5 articles

Historiography

Debates and controversies.

Climate and the steppe empires What tree rings, ice cores and lake sediments say about the weather of the steppe between the Xiongnu and the Uyghurs, and who has argued what from it: the eruptions of 536 and 540, the Late Antique Little Ice Age, the cold summer of 627 and the fall of 630, the drought of the Uyghur decades.
Making of the first steppe empire Why a steppe empire appeared north of China in the third century BC, and whether China made it: the frontier models of Owen Lattimore and Thomas Barfield, Peter Turchin's coevolution, the state-or-chiefdom argument, and Nicola Di Cosmo's case that the institutions of the Xiongnu came from the steppe and the west, not from China.
The language of the Xiongnu What the Xiongnu spoke, argued from four words in a Chinese chronicle and some fifty glossed terms: the Turkic readings, the Yeniseian reading, the Eastern Iranian stratum in the titles and the dairy words, and what three genomes add to the question.
The steppe before the Xiongnu What archaeology and Golden say of the Eurasian steppe before the first empire: the Bronze Age cultures of South Siberia, the horse and the coming of nomadism, the Early Nomads of the Iron Age, and the Cimmerians, Scythians and Saka of the west.
The Turkic ethnogenesis debate Who has claimed what about the origin of the Turkic peoples and the descent of the Göktürk: the Altaic and Transeurasian hypotheses, the Xiongnu and the Huns, the Ashina and the Wusun, the genome of an empress, and the national narratives; set out as positions, not findings.