ETHNOGENESIS, COEVOLUTION AND POLITICAL MORPHOLOGY OF THE EARLIEST STEPPE EMPIRE: THE XIONGNU QUESTION REVISITED Nicola Di Cosmo It is generally assumed that the Xiongnu were the first steppe empire, but how did such an em- pire come about 1 ? This is, for Inner Asian history, a “foundational” question, which, if an- swered, would considerably advance the field of Xiongnu studies, and more generally that of Inner Asian history. My purpose in this essay is not to provide a complete summary of our pres- ent state of knowledge regarding the Xiongnu, which, as will become apparent, is simply im- possible to do at the present time, but to highlight the limitations of such knowledge and discuss the usefulness of certain assumptions and theories. In the first part of this essay I shall illustrate some of the issues that various approaches to Xiongnu studies entail, focusing on history, archaeology, genetic studies, and anthropology. In the second part I will focus on some characteristics of the “morphology” of the Xiongnu empire, which have led me to question the usefulness of the “coevolution” thesis, or, in fact, of any thesis based on the assumption that frontier dynamics between China and the Xiongnu could be re- garded as the chief “locus” of the formative stages of the Xiongnu political culture and of its imperial evolution. HISTORY Most of what we know about the Xiongnu as a historical phenomenon is based on Chinese sources, in particular the “Shiji”, the “Hanshu” and the “Hou Hanshu”, written between the second century BC and the 5th century AD 2 . The description of the Xiongnu that we receive from these written records essentially provides no account of the history of the Xiongnu prior to the establishment of their empire or the narratives of their relationship with the Qin and the Former and Later Han dynasties. Mentions of the Xiongnu in other sources, such as the “Zhanguo ce” (Strategies of the Warring States), are also extremely few. 1 Cimmerians and Scythians were also powerful steppe peoples, but on the basis of the extant sources we can- not say that these formed “empires”, if, by empire, we mean a political entity that grows by integrating its constituencies into a unified and centralized structure. Among them, the Royal Scythians mentioned by Herodotus constituted probably an elite aristocratic stratum, but there is no evidence that the presence of nomadic aristocracies amounted to a politically unified empire. At the same time, it can by no means be ex- cluded that the political culture of the Scythians was shared broadly across the steppe region. 2 For a quick reference see E. P. Wilkinson, Chinese His- tory: A Manual. Harvard-Yenching Institute mono- graph series 52 (Cambridge, Mass., London 2000) 781–788.