“Oooh,” said the Brooklyn lady, rapturously to her companion, “Shirley, that would look great on you.” She was pointing at the dazzling 24-karat reindeer broach in the Metropolitan Museum’s 1975 show “The Gold of the Scythians”. Our fascination with the nomads of the steppe has only increased since then, while our knowledge about them has grown by leaps and bounds. John Man’s Empire of Horses is an attempt to evoke the glory and glamor of the Xiongnu empire, as he has done previously with the Mongol empire.  The problem lies in the fact that while everyone knows about Genghis Khan, only specialists know about the chanyus (khans) of the Xiongnu. There is a risk that the story will be as dry as the Gobi desert.

The main story-line follows that of most nomadic empires. A charismatic leader, Modun, unites several clans and uses the mobility, autonomy and unpredictability of nomad cavalry to great advantage against the cities and farmlands of the sedentary Chinese. The year is 209 BC. The Chinese can only riposte at great expense, mobilizing armies, transport and forage. When they invade the steppe, the nomads vanish over the horizon, untouchable. The Chinese decide it is less costly and more reliable to simply buy off the Xiongnu with gifts. The Xiongnu use these gifts to cement their prestige, secure the loyalty of the wandering tribes, and build a long-lasting confederation. In essence this story is repeated over and over throughout Chinese history, until the Qianlong Emperor’s devastating war (1755-1757) against the Dzungars destroys the last nomadic threat to China.

 

The central question in Man’s book is how the Xiongnu became the first nomadic civilization. He posits a threat-response phenomenon. Just as the Chinese became more centralized and warlike under the first Qin Emperor (he of the terracotta army), so the threat of this powerful neighbor may have inspired the nomads, or scared them, into forming a military power capable of resisting the Qin. He makes it clear that in so doing the Xiongnu created a sophisticated and wealthy society, undeserving of the sobriquet “barbarian”.

Man brings a school-boy’s boundless enthusiasm for the steppe. He delights in the survival of Xiongnu superstitions practiced by modern Mongols. He thrills to long drives over unpaved roads to visit excavations, abandoned forts, or imaginative Chinese monuments, like the one commemorating Roman legionnaires  in remote Liqian. The best parts of the book recount his own travels and encounters with Mongol and Chinese archaeologists who are doggedly recovering the lost world of the Xiongnu from below the icy steppe. His catalogue of newly discovered artifacts is fascinating.

It’s good that Man offers us this perspective on the Xiongnu because their narrative history itself is thin. Most of what we know comes from Sima Qian’s Annals, the “Shiji”. Like Thucydides, Sima Qian includes many invented speeches and imagined anecdotes, but unlike Thucydides who gives his protagonists an equal hearing, Sima Qian finds the Xiongnu too barbaric, too impenetrable.  They are shadow figures in Chinese history, who do not really come to life. As a result the historical passages in Man’s book suffer from too many details from the “Shiji”, and the Xiongnu are occasionally forgotten.

 

China’s relations with the Xiongnu involved offering Han princesses or high-born young women to the Xiongnu khans as brides.  The story of the most beautiful of them, Zhaojun, became progressively more romanticized and fanciful until it crystallized into the Yuan dynasty opera “Autumn in the Han Palace”.  Citing the story of these women exiled in the icy North, brings a more human touch to the epic of the Xiongnu than the embroiled plots of Sima Qian.

Readers will be impressed with the writer’s engaging approach to the subject, far removed in style from Maenchen-Helfen’s magisterial work on the Huns—which sadly manages to be boring. This is avoided here by Man’s inexhaustible flashes of erudition. The Xiongnu remain a shadowy people, but as their graves are excavated, their story comes more and more into daylight.

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David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019) and Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empire (WW Norton, July 2024).