The Hephthalites: Huns in Iran
At the end of the summer of 474, envoys from the Persian court of Ctesiphon stood before the Roman emperor Zeno in his palace on the Bosporus, at Constantinople, the New Rome.1 They arrived with an urgent message from the regent Valkash that his brother, the Sassanid shah of Persia, Peroz, was a captive of the Hephthalites, the White Huns. They were a new and dangerous barbarous race on the northeastern frontier of Iran, and they shared the same name as the Huns who had compelled Zeno’s predecessor Theodosius to construct the awesome walls to defend the city’s four miles on the land side. Shah Peroz had been defeated and captured in a great battle at the hands of the Hephthalites, who overran Sogdiana and Bactria. These Huns now demanded an extraordinary ransom. The envoys would have subtly pointed out how Zeno could negotiate with his fellow monarch as an equal, whereas Huns invaded, plundered, and demanded tribute from their slave, the Roman emperor. The envoys might well have employed the polite phrase that God had created Rome and Persia as the two eternal eyes of the earth.2 Over a century later, an exiled shah, Khusrau II, so appealed to the emperor Maurice Tiberius, who furnished money and soldiers to the young shah so that he could regain his throne.3 The unpopular Zeno, a tough Isaurian soldier from southern Asia Minor, had ascended to the throne only because he had married the empress Ariadne, the only daughter of Leo I, another blunt soldier emperor who had bribed his way to the throne.4 Zeno knew what was expected even before the envoys requested it. He was to dispatch sealed sacks of centenaria, each representing one hundred pounds of gold, to help meet the ransom demands.
The Hephthalites were satisfied with the initial payment in Persian silver dirhems and Roman gold solidi, and so they released Shah Peroz on promise of paying the balance as soon as he returned to Ctesiphon. Peroz had to hand over his son Kavad as a hostage to guarantee prompt payment, because the shah was well-known for going back on his word. Ironically, years earlier, at his accession in 459, Shah Peroz had engaged the Hephthalites as allies in his war against his brother Hormizd for the Sassanid throne.5 At the time, Shah Peroz considered these newcomers just one of a number of convenient barbarian allies. Peroz won the civil war, and was crowned King of Kings at Ctesiphon, but his new allies neither returned to the pastures north of the Jaxartes River nor accepted their status as dutiful subjects within the Persian Empire. Peroz erred in his dealings with the Hephthalites, but, in fairness, he was following a well-established policy of his ancestor Shapur II, acclaimed by many as the greatest of all shahs, who had quite successfully dealt with other Hun barbarians.
The origins of the Hephthalites are obscure, but they likely traced their descent to Iranian-speaking nomads driven out of the arid steppes of the Tarim Basin due to the wars between their more powerful neighbors and the emperors of China during the third and fourth centuries.6 The Byzantine historian Procopius, writing in the sixth century, described the Hephthalites as White Huns because “They are the only ones among the Huns who have white bodies and countenances which are not ugly.”7 Procopius’s remark still incites controversy, but Procopius was reporting what his informants had seen, and to them the Hephthalites were Europoid in appearance and quite unlike Attila’s Huns. The silver coins minted by the Hephthalites offer no assistance as to their appearance because they are faithful imitations of Persian dirhems.8 On the obverse, the royal crowned bust is that of the Sassanid shah, preceded by the tribal tamgha of the Hephthalites, while the reverse mint marks carry the names of Herat or Balkh, cities that fell into their hands after the defeat of Shah Peroz.
The Hephthalites were but one of a number of nomadic tribes called Huns who trekked west from their ancestral pastures until they reached the Jaxartes River during the fourth and early fifth centuries. The Jaxartes River marked the limits of the Sassanid Empire. The pastures and rich caravan cities to the south have always been an irresistible attraction to nomads. When the Hephthalites crossed into Ferghana by the opening of the fifth century, they were not the first Huns to cross, for their kinsmen, the Kidarites, known as Chionites to Classical authors, had already preceded them by two generations.9 These first Huns, the Chionites, soon pressed south in search of fresh pastures and water in the direction of Bactria. Under the best of circumstances, the newcomers, perhaps between one hundred thousand and one hundred fifty thousand strong, would have proved an intolerable burden on the indigenous urban residents, peasants, and pastoralists of Transoxiana. But the Huns came well armed, fielding twenty thousand horse archers, who could take by force what they needed from unwilling hosts. The local Kushan princes (who ruled in the name of the shah) and the councils of merchant princes in the caravan cities could not resist the Chionites. They thus appealed to their overlord, the Sassanid shah. Shah Shapur II could not countenance so many uninvited settlers from the steppes. He broke off his war with the Roman emperor Constantius II, and hastened east to wage a winter campaign against the Chionites in 357–358.10 The Chionites quickly submitted, and accepted a treaty dictated by the shah, whereby they were permitted to settle in Bactria in return for military service. Less than a year later, in 359, a large contingent of their horse archers under the command of King Grumbates marched over one thousand five hundred miles west to join Shapur’s field army readying to invade Roman Mesopotamia.11
Ammianus Marcellinus, the last great historian of imperial Rome, recalled his encounter with the Chionites during this Persian invasion of Mesopotamia. Ammianus, assigned to the staff of Ursicinus, the senior cavalry commander of the Roman East, was sent to reconnoiter the advance of Shapur’s army. Years later, Ammianus recalled with awe when he spotted the Persian army assembling to cross the Tigris River. Atop a high point, Ammianus could identify Shapur by his splendid regal dress and gilt helmet in the shape of a ram. To the shah’s left rode Grumbates, advanced in years and with withered limbs, but with an impressive bearing won by years of fighting.12 The Persian army crossed the Tigris near the ruins of Nineveh, and marched along the southern route, aiming to cross the Euphrates at Zeugma. The prize was Antioch, third city of the empire. The Romans had laid waste this route, and so Shapur unexpectedly changed direction north against the fortress city Amida on the steep west bank of the upper Tigris River. Ammianus narrowly escaped into the city after he was nearly slain in a night skirmish with a detachment of Persian cavalry. Ammianus endured the seventy-three-day siege, and narrowly escaped again when the city fell. Thirty years later, he wrote one of our best descriptions of a siege in Antiquity.13 The massive Ottoman walls of well-fortified Amida (today Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey) rest on Roman foundations, and the eastern and southern approaches built on steep slopes were most difficult to attack. Shapur twice offered terms to the garrison. Ammianus reports that Grumbates and three hundred of his Chionites volunteered to deliver the second offer. As Grumbates approached under a flag of truce, he and his company were greeted by a hail of arrows and bolts shot from Roman ballistae. Grumbates’s son was pierced by a bolt and instantly killed. The enraged Grumbates vowed revenge, and Shapur pressed the siege to appease his ally. Ammianus recalls how the Chionites lamented the unnamed son of Grumbates in a manner reminiscent of Scythian customs. For a week, the body was conveyed on a funeral bier throughout the camp, and the Chionites slashed their arms and offered locks of hair. The body was then cremated and its ashes placed in a golden urn.14 Shapur then deployed the full might of the Persian siege train—towers, war elephants, and finally a great ramp (agger)—that brought down a vast section of the west wall. When Chionites and Persians burst through the breach, they ruthlessly sacked the city. Shapur ordered the Roman commander and his surviving officers crucified. The survivors were deported to Persia. Shapur, however, immediately withdrew east of the Tigris because he had squandered the campaigning season to punish the defiant Roman garrison.
The Chionites returned to their new homes around Herat and Balkh, where Grumbates gave the ashes of his son a burial with proper nomadic rites. He had not wished to inter his son’s body so distant from his homeland. The Chionites, or Kidarites, came to terms with their new neighbors and quickly adapted to the mixed economy of Bactria. They minted a series of gold and copper coins that imitated the previous issues of the Kushan princes, for they now acted as the shah’s protectors over the former Kushano-Sassanid satrapy of Bactria.15 But two generations later, these Huns were, in turn, forced to move again, first into their strongholds in the Kabul valley, and finally into northwestern India. The second wave of Huns had arrived: the Hephthalites.
The Hephthalites arrived in greater numbers, and they posed a far greater danger to the Sassanid Empire. They were likely primarily speakers of an eastern Iranian dialect, but they employed titles and personal names that betray familiarity with Turkish, Tocharian, and Chinese languages.16 They undoubtedly comprised a polyglot confederation of tribes headed by a high king, called either khan or, in Sogdian, khushnavaz.17 They too, like the Kidarites, had dwelled on the steppes of the Gansu corridor or Tarim Basin, where they learned political organization from both Chinese emperors and Rouran khans. Procopius notes with approval how they obeyed a single high king, followed his laws faithfully, and were honest in their dealings just like Sassanid Persians and Romans.18 The Hephthalites were also expert in the lucrative dealings with cities that needed protection for their caravans. Once secure in Transoxiana, they, like the Kushans before them, switched to Bactrian, the eastern Iranian language of culture and commerce, as their preferred language. They valued access to the markets and products of the sedentary communities of Transoxiana, and quickly adapted to the conditions and languages necessary to engage in trade.
The arrival of the Hephthalites, first in Sogdiana and then Bactria, proved to be the dress rehearsal for the migration of the Seljuk Turks into the Islamic world in the eleventh century. Shahs Bahram V (420–438) and Yazdegerd II (438–457) had to shift their attention away from the ancestral rival Rome to cope with yet another nomadic threat posed by these Hephthalites on the northeastern frontier. Fortunately for the shah, the Roman emperor in Constantinople was likewise preoccupied with other Huns in Central Europe and the south Russian steppes.19 The shahs could never quite dislodge the Hephthalites from Sogdiana, for the Hephthalites repeatedly switched from foes to allies, and back again. Today, museums proudly display their collections of magnificent silver plates depicting the equestrian shah at hunt.20 Persian envoys conveyed these ceremonial plates along with many other gifts to appease the khan of the Hephthalites. Shah Peroz (459–484) engaged the Hephthalites as allies to retake his throne, and then he recovered Bactra (Balkh) from the Kidarites. He soon clashed with his dangerous allies, and twice he was defeated.21 In a third battle, the Hephthalites surprised Peroz and his army outside of Herat in 484. Peroz fell fighting, and his body was never identified.22 His death plunged the Sassanid Empire into crisis.
The Persian nobility acclaimed Peroz’s younger brother Valkash, who had loyally administered the realm during Peroz’s captivity two decades earlier. The mild-mannered Valkash hastily concluded a peace with the Hephthalites.23 He recognized the loss of Transoxiana, Bactria, and Khurasan (northeastern Iran), and promised an annual tribute. But the tough border lords (marzpans) and Zoroastrian priests (magi) objected to so pacific, and pragmatic, a policy. To them, Valkash had signed away nearly half of the Persian Empire. They deposed Valkash four years later and elevated to the throne Kavad, the eldest of the surviving sons of Peroz. In 496, Kavad was, in turn, overthrown by a clique of aristocrats and priests who were this time outraged over the shah’s encouragement of the Mazdakites, members of a radical movement calling for the reform of Zoroastrianism.24 The goals of Mazdak and his followers are obscure. Since they lost, their writings were condemned to the flames, and we must depend on the reports of their hostile opponents. Modern historians have either condemned or praised Mazdak as yet another forerunner of the revolutionary leaders of the proletariat. Zoroastrian writers cursed Mazdak of impiety and depravity, because they alleged that he proclaimed a communal society based on the sharing of land, wealth, and women. Yet calls for religious reform gained many adherents discontented over corrupt priests and royal agents exacting higher rents and taxes to fund the defense against the Huns. Shah Kavad initially welcomed the Mazdakites as a counter to the powerful landed families who monopolized military positions and the Zoroastrian hierarchy.
The council representing the seven leading families of the empire ordered Kavad imprisoned in the notorious Castle of Oblivion in southeastern Persia, and acclaimed as the new shah Kavad’s younger brother Jamasp.25 Kavad escaped his gloomy imprisonment either disguised as a woman (with the aid of his wife) or rolled up in a carpet (with the connivance of his sister).26 He immediately fled to the Hephthalites. During his captivity, Kavad had gained many friends among the Hephthalites and learned their customs. For a price, Kavad obtained their assistance and recovered his throne eighteen months later.27 In 498, Kavad crushed the great families, implemented sweeping fiscal and land reforms, and promptly jettisoned his Mazdakite allies in favor of an orthodox Zoroastrian clergy purged of foes and subservient to his will. Kavad was long despised as a despotic, suspicious shah, but he held on to power until his death.28 Foremost, Kavad recognized that the Hephthalites were indispensable allies, and so increased the tribute of his uncle.29 The Hephthalites received so much silver in tribute that they minted an extensive silver coinage based on Persian originals that greased the wheels of commerce across Transoxiana.30 Later in his reign, Shah Kavad disengaged from fighting Rome and waged a desultory war against the Hephthalites, who practiced the time-honored policy of raiding disputed borderlands to extort better terms from the shah. In 513, Kavad and the Hephthalite khan concluded a peace that lasted for nearly two generations.31
At the start of the sixth century, the Hephthalites had succeeded to the political legacy of the Kushans in Transoxiana, Bactria, and northeastern Iran, and they were just as adept in promoting and profiting off the trade of the Silk Road. Between 493 and 513, Kashgar, Kuchea, and Khotan, the principal oasis cities of the Tarim Basin, put themselves under the protection of the Hephthalites.32 The Northern Wei emperor and Rouran khan each sent delegations bearing costly gifts and seeking trade agreements. In the throne room of Ctesiphon, the shah Khusrau I placed a golden chair for the Hephthalites, thereby acknowledging that their khan was an equal to the emperors of Rome and China, each of whom was awarded a similar throne.33
The Sassanid shahs after Peroz lavished gifts on the Hephthalites, but they poured even more money and resources into constructing the Great Wall of Gorgan to check Hephthalite attacks from Khurasan into northern Iran.34 This brick wall stretches nearly 125 miles from the eastern shores of the Caspian to the Pishkamar Mountains, and forts guarded the strategic passes. Even though Classical writers never learned of this wall, later Persians concluded that it must have been built by Alexander the Great as yet one more Gate of Alexander (Sadd-i-Iskandar) that was intended to seal off the hordes of Gog and Magog. The system required thirty-five thousand soldiers to man the walls, forts, and signal towers as well as to patrol beyond the frontier and intercept raiders. This wall is longer than Hadrian’s Wall (seventy-seven miles) and the Antonine Wall (forty-four miles) combined, and it is the second-longest defensive works ever raised against nomadic invaders. This wall still stands as a testimony to organization of the Sassanid state, and to the threat posed by the Hephthalites for nearly a century.
The Hephthalites, however, never succeeded to the Kushan political legacy in India. Chinese chroniclers and Buddhist writers in India may refer to sporadic attacks launched across the Hindu Kush by the Hephthalites. Instead, three successive hordes of other Huns—Kidarites, Alchon Huns, and Nezak Huns—crossed the Hindu Kush from bases at Kabul or Ghazna in Afghanistan today. They sacked Buddhist sanctuaries, and carved out short-lived kingdoms in Gandhara and the Punjab.35 These Huns likely were operating on their own rather than acting as the vassals of the Hephthalites. It is very unlikely that any of the rulers of these three Hun confederacies ever obeyed the writ of the khan of the Hephthalites.
The Kidarites, dislodged from Bactria by both Shah Peroz and the Hephthalites, first found refuge in their strongholds in the Kabul valley, where they had long established a court at Kapisa (today Begram), the former summer capital of the Kushans. Already, in 437, an embassy from the Northern Wei court arrived at Kapisa and flattered the Kidarite king by saluting him the Son of Heaven of the Great Kushans (Da Yuezhi).36 These Chinese envoys also reported to their master the emperor Dong Wan that the son of this king held court at Purusapura (today Peshawar, Pakistan). The Tocharian-speaking subjects of Kidarites would have pointed out to their Kidarite overlord the routes to the rich cities of Gandhara and the Punjab over which their ancestors, the Great Kushans, had once held sway. Therefore, already in the early fifth century, Kidarites were migrating into India, but they relocated their principal court to Gandhara after 484.37 In their Indian domains, the Kidarites minted silver dirhems with the portrait and the name of their former overlord Shah Peroz, who is identified by name in the Indian Brahmi script rather than the Persian one. Some of these coins carry a facing portrait that gives us our first depiction of a Hun who has a round, clean-shaven face with almond eyes.38 He would have looked perfectly at home among the nomads dwelling north of the Great Wall.
The Alchon Huns soon followed the Kidarites, first into the Kabul valley and then into India, where they incorporated the Kidarites into their own confederacy.39 These Alchon Huns too comprised a polyglot group of tribes who were apparently set in motion by the advance of the Hephthalites. The ethnic name Alchon only appears on their coins, while Indian authors indiscriminately called all invaders from the north Hunas. These Huns too adopted the Bactrian language written in a Greek script, and the royal names on coins are of Iranian origin. The portrait on the coins of the first known ruler, Khingila, depicts a clean-shaven man in his prime wearing a simple conical crown.40 Khingila had a Roman nose, almond eyes, and a high forehead that had been flattened by the ritual cranial deformity practiced by many steppe nomads. On their coins, his successors sport long drooping mustaches and wear more ornate crowns, but otherwise they all share the same physical traits complete with the flattened forehead. They all would have hardly stood out among the mixed populations of the Tarim Basin, as revealed by the DNA testing of the Tarim Mummies.
Later Buddhist authors of India universally decried these Huns as impious barbarians ignorant of the teachings of the Buddha. Just before the mid-fifth century, Mihirakula, the ruler of the Alchon Huns, sacked Taxila, the capital of the Punjab and renowned center of Buddhist learning since the Mauryan Empire. Many of Mihirakula’s coins were found by excavators just above the debris of the final sack that leveled the city forever. Buddhist envoys and pilgrims from the Northern Wei court likewise lamented the wanton destruction committed by these Huns across Gandhara and the Punjab, and deplored their barbarous customs. A century later, the Chinese monk Xuanzang was told tales about how the cruel invader Mihirakula had ravaged all of India.41 According to so many hostile accounts, the Alchon Huns can be dismissed as too few, and too destructive, to succeed to the Kushan legacy in India so that they always remained invaders. But the Alchon Huns have left no written records of their presence other than their coins, which testify to a sophisticated level of royal organization.42 They, like their kinsmen the Hephthalites, must have adapted existing administrative and fiscal institutions to their needs, and promoted international commerce that brought the silver specie for their coinage. They remained animists, devoted to their shamans and the spirits of the eternal blue sky. Once securely in control, their rulers respected all faiths, and, at least in one case, an Alchon Hun monarch endowed a Buddhist monastery.
At the end of the fifth century, the Alchon Huns posed a deadly threat to the Gupta emperors, who had forged the second great Indian empire and sponsored Hindu cults and letters. The Huns overran the Doab and upper Ganges valley, and briefly threatened to overthrow Gupta rule over Aryavarta, the heartland of Hindu civilization. Yet, in the early sixth century, the kings of the Alchon Hun, Toramana and Mihirakula, each suffered a decisive defeat that ended their ambitions to forge a Hun Empire in India. In 510, the Gupta emperor Bhanugupta won a major victory over Toramana, who abandoned his campaign against the Gupta capital, Pataliputra. In 532, Mihirakula, after suffering a humiliating defeat, submitted to Yashodharman (ca. 515–545), the ruler of Malwa, who briefly reunited northern India after the fall of the Gupta Empire.43 Each victor raised a grandiose memorial column to commemorate the battle. By the mid-sixth century, the Alchon Huns steadily withdrew to the valley of Kabul, where they regrouped with other tribes and soon returned under new rulers of the Nezak Huns.44 These last of the Huns only carved out a regional kingdom in Gandhara at the end of the sixth century. They too struck a series of remarkable silver and copper coins inspired by Sassanid prototypes.45 Each ruler is depicted sporting an elaborate crown that combined Persian lunar and solar symbols with the horns of the Indian water buffalo. None of the coins carries personal names, and each Nezak ruler is a ringer for a Cossack hetman. The Nezak Huns too were driven out of India into the Kabul valley, where Arab armies encountered them at the end of the seventh century.
None of the Hun confederations forged a lasting imperial state, and yet each played a significant role in the fragmenting of the Gupta imperial order, and the proliferation of the bewildering array of regional Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms for the next six centuries. In Hindu literature, all these Huns have been remembered as the Hunas, a valiant foreign warrior race, dwelling just beyond the Himalayas. In the Indian national epic Mahabharata, the Hunas join the righteous side commanded by Yudhishthira, the eldest brother and leader of the Pandavas, in the legendary war against their rival cousins, the Kauravas.46 The Rajputs, a martial race admired by agents and officers of the British Raj, have sometimes claimed descent from the Huns.
Whereas the sundry Huns in India failed to build an empire, the Hephthalites north of the Hindu Kush proved to be too successful. The khans of the Hephthalites, who remain anonymous to this day, were worthy heirs to the Kushan Sons of Heaven, and they were so recognized by their foe, the Sassanid shahs. They posed an existential threat on the eastern frontier of the Sassanid Empire after 484. The shahs were already overtaxed in defending their western and northwestern frontiers. In 379, Shah Ardashir II had concluded an agreement with the Roman emperor Theodosius I to partition Armenia, the bone of contention for so many wars between the two imperial rivals.47 The majority of the kingdom passed under Sassanid rule, and soon proved a poisoned gift. The Armenians were recalcitrant subjects who refused to abjure their Christian faith or to pay taxes to a heathen oppressor.48 The shah also acquired the expensive task of garrisoning the Dariel and Derbent Passes through the Caucasus Mountains. In 395–396, a horde of Huns from the south Russian steppes crossed the Derbent Pass and pillaged across Armenia and Iraq, halting just north of Ctesiphon.49 They then withdrew with a haul of booty and captives. Repeatedly, later shahs loudly requested subsidies from the Roman emperor to pay for the common defense against the nomads north of the Caucasus.50 Each time, the emperor flatly refused, for any payment to the shah might be interpreted as tribute.
Facing nomadic foes on his northwestern and eastern frontiers, Shah Khusrau I (531–579), the son and successor of Kavad, was determined to avenge the humiliating defeats suffered at the hands of the Hephthalites, and to reestablish Persian power in Transoxiana. He found new allies in the Gök Turks, who had just arrived on the central Eurasian steppes north of the Jaxartes River. In 557, Shah Khusrau concluded an alliance with Ishtemi, the yabgu or subordinate kaghan of the Gök Turks of the West.51
Khusrau even sealed the deal by marrying a daughter of Ishtemi Kaghan—the first significant marriage of a Turkish princess to a sovereign of the Near East. Together, in 557–581, Persians and Turks overthrew and partitioned the Hephthalite Empire. Khusrau regained northeastern Iran and Bactria, but the Gök Turks occupied the cities north of the River Oxus. They thus gained the crucial caravan cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Kashgar. Shah Khusrau had indeed eliminated the menace of the Hephthalites, but he and his heirs henceforth faced a far more dangerous nomadic foe in the Turks, who were to transform forever the linguistic and ethnic identity of the nomadic peoples across Eurasia.
Meanwhile, as the Sassanid shahs battled the Hephthalites, “the White Huns,” imperial Rome, the other eternal eye of the earth, faced other Huns, who arrived on the edge of the Roman world in 370. These Huns under the world-famous Attila, the Scourge of God, would forge one of the greatest of the steppe empires, and so determine the destiny of the Roman Empire, and the future of modern Europe.