of the population. That means that the majority of early Hungarians, like the majority of Huns before them, were genetically mixed and largely local. So the Hungarians are not genetically the Huns. But by the Middle Ages, claiming descent from the Huns served a political purpose. It connected the Hungarian elite to a powerful, feared, and prestigious past. It legitimized rule, territory, and status because ancestry carried authority.
So where did the Huns come from? They came from a lot of places, not all of which are known. More generally, they emerged from the Eurasian step, where small elite groups could move vast distances, form alliances, and reshape their identities. Some of those elites carried ancestry from older step confederations like the Shangnu, but the Huns themselves were created in Europe through coalition, incorporation, and opportunities that came their way. Will we ever be able to piece together the details of this assemblage? I'm sure more evidence will come in, but I doubt that all of our questions about this will be answered.
You might like my little ebooklet, Why Ancient History Matters. It's designed to persuade people that the subject is important, even in the modern world. You might also wish to use it to help spread the word. So, feel free to share it with someone you know. It's free for anyone who wants it. I've left a link in the description box below the video for you to grab a copy. Catch you later.