page_title: Xionites
section_title: Origins and culture
hierarchical_section_title: Xionites / Origins and culture
caption_attribution_description: English: Hephthalite horseman on British Museum bowl 460-479 CE British Museum notice
context_page_description: Xionites, Chionites, or Chionitae are Romanisations of the ethnonym of a nomadic people who were prominent in Transoxania and Bactria.
  The Xionites appear to be synonymous with the Huna peoples of classical/medieval India, and possibly also the Huns of European late antiquity. It is unclear whether the Xionites were connected to a people named in Ancient China as the Xunyu, Xianyun 猃狁 and Xiongnu.
  They were first described by the Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, who was in Bactria during 356-57 CE; he described the Chionitæ as living with the Kushans. Ammianus indicates that the Xionites had previously lived in Transoxiana and, after entering Bactria, became vassals of the Kushans, were influenced culturally by them and had adopted the Bactrian language. They had attacked the Sassanid Empire, but later, served as mercenaries in the Sassanian army.
  Within the Xionites, there seem to have been two main subgroups, which were known in the Iranian languages by names such as Karmir Xyon and Spet Xyon. The prefixes karmir and speta likely refer to Central Asian traditions in which particular colours symbolised the cardinal points.
context_section_description: The original culture of the Xionites and their geographical urheimat are uncertain. They appear to have originally followed animist religious beliefs, which  mixed later with varieties of Buddhism and Shaivism. It is difficult to determine their ethnic composition.
  Differences between the Xionites, the Huns who invaded Europe in the 4th century, and the Turks were emphasised by Carlile Aylmer Macartney (1944), who suggested that the name "Chyon", originally that of an unrelated people, was "transferred later to the Huns owing to the similarity of sound". The Chyon who appeared in the 4th century, in the steppes on the northeastern frontier of Persia were probably a branch of the Huns that appeared shortly afterwards in Europe. The Huns appear to have attacked and conquered the Alans, then living between the Urals and the Volga about 360 AD, and the first mention of the Chyon was in 356 AD.
  At least some Turkic tribes were involved in the formation of the Xionites, despite their later character as an Eastern Iranian people, according to Richard Nelson Frye (1991): "Just as later nomadic empires were confederations of many peoples, we may tentatively propose that the ruling groups of these invaders were, or at least included, Turkic-speaking tribesmen from the east and north, although most probably the bulk of the people in the confederation of Chionites... spoke an Iranian language.... This was the last time in the history of Central Asia that Iranian-speaking nomads played any role; hereafter all nomads would speak Turkic languages".
  The proposition that the Xionites probably originated as an Iranian tribe was put forward by Wolfgang Felix in Encyclopedia Iranica (1992).
  In 2005, As-Shahbazi suggested that they were originally a Hunnish people who had mixed with Iranian tribes in Transoxiana and Bactria, where they adopted the Kushan-Bactrian language. Likewise, Peter B. Golden that the Chionite confederation included earlier Iranian nomads as well as Proto-Mongolic and Turkic elements.
caption: Hephthalite horseman on British Museum bowl, 460-479 CE.[5]
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