New Research Tells Us More About the Mighty Ancient Xiongnu Women

By combining genetics and archaeology, experts show the Xiongnu were a multiethnic empire ruled by females

Hiya!

Two factors are significantly altering our comprehension of ancient societies and shifting modern attitudes about how society can be arranged. One factor is the incredible technological advancement over the last couple of decades, allowing scientists to study archeological artifacts in greater detail than ever before. The second is our collective perspective shift as a global culture, particularly regarding equal rights between genders.

Thanks to the invention of DNA sequestering and analysis, scientists add a new layer of knowledge that help us paint a better picture of how ancient cultures lived, who they procreated with, and even migration routes.

Meanwhile, as we wade into more egalitarian ways as a society — allowing women equal rights and privileges as men — experts are beginning to reevaluate past discoveries and keep a more open mind when analyzing new ones. Along the way, they discovered female warriors and women rulers of an expansive empire, such as the Xiongnu.

The Xiongnu

The Xiongnu ruled from the edge of China to modern-day Kazakhstan’s grasslands and dominated the Mongolian region between roughly 200 BCE to 100 CE. Their reign coincided with the thriving cultures of ancient Rome and Egypt further West.

The Xiongnu are most well known for undertaking relentless attacks on their neighbors and their innovative war tactics. Aside from their ferocity, the Xiongnu were also known for their nomadic lifestyle—and that’s pretty much all experts knew about them until just a couple of decades ago due to three reasons.

First, their nomadic tendencies mean the Xiongnu didn’t linger in any one place for very long, so they left little archeological trace. But they did leave some, which I’ll tell you about in the next section.

Secondly, despite their apparent expansive domain and strategic warfare, the Xiongnu never created a formal writing system. If they kept any records, they haven’t been discovered yet.

Third and lastly, since no writing system has been found, most of the stories we know about the Xiongnu were written by their enemies. An associate professor of anthropology and an expert in biomolecular archaeology, Christina Warinner, who co-led recent research I’ll tell you about in the next section, explained in an interview with The Harvard Gazette:

“If you do an online image search, most of what you find are brutal battle scenes. It’s all very masculine, very violent.” Because “[m]ost of what we know comes from the Han Dynasty of Imperial China. They were major rivals of the Xiongnu, and they wrote about their wars and skirmishes along the border.”

Fun fact: Because of their domain on the edge of China and their habit of attacking their neighbors, some report the Great Wall of China was erected to prevent mounted Xiongnu warriors from invading.

But here’s the plot twist — amongst the historical documents written about the Xinongnu people were detailed accounts of Xinongnu’s powerful women, which, Warinner quips, “was another reason Imperial China didn’t like them.”

Previous Research

Considering the three obstacles I mentioned above, researchers have struggled to find physical evidence to validate the Xiongnu enemy’s claims. In the same interview, Wainner explains: