The Huns were traced to a nomadic tribe in Central Europe (the Steppes near the Black Sea). It is still uncertain whether the Huns in Europe were the same as Xiongnu (which sometimes are also called Huns) [see Encyc. Britannica].
Huns in Europe appeared around 370 AD, while the presence of Xiongnu was felt in China during Qin dynasty (221 BC). The result of conflict between Han dyasty and Xiongnu was a division of Xiongnu. Part of the Xiongnu tribe was "sinicized" (Hanized?), as recorded in history about Wang2 Zhao1 Jun1 and Han Wudi. The others were driven away. It is not surprising that after several hundred years, they actually showed up in Europe.
Hungary, which obviously is derived from the word "Hun", has a language of Uralic origin. It is quite certain that Hungary had heavy influence by the Huns. Interestingly, a Hungarian friend told me that Hungarians put their family first when they address people, which is distinctly different from other European culture, but similar to Chinese culture. Whether this is the influence of the original Huns or the Mongolian occupation later in 1200 AD is uncertain.
Huns are significantly different from Hakka in their cultural behavior. Although both Huns and Hakkas are migratory, Huns never settled in one place. They kept moving, conquering and moving. Huns mainly made their living by snatching from the conquered while Hakkas are agriculturally based and self-sufficient. Huns were illiterate and had no idea about civilization and knowledge preservation, while Hakkas have a tradition of strong emphasis on education and intellectualism. These two cultures are totally dissimilar and incompatible. Huns finally disappaered and was integrated with Europeans without a trace of their original "culture".
Xiongnu in China also intermarried Han people. During the downfall of West Jin dynasty, the Han people cross the yangtze River and settled in southern China, bringing with them some Xiongnu soldiers and servants. While Xiongnu descendents established "Han" Kingdom in the north, gradually became sinicized. Han Kingdom was destroyed by Zhao kingdom (Jie2 ethnic group), which was in turn destroyed by Han people again.
If Hakka were actually sinicized "non-Han", then Hakka migration from north to south would not be "fleeing" the "northern foreign invasion" to "preserve" their own culture. Intead, Hakkas would have to be the actual "invaders" from the north trying to spread their own culture to the south. However, how a non-Han minority could preserve the Han culture better than the true Han people would be very difficult to explain. And it would be even more difficult to explain why the poems in Shijing (The Book of Poems) popular in the Chunqiu-Zhanguo period (pre-Qin) rhymes better with Hakka than Mandarin. Xiongnu although had attempted invasion of the northern kingdoms during the Chunqiu-Zhanguo period, they could hardly have had major settlement in "China" prior to Han dynasty.
The "theory" on Hun origin of Hakka was based on very fragmentary blood typing and DNA analysis done by Japanese and Russian researchers.
(I believe that the Hakka are of mixed race, Asian and Cacuasian.)
TRACKING THE TARIM MUMMIES
A solution to the puzzle of Indo-European origins?
BY DAVID W. ANTHONY
Archaeological and linguistic evidence places the Indo-European homeland in the North Pontic region. Members of one Indo-European group (the Yamnaya culture) that migrated to the western Altai Mountains, where they are identifiable as the Afanasievo culture, may have later moved into the Tarim Basin of what is now western China.
The Indo-European problem is one of archaeology's oldest, most contentious questions. More than 200 years ago, in 1786, English jurist and scholar Sir William Jones realized that Latin and Greek shared a common origin with Sanskrit, the ancient language of Hindu law and religion. These three languages, he proposed, had developed from a single ultimate parent language, now called Proto-Indo-European. Linguists soon added most of the languages of Europe (including English), Iran, and northern India-Pakistan to the family, and eventually discovered several extinct cousins, including Hittite, spoken in Anatolia about 2000-1000 B.C., and Tocharian, a group of two (or possibly three) languages spoken about A.D. 500-800 in the Buddhist monasteries and caravan cities of the Tarim Basin in what is now western China. All of these languages still display telltale traces of the same Proto-Indo-European grammar and vocabulary. But where and when was the elusive mother tongue spoken? And by what historical circumstances did it generate daughter tongues that became scattered from Scotland to China?
In 1995, media reports brought to the public's attention astonishingly well-preserved remains of European-looking people, dressed in European-looking clothes, buried in the Tarim Basin between about 1800 B.C. and A.D. 500. This came about through the persistent efforts of Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese and Indo-Iranian literature and religion at the University of Pennsylvania. Long known to specialists but poorly understood and little studied, the Tarim mummies (not really mummies, but bodies preserved by dry conditions) quickly became the focus of intense interest and debate. Riveting photographs appeared in ARCHAEOLOGY (March/April 1995, pp. 28-35) and Discover. Academic papers on the mummies were edited by Mair for the 1995 Journal of Indo-European Studies. Film crews working for Nova and the Discovery channel soon followed Mair to the deserts of northwestern China; the Discovery show ("The Riddle of the Desert Mummies") was nominated for an Emmy. In 1996, Mair hosted a conference of 50 international experts on the archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthropology of the Central Eurasian societies related to the mummies; the proceedings were published in two dense and informative volumes in 1998, and textile specialist Elizabeth Barber issued a book on the Tarim textiles.( Barber's book is titled: "The Mummies Of Urumchi")
Now Mair has teamed with James Mallory, a distinguished Indo-European linguist and archaeologist at Queen's University in Belfast, to write The Tarim Mummies, which explores the difficult and controversial questions about the languages, identities, technologies, migrations, and physical traits of the mummies. It is a fascinating and readable account and presents a valuable compendium of recent research on a little-known region that has long been the focus of romantic speculation by travelers and explorers from Marco Polo to Aurel Stein. To determine the ethnic and linguistic identity of the Tarim mummies requires, as they say, "a feat of archaeological and linguistic legerdemain," but it is an intriguing game to follow, for it sheds light on the documentary, linguistic, archaeological, and skeletal evidence that must be used to attempt a linguistic and ethnic prehistory of eastern Central Asia.
In the end, their "working hypothesis" is that the earliest Bronze Age colonists of the Tarim Basin were people of Caucasoid physical type who entered probably from the north and west, and probably spoke languages that could be classified as Pre- or Proto-Tocharian, ancestral to the Indo-European Tocharian languages documented later in the Tarim Basin. These early settlers occupied the northern and eastern parts of the Tarim Basin, where their graves have yielded mummies dated about 1800 B.C. They did not arrive from Europe, but probably had lived earlier near the Altai Mountains, where their ancestors had participated in a cultural world centered on the eastern steppes of central Eurasia, including modern northeastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tadjikistan. At the eastern end of the Tarim Basin, people of Mongoloid physical type began to be buried in cemeteries such as Yanbulaq some centuries later, during the later second or early first millennium B.C. About the same time, Iranian-speaking people moved into the Tarim Basin from the steppes to the west. Their linguistic heritage and perhaps their physical remains are found in the southern and western portions of the Tarim. These three populations interacted, as the linguistic and archaeological evidence reviewed by Mallory and Mair makes clear, and then Turkic peoples arrived and were added to the mix. The Tarim Mummies J.P. Mallory and Victor Mair New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000 $50.00 (cloth); 352 pages
(It is my opinion that we Caucasians have lost track of some of our relatives because they adopted Chinese names, customs and etc. and migrated to the South of China...and even to Korea and Japan where they ran into another group of Caucasians known as the Ainu...The same as Kennewick Man!)
Magyars have nothing to do with China. Uralic peoples origionate in the steppe between teh Capsian and Aral Seas and the up the Ural mountains on the east side of the Volga river.
The Magyars and affiliated tribes swept into the upper Danube and Panagonian plain in the late 9th century.
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