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The Alchons were a Hun people of the Kabul valley, Gandhara and northern India in the fifth and sixth centuries.[1] Their name stands on their coins as a Bactrian word.[2] The Indian inscriptions call the people Huna.[3] Under Toramana their rule reached from the Punjab and Kashmir into Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.[4]

Name and classification

  • αλχονοBactrian
  • AlxonArmenian
  • HunaSanskrit
  • Śveta HunaSanskrit

The name Alchon comes from the coins.[2] Their legends carry a Bactrian word that is read alxono, and the ending -xon is taken for a Hun name.[2] Other scholars give alxonno, alxanno and alchanno.[2] One of them links alxanno with the Indian title rājālakhāna.[2] It is not settled whether the word is a personal name that became the name of a dynasty, the name of a tribe or a title.[2]

Outside the coins the name is rare. The Armenian Geography ascribed to Moses of Khorene names Alxon and Walxon among the peoples it assigns to Scythia.[5] Some scholars take the two names for one people.[6]

The standard classification of the Huns of Bactria and northern India sorts their coins into four waves, which it calls the Kidarites, the Alchons, the Nezaks and the Hephthalites.[7] In that order the Alchons are the second wave.[2] The classification has them migrate into Iran at the end of the fourth century and invade India in the middle of the fifth.[7] They pushed out the Kidarites and finally held the whole of north-western India.[2] The coins of the Kidarites show no typological link to theirs.[8]

Which people the Huna of the Indian texts were is disputed.[9] Some scholars identify them with the Alchons and hold that the Hephthalites proper never crossed the Hindu Kush.[9] Others identify them with the Hephthalites.[9] A third view admits that the Alchons may have been a clan of the Hephthalites.[2] The Indian texts also speak of Śveta Huna, the White Huns, and of Hara Huna, the Red Huns.[10]

The coins

The Alchon coinage, one of the groups described in Coinage of the Huna Peoples, is large, with more than 150 types.[11] The earliest issues reuse dies of the Sasanian king Shapur II and replace the Pahlavi legend with the Bactrian word.[12] Some scholars date the first mint to about 390, in the area of Kapisa and Kabul.[12]

The coins change in four steps. A tamga is added in front of the bust, then a crescent behind the crown.[12] In the fourth step the obverse shows the bust of a king above a floral motif, with the Bactrian legend in front and the name Khingila in Brahmi behind.[12] This is the first bilingual type.[12] The use of Brahmi points to a mint in Gandhara.[12] A hoard of sixteen drachms of the early types from Shahji-ki Dheri near Peshawar supports it.[12] Two main tamgas stand on the Alchon coins.[13]

The coins name six kings: Khingila, Javukha, Mehama, Toramana, Mihirakula and Narana.[14] The silver content of the drachms falls under Mihirakula.[15] His coins bear his name in Brahmi, with the word jayatu (“let him be victorious”) or shri before it, and the bull Nandi of Shiva on the reverse.[15] His large copper coins show the king on horseback, after the horseman coins of the Guptas.[15] A few coins of Toramana were struck over by Mihirakula.[15]

Alchon coins turn up in Buddhist places. Sixteen Alchon drachms lay with a drachm of Kidara in the monastery at Hadda near Jalalabad.[16] The monasteries of Taxila gave 32 silver coins of Khingila and Javukha.[16] The relic deposit of the main stupa at Hadda, Tope Kelan, held fourteen Alchon silver drachms of six types.[17] The portraits of the rulers on them show cranial deformation.[17] All coins of Khingila and Javukha were found south of the Hindu Kush, between Sadiqabad near Begram and Taxila.[18] No Alchon coin find north of the mountains has been reported.[18]

The copper scroll

A copper scroll in the Schøyen collection records the consecration of a Buddhist stupa.[19] It is written in Sanskrit, and its place of origin is probably northern Afghanistan.[19] The stupa stood in a place called Śārdīyasa, in the realm of Mehama.[19] The scroll names thirteen royal donors.[19] Among them are the great shahi Khingila, the god-king Toramana, the great shahi Mehama and the great king Javukha, son of Sādavīkha.[20] The date is read in the Laukika era and falls in 492 or 493.[19] The stupa is placed near Talaqan, east of Kunduz.[19]

The scroll changes the order of the kings. Under the older classification Toramana followed Khingila.[19] The scroll shows both reigning at the end of the fifth century.[19] It also shows Javukha as a real king, where the classification had read his name as a title of Khingila.[12] Some scholars conclude that Khingila, Toramana, Javukha and Mehama reigned side by side in different regions.[18] The donors are unlikely to have taken part in the foundation themselves.[21] They may have listed the kings of the surrounding lands to raise the standing of the gift, and some of these rulers may have been local rulers or governors.[21] The scroll gives a father for Javukha but not for Toramana, and so does not make Khingila the father of Toramana.[21]

The scroll also shows that the influence of the Alchons reached north of the Hindu Kush, to Talaqan.[18] The coins alone place them south of it.[18] Some scholars hold that a branch stayed in Bactria and came under Hephthalite control, either after the first Hephthalite victory over the Sasanians in 474 or after the death of the Sasanian king Peroz in 484.[18]

Toramana and Mihirakula

The boar inscription of Eran in central India is dated in the first year of the great king of kings Toramana.[22] It records that Dhanyavishnu, the younger brother of the late Maharaja Matrivishnu, had a stone temple built for Vishnu in the form of a boar.[23] The two brothers also set up a column in the reign of the Gupta king Budhagupta.[24] For that reason the inscription is understood to place Toramana in eastern Malwa not long after Budhagupta.[24] Toramana’s coins were found in large quantities in Malwa, in the Punjab and in Kashmir.[25] Some scholars hold that the Aulikaras stopped his advance to the west near Mandasor.[4] It rests on a slab inscription of the Aulikara king Prakashadharma from Risthal, about 515.[4]

The Gwalior inscription belongs to Mihirakula. It names him as the son of Toramana and is dated in the fifteenth year of his reign.[26] It records the building of a stone temple of the Sun on the hill of Gopa, where the fortress of Gwalior stands.[26] Mihirakula’s rule thus reached central India.

The pillar inscription of King Yashodharman at Mandasor comes from the other side. It boasts that his lands lie beyond what the Guptas and the chiefs of the Hunas could subdue.[3] It adds that even the famous Mihirakula paid him respect.[27] The text praises Yashodharman and speaks for him.[28] It is undated.[29] A second Mandasor inscription of Yashodharman is dated 532 or 533, and the pillar is placed within a few years of it.[29]

The Gupta inscriptions also record Hun wars.[30] The Bhitari pillar of Skandagupta, who reigned from about 454 to about 467, says that the earth shook when he fought the Hunas.[31] Which Hun people he met is uncertain: they were either Hephthalites or Kidarites.[32][9] At the end of the fifth century the Hunas broke into northern India.[33] The central power of the Guptas declined, and by the middle of the sixth century their kingdom was dissolved.[33]

Accounts of Mihirakula

Xuanzang, the Chinese pilgrim, came to the old town of Śākala on his way through the Punjab, as his Record of the Western Regions tells.[34] There he was told of a king Mihirakula, who had made the town his seat and ruled India.[35] The pilgrim says that he was of quick talent and naturally brave, and that he subdued all the neighbouring provinces without exception.[35]

Then the account turns against him. He wished to examine the law of the Buddha, but no eminent priest would come.[36] He ordered the destruction of the Buddhist priests through the five Indies.[37] Baladitya, the king of Magadha, refused him tribute.[37] Mihirakula marched against him, was taken alive and was freed at the plea of Baladitya’s mother.[38] His younger brother had taken the throne in the meantime.[39] Mihirakula went to Kashmir, killed the king who had taken him in and made himself king there.[39] Then he turned on Gandhara and killed its king.[39] He overthrew stupas and destroyed monasteries, in all 1,600 foundations.[39] He died before the year was out.[40]

The pilgrim was a Buddhist, and he set down the story more than a century after the events.[32] Modern accounts hold that the details may be unhistorical, while the outline stands.[41] Xuanzang himself places the king some centuries before his own journey.[35] The coins and inscriptions put Mihirakula in the first half of the sixth century.[42][29]

Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote of the White Huns in the north of India.[43] He wrote in the sixth century.[32] Their king, called Gollas, took no fewer than two thousand elephants and a great force of cavalry to war, it was said.[44] Cosmas calls him lord of India and says that he made the people pay tribute.[45] He tells how Gollas once besieged a city protected by water on every side.[45] The elephants, horses and soldiers drank the water dry, and Gollas crossed to the city dry-shod and took it.[45] Modern accounts take Gollas for Mihirakula.[46] Others identify him with the king whom Song Yun met in Gandhara in 520.[47]

The Kashmir chronicle Rājataraṅgiṇī was written in 1148 and 1149.[48] It counts Mihirakula among the kings of Kashmir.[49] It calls him a man of violent acts, like Death, who ruled in a land overrun by hordes of Mlecchas.[49] The chronicle sets him about twelve hundred years too early.[50]

Gandhara in 520

In 520 the pilgrim Song Yun, sent by the empress of the Northern Wei, entered Gandhara.[51] He found a land that the Ye-tha, the Hephthalites, had overcome and given to a king set up by them.[52] Two generations had passed since.[53] The king was at war with Ki-pin and had been for three years.[53] Some scholars identify Ki-pin with the Kabul valley.[53] The king kept 700 war elephants, each carrying ten armed men, and lived with his army on the frontier.[53] He did not rise when he received the letter of the Wei court.[54]

The Wei Shu has the same story in its entry on Gandhara.[55] The land was formerly called Yebo and took its new name after the Yeda overthrew it.[55] Its king was originally a Chile and had been on the throne for two generations.[55] He loved war and had fought Jibin for three years.[55] His 700 war elephants carried ten men each, and blades were tied to their trunks.[55] Chile is the northern name for the people the Chinese call Gaoche and Dingling.[56] The text does not say how a Chile came to rule Gandhara. It does not name him.

Some scholars call this ruler the Tegin of Gandhara, one of the first Hephthalite rulers to take the country, and hold that he may have been Khingila.[57] A coin of the earliest design yields the name Thujana, and it is attributed to a first ruler, Tunjina.[30] Whether the king of Song Yun and the Wei Shu belongs among the Alchon kings of the coins is not settled.[57]

Alchons and Nezaks

The Alchons met the Nezak kings of Kapisa and Kabul in war.[58] The sequence is given in two ways.[59] One has the Alchons driven out of the Kabul mint shortly after Toramana died in 515, when the Nezaks took it.[60] The other has them return from India after the defeat of Mihirakula.[58] They crossed the Khyber Pass westward and fought the Nezaks in Kapisa and Kabul.[61]

The coins show the clash. Overstrikes between Alchon and Nezak coins lie in a hoard near Kabul from the second half of the sixth century.[61] Narana, the last king known from coins, wears the bull’s-head crown of the Nezaks on some of his drachms struck in Gandhara.[62] The Nezak coinage shows elements of the Indian Alchon coinage.[61] Some scholars see the war as a religious one, Buddhist Nezaks against Hindu Alchons.[12]

After Mihirakula

The coins give the name of one more king after Mihirakula, Narana or Narendra.[16] He ruled, by one count, from about 570 or 580 to about 600.[16] Kashmir kept its own memory of later Huna kings.[63] The chronicle and the coins are understood as a line from Pravarasena II to Gokarna, Narendraditya Khinkhila and Yudhishthira.[63] The coins of Pravarasena and of Narendraditya carry the legend Kidāra, whose meaning is not known.[64] The last king of the line, Yudhishthira, lost the throne to the Karkota dynasty between about 657 and 670.[65]

The Huna of India lost their base in Central Asia when the Göktürks beat the Hephthalites there.[41] Small Huna principalities survived after the middle of the sixth century, but they carried little political weight.[41] The name lived on much longer.[66] In the ninth century the Pala king Devapala defeated Hunas in the north, and a principality of Hunamandala lay north-west of Malwa.[66] In the eleventh century the Kalachuri king Karnadeva married a Huna princess.[67]

The Huna and Buddhism

Xuanzang’s Mihirakula destroys Buddhist foundations.[39] The copper scroll points the other way, for it shows kings of the Alchon world as donors of a stupa.[20] Alchon coins lay in the relic deposits of stupas and in the monasteries of Taxila.[68] Excavations at Taxila led some scholars to speak of great destruction by the Huns.[69] Others hold that city life went on and that the monasteries were kept up, as Xuanzang saw when he visited.[69] These scholars find no archaeological fact that shows the Hephthalites destroying Buddhist temples.[70] Mihirakula’s coins show the bull of Shiva.[15] His Gwalior inscription records a temple of the Sun.[26]

References

  1. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 96, 101
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i Kurbanov 2010, p. 96
  3. ^ a b Fleet 1888, p. 147–148
  4. ^ a b c Kurbanov 2010, p. 178
  5. ^ Marquart 1901, p. 141
  6. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 16
  7. ^ a b Kurbanov 2010, p. 93
  8. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 95
  9. ^ a b c d Kurbanov 2010, p. 177
  10. ^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 173
  11. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 97
  12. ^ a b c d e f g h i Kurbanov 2010, p. 101
  13. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 87
  14. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 96–102
  15. ^ a b c d e Kurbanov 2010, p. 98
  16. ^ a b c d Kurbanov 2010, p. 99
  17. ^ a b Kurbanov 2010, p. 65
  18. ^ a b c d e f Kurbanov 2010, p. 102
  19. ^ a b c d e f g h Kurbanov 2010, p. 120
  20. ^ a b Kurbanov 2010, p. 120–121
  21. ^ a b c Kurbanov 2010, p. 121
  22. ^ Fleet 1888, p. 158–161
  23. ^ Fleet 1888, p. 159–161
  24. ^ a b Fleet 1888, p. 159
  25. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 97–98
  26. ^ a b c Fleet 1888, p. 161–163
  27. ^ Fleet 1888, p. 148
  28. ^ Fleet 1888, p. 146–148
  29. ^ a b c Fleet 1888, p. 146
  30. ^ a b Litvinsky 1996, p. 179
  31. ^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 145, 179
  32. ^ a b c Litvinsky 1996, p. 145
  33. ^ a b Litvinsky 1996, p. 191
  34. ^ Record of the Western Regions; Beal 1884, p. 166–167
  35. ^ a b c Record of the Western Regions; Beal 1884, p. 167
  36. ^ Record of the Western Regions; Beal 1884, p. 167–168
  37. ^ a b Record of the Western Regions; Beal 1884, p. 168
  38. ^ Record of the Western Regions; Beal 1884, p. 168–171
  39. ^ a b c d e Record of the Western Regions; Beal 1884, p. 171
  40. ^ Record of the Western Regions; Beal 1884, p. 172
  41. ^ a b c Litvinsky 1996, p. 146
  42. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 179
  43. ^ McCrindle 1897, p. 370
  44. ^ McCrindle 1897, p. 370–371
  45. ^ a b c McCrindle 1897, p. 371
  46. ^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 145–146
  47. ^ Beal 1884, xvi
  48. ^ Stein 1900, p. 6
  49. ^ a b Stein 1900, p. 43
  50. ^ Stein 1900, p. 79
  51. ^ Beal 1884, xv, xcix
  52. ^ Beal 1884, xcix–c
  53. ^ a b c d Beal 1884, c
  54. ^ Beal 1884, c–ci
  55. ^ a b c d e Wei Shu, juan 102
  56. ^ Wei Shu, juan 103
  57. ^ a b Kurbanov 2010, p. 177–178
  58. ^ a b Kurbanov 2010, p. 98, 100
  59. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 100, 104
  60. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 104
  61. ^ a b c Kurbanov 2010, p. 100
  62. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 99–100
  63. ^ a b Litvinsky 1996, p. 173–174
  64. ^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 173, 180
  65. ^ Litvinsky 1996, p. 174
  66. ^ a b Kurbanov 2010, p. 181–182
  67. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 182
  68. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 65, 99
  69. ^ a b Litvinsky 1996, p. 176
  70. ^ Kurbanov 2010, p. 234

Sources

Literature

  • Aydogdy Kurbanov, The Hephthalites: Archaeological and Historical Analysis (2010)
  • B. A. Litvinsky; Zhang Guang-da; R. Shabani Samghabadi (ed.), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. III (1996)
  • John Faithfull Fleet, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Vol. III: Inscriptions of the Early Gupta Kings and their Successors (1888)
  • J. W. McCrindle (trans. and ed.), The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk (1897)
  • Samuel Beal, Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World (1884)
  • Marc Aurel Stein (trans.), Kalhana's Rajatarangini, a Chronicle of the Kings of Kasmir, Vol. I: Introduction, Books I–VII (1900)
  • Josef Marquart, Ērānšahr nach der Geographie des Ps. Moses Xorenacʿi (1901)

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Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Alchon Huns.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/ethnicities/alchon/

Last revised: 8 November 2026