L'Asia centrale occidentale tra il IV e il VI sec. d.C. Profilo archeologico di un controverso periodo storico

The problem concerning the alleged ancestry of the “European Huns” from the Xiongnu has always attracted the attention of many scholars and has its roots in the theory advanced in 1758 by Joseph de Guignes, who identified the two groups mainly on the basis of the phonetic similarity of the names. The same “hunnic” origin, that is xiongnu, has been attributed by many scholars to a series of lineages conventionally named “Iranian Huns”, to distinguish them from the much better known ones those that arrived in Eastern Europe around 370 AD. These are the Chionites, the Kidarites, the Ephthalites, the Alkhans and the Nēzak, who, according to the most accredited hypothesis by scholars, would have originally belonged to an ethnic group of an indefinite nature that, around the middle of the 4th century AD, migrated from the previously area part of the xiongnu potentate, to reach the central Asian regions, where they imposed their control until the 6th century AD. The purpose of this research, whose protagonists are the “Iranian Huns”, was to verify the truthfulness of this historical reconstruction, based only on philological data somewhat controversial. In light of the most recent approaches in the study of the interpretation and identification of migratory phenomena in archaeology and considering the most recent research that rethinks the concept of ethnicity, this study investigated the supposed “hunnic/xiongnu” origins of the “Iranian Huns” through the comparison between the archaeological evidence in western central Asia and those attributed to the Xiongnu in Mongolia, in Transbaikalia (southern Siberia) and in the Altai. From the comparison of these data, no connection seems to emerge between the “Iranian Huns” and the Xiongnu that could support the migratory hypothesis. There is instead a profound relationship between the Sogdiana and the region of the middle Sir Darya, to let us suppose large migration flows.