Xiongnu, the World’s First Nomadic

Empire Bryan K. Miller

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Xiongnu: The World’s First Nomadic Empire

Bryan K. Miller
 Xiongnu
The World’s First Nomadic Empire

Bryan K. Miller
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
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For Alicia, of course.
Contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue

1 Nomad Protagonists
The Nomadic Alternative
The Mobile State
Reconfiguring the Narrative

2 Kingdoms of Those Who Draw the Bow

A Matrix of Steppe Worlds
Nomads of the Steppe Heartland
Herders of the Corridors and Oases
Herders and Hunters of the Far North
Kingdom of the High Mountains
Herders Between the Steppe and the Sown
Inner Asian Innovations

3 Masters of the Steppe

The New Order
Noble Nomads
Under Xiongnu Reins
All Are Xiongnu
Foddering the Regime
Livestock and Labor
Crops and Ores
 Furs and Silks
The Spoils of Conquest

4 Rule by the Horse

Institutions of the Empire
Regulations and Accounts
Ceremonies and Customs
Beastly Badges
Body of the Empire
Local Communities
Regional Hierarchies
Supraregional Polity
Arms of the Empire
Ventures Left and Right
Enterprises of Interregional Exploitation
Harnessing Eurasia

5 Of Wolves and Sheep

Empires in Arms
The Militant Emperor
The Great Game
Five Baits for the Nomads
Other Kings and Other Kingdoms
Culling the Herds
The Five Chanyus

6 Masters of the Continental Worlds

On the Global Stage
Great Reformations
Reigning Supreme
 Global Political Culture
Communities of the Empire
Local Nodes
Regional Networks
The Western Frontier
The Imperial Matrix
The Resilient Regime
The Scattering of Sheep

7 Hunnic Heritage
After the Fall
What’s in a Name
A Whole New World
Pacifying the Barbarians

Epilogue
Appendix (Chanyu Rulers)
Notes
References
Index (with Chinese Characters)
Acknowledgments

An eminent Xiongnu scholar once stated for their book

acknowledgments: “I thought that this page would never be
written.” And they have asked me for many years now: When will
your book be written? I tally up the years and places and people
that led to the completion of my book, and it is a long course
indeed, achieved only through the help and encouragement of a
horde of friends, colleagues, and mentors.
The interdisciplinary historical-archaeological approaches that
underlie this book began, without a doubt, during my graduate
studies at the Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. While there, I was
privileged to begin my intellectual journeys under the incomparable
guidance of Lothar von Falkenhausen. He was a remarkable mentor
and has been an unceasing supporter in the decades since. My
fellow East Asian archaeology colleagues from my time at UCLA—
Gwen Bennett, Chen Pochan, Rowan Flad, Minna (Haapenen)
Franck, Lai Guolong, and Ye Wa—were equally important in the
formations of my endeavors into early empires, which shifted quickly
from Qin to Han and, finally, to Xiongnu. And last, I must thank
Steve Rosen, with whom I was most fortunate to overlap at UCLA,
for formally launching me into the realms of “nomads” archaeology.
My first colleagues with whom I ventured into Mongolian
archaeology—namely Tserendorj Odbaatar and Jean-Luc Houle—
continue to help in more ways than they know, both in and out of
the field, from Khanuy brigade to center city Philadelphia, from
institutional juggling to theorizing prehistoric mobile pastoral
communities. I must give profuse thanks to Diimaajav Erdenebaatar
and Natsag Batbold for facilitating incredible first forays into the
world of Xiongnu archaeology at the amazing site of Gol Mod II. I
am most indebted to Tsagaan Törbat, an all-knowing bagsh for
Xiongnu archaeology, without whom much of this book would be
severely lacking and with whom I have shared many office
discussions, from Mongolia to Germany. He continues to impart rare
books and wisdom that have vastly improved this book, even up to
the very eve before I sat down to compose these acknowledgments.
Last, and perhaps more than anyone else in Mongolia, I must thank
Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan (Bayaraa)—my long-time field collaborator,
intellectual colleague, naiz min’ co-conspirator, and true nökhör—the
most steadfast and inspiring companion imaginable.
Through Bayarsaikhan and Odbaatar, I gained an extremely
supportive base of operations at the National Museum of Mongolia,
working with a host of office mates and fieldwork mates, including
Tseel Ayush and Tsevendorj Egiimaa. It was my great privilege to
work for several years in Khovd alongside the National Museum
crew, with added help from James Williams, Judy Logan, Claire Neily,
and Erik Johannesson, and even the esteemed Prokopy B.
Konovalov, who blessed us with his immense experience and wisdom
(and joy) for two summers of excavation work. Of the many
students from Khovd University who joined our crew, I give special
thanks to Tsegmediin Mönkhbat, who I am now honored to call a
long-distance colleague and co-author. For all these field endeavors
that produced amazing data for this book, I must express the utmost
gratitude to the Silk Road Foundation and its undaunted academic
leader Daniel Waugh, for overwhelming faith in and financial support
for such a young scholar-in-the-works.
All the while I conducted fieldwork in Mongolia, I was able to
“keep a foot” in China through my gracious hosts at the Center for
Frontier Archaeology at Jilin University, Yang Jianhua, Shao Huiqiu,
and, above all, Pan Ling. Thank you as well to Michelle (Machicek)
Hrivnyak, Pauline Sebillaud, and Steve Wang—my tongxuemen of
overseas grad students there in Changchun, who were great
sounding boards of conversation. Yes, xiao-mi is at last da-mi.
On top of the foundations of archaeological research from UCLA
and the many years of fieldwork in Mongolia, this book benefitted
greatly from my years as a doctoral grad student at the University of
Pennsylvania, through forays into worlds of Chinese texts
investigations with Paul Goldin and worlds of art history with grad
master Nancy Steinhardt. The consortium of fellow grad students,
who humored my incessant ramblings and map gymnastics about
the Xiongnu, were of equal importance in the collation of the first
iteration of a Xiongnu database. So, many thanks to you, Kate
Baldanza, Aurelia Campbell, Sarah Laursen, Leslee Michelsen, Jeff
Rice, Ori Tavor, and Chris Thornton. Thank you to Holly Pittman and
Renata Holod and all those in the Kolb Society at the Penn Museum
for providing a most excellent community for engaging my
archaeological inquiries.
Above all, I give thanks to two ‘outside’ people during my time at
U Penn, my resolute mentors in archaeological and historical
examinations who gave such shape to my dissertation on Power
Politics in the Xiongnu Empire (which is the origin of this book)—
Bryan Hanks and Nicola Di Cosmo. Bryan (the other one) is one of
the most faithful and inspiring intellectual supporters one could ever
have. Nicola was a devoted mentor long before he even took on that
official role during my years at Penn. He excavated (happily, despite
the flies) with me in the pits at Gol Mod II and has continued to
support me through many years since getting my degree, even to
the point of enabling the publication of this book.
Many of those thanked here are individuals, but there must be
room as well to acknowledge the support from organizations. The
American Center for Mongolian Studies funded my first venture to
Khovd (with Erdenebaatar), facilitated the massive undertaking of
the Xiongnu Archaeology international conference in 2008, and
managed a valuable year of postdoc work in Ulaanbaatar, when I
was able to begin the process of transforming a dissertation into a
book.
Of the rare kinds of people who change lives, personally and
intellectually, I must give special note to Ursula Brosseder, my other
co-conspirator in Mongolian archaeology, a most welcome “intense”
colleague, and the best kind of friend who opened doors to so many
opportunities in Germany and beyond. If I am in debt to the
numerous people listed thus for the gathering and processing of
data for this book, then I am certainly in debt to Ursula for
assistance in the inspiration, revising, and polishing of many of the
ideas.
I promised many times through the long course of the production
of this manuscript that I would someday thank Uncle Alex and Aunt
Gerda. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany
facilitated a very productive two years at the University of Bonn,
where I spent most of the scheming stages for this book and
benefitted from the rare books of their Inner Asian archaeology
library and invaluable conversations with Jan Bemmann, Ursula
Brosseder, and Susanne Reichert. The Gerda Henkel Foundation
gave me my first book-writing grant, funding the most valuable
resource—time—for final collation of the piles of archaeological and
historical data that fill these pages. And during this time given from
Gerda Henkel, I was fortunate to gain yet another cohort of
archaeological colleagues in the German town of Kiel. Thank you
Christian Horn, for entertaining theories of war and society so far
from Scandinavia, and thank you Martin Furholt, for bringing your
expertise and insights (and humor) all the way to Mongolia.
The chapters of this book began composition at Oxford University,
under the auspices of the Nomadic Empires group led by Pekka
Hämäläinen. It was an immensely fruitful group with plenty of good
pub chats, matched by a stream of “comparative nomads”
conversations, on frequent occasions with my reliable office mates
Julien Cooper and Marie Favereau. I cannot understate the value of
my Oxford archaeology colleagues as well, namely Paul Wordsworth,
who showed me the gavel-banging inner spheres; Anke Hein, with
whom I shared many whiskey chats (and eventually a conference
and volume for Lothar); and Pete Hommel, Eurasian prehistory
genius, whom we have now brought with us to Mongolia. Pete, Let’s
do this!
I must also give thanks to Uncle Max. The Max Planck Institute for
the Science of Human History, where Niki Boivin created a welcome
space for me and gave me the opportunity to make rapid headway
in writing this book. There, in the town of Jena, I was privileged to
be part of an amazingly collegial environment with far too many
people to thank in these acknowledgments. Of the host of brilliant
young scholars there with whom I interacted, I give special thanks
to the people who helped shape my conceptions of milk, millet, and
populations dynamics that have been folded into this particular
narrative of the Xiongnu—Elissa Bullion, Steve Goldstein, Jesse
Hendy, Anneke Janzen, Choongwon Jeong, Patrick Roberts, Robert
Spengler, Tina Warriner, and Shevan Wilkin. Thanks for your patience
with me in the labs, Sam Brown, many praises to Mara Nakama, who
created the most amazing illustrations for this book, and thanks as
well to Will Taylor for taking care all the renderings of horses were
proper.
Last of all, endless gratitude goes to the History of Art Department
and Museum of Anthropological Archaeology at the University of
Michigan, where Christy Gruber and Mike Galaty helped carve out a
fantastic final home for me and where the final bits of writing were
done, even amidst pandemic shutdowns. My thanks to Joyce Marcus
for reading and commenting upon every last word and punctuation
point, and to Bruce Worden who made all the maps look far better
than I could have imagined. Thanks as well go to Tammy Bray and
Lori Khatchadourian and the amazing School for Advanced Research
seminar group on imperial politics they brought together; the group
helped add integral, even if last-minute, thoughts and bits to the
book.
Acknowledgment statements often end with the greatest
foundation—family. I have benefitted for so many years from their
immense encouragement and unfathomable support to venture out
to China, Taiwan, Mongolia, Germany, and England and to persevere
the tumultuous worlds of academia. But how does one go about
thanking a partner, especially one of the incomparable caliber of
Alicia Ventresca Miller? Not just a partner with whom you share a life
(and a child, who is subjected to images of belts and bows and
taken on long journeys into the Mongolian countryside), but
someone who helps advance and inspire you through brain-
storming, manuscript drafts, and research trips. Any portion of this
book which reads more easily is most certainly a result of her input.
Any success is owed profoundly to her contributions. So to her, this
book is dedicated.
—June 2022, Ulaanbaatar
Prologue

The Chanyu, Magnificent Ruler of the vast steppe realms and master
of All Those Who Draw the Bow, ascended a high mountain with his
entire entourage and all the trappings for a traditional steppe ritual
of a binding blood oath. He had chosen the particular frontier peak,
beyond the confines of any Chinese garrisons, to convene with
Chinese ministers and consecrate a new peace treaty. The oath ritual
boldly commenced with the sacrifice of a white horse to sanctify the
ceremony. Then the Chanyu took a ritual knife, shaved off bits of
gold into a cup of alcohol, and stirred them in with a ceremonial
spoon. He presented the gilded brew to the Chinese ministers in an
aged cup fashioned from a human skull. It was an heirloom of the
Xiongnu rulers, handed down from a previous conquering Chanyu
over a century and a half before, hewn from the head of an enemy
king who had once wronged the founder of the steppe empire.
The Chinese delegation had come to the gathering with
predications of renewed nomadic concession to the Chinese court.
But there, amongst a mass of nomadic administrators and warriors
at the culmination of a steppe ceremony, the handful of Chinese
officials drank from the ominous memento of Xiongnu power. The
outcome of the gathering was not going to accord with the
ambitions of the August Emperor who sat far way in Chang’an, the
capital of the Han Empire. It was the design of this Chanyu, named
Huhanye, one who would revitalize the might of the steppe empire.
After decades of war with the Han Empire, and amidst
fragmenting civil war in the steppe realms, Huhanye Chanyu had
gone south to entreat the Chinese for aid and reside within their
frontier. In 51 BCE he had capitulated to the Han Emperor and was
heralded a “frontier vassal.” To this end, the Emperor had bestowed
him with official Han garments and a residence within the Han
capital region. The menace of the Xiongnu Empire had at long last
been quelled and its ruler, the Chanyu, ostensibly restrained within
the Han realms.
This would certainly have seemed so to any of the Chinese court
chroniclers at the time, and generations of historians since have
interpreted this as the beginning of a tumultuous and protracted
dissolution of the Xiongnu Empire. But the course of ensuing events,
culminating in the mountaintop oath ceremony, demonstrate a
dramatically different narrative.
Soon after his apparent acquiescence in the confines of the Han
capital, Huhanye moved northward with his remnant entourage to
reside in the grasslands between Chinese frontier garrisons. Yet
these lands were also occupied by resettled nomadic hordes, those
who had previously served the Xiongnu rulers. Although ostensibly
within the limits of the Han Empire, the Chanyu was surrounded by
fellow noble nomads and militia of the steppe, of whom he quickly
took command based in his temporary mountain abode. On
numerous occasions he received tens of thousands of cavalry for
protection and, through claims that his people were weary, cart
loads of grain from the stores of the surrounding frontier counties.
Only once more during his time in the frontier did he go directly to
the Han court to pay his respects.
As Huhanye bolstered his hordes and augmented his resources,
nomadic groups in the frontier who had once submitted to the Han
began to withdraw northward in ever-increasing numbers into the
steppes. By 47 BCE, Chinese officials at the northern frontier
remarked that the Chanyu’s people were in fact flourishing, his main
rival within the steppes was no longer a threat, and his own
ministers had begun to discuss a return north to the core Xiongnu
lands. In order to promptly garner a favorable and binding truce
before the Chanyu was out of reach, Chinese officials in the frontier
met with Huhanye at the top of a mountain to forge a treaty in the
name of their Emperor.
The terms of this treaty were not one of Xiongnu submission, as
the Chinese had presumed, but rather a peace agreement between
equal powers, recognizing “Han and Xiongnu together as one
house.” Even though court histories handed down through the ages
assert that the treaty was devised by Han representatives, the
emissaries were clearly not in control of its particulars. Even more
telling than the terms of the treaty were the rites of the oath
ceremony. It was conducted not in Chinese fashion but in accord
with sacred spaces, accoutrements, and actions of steppe rituals
that imparted Xiongnu dominance over the agreement.

[The Han officials] Chang and Meng along with the Chanyu and [his] great
ministers all ascended the mountain east of [what would become known as
the] River of Xiongnu Assent. [There] a white horse was slaughtered, the
Chanyu used a jinglu knife [to carve off] gold and a liuli spoon to mix
together [with] alcohol, and then, using the drinking vessel which Old
Venerate Chanyu had made from the skull of the King of the defeated
Yuezhi, all [in attendance] drank to the blood covenant.1

The ritual paraphernalia were items particular to steppe traditions.

The knife used to shave off gold into the alcohol was a specific sort
of Xiongnu precious dagger, and its name (jinglu) referred to a
Xiongnu deity of Heaven and the sacrificial places in honor of its
spirit. The cup was an heirloom of Xiongnu royal regalia,
commemorating a triumphant campaign against one of the last
competing nomadic groups, the Yuezhi, well over a century earlier
under the reign of the second imperial Chanyu. In addition, the
sacrifice of prized horses for ritual ceremonies had been a custom
among steppe nomads for well over a millennium, and the open
ritual space atop sacred mountains was certainly akin to steppe
ceremonies linked with sacred geography.
The frontier encampment of the Chanyu was closer to the Han
capital than to the seat of Xiongnu power in grasslands north of the
Gobi Desert, yet Huhanye purposefully did not journey to Chang’an
to consecrate this oath directly with the Han Emperor. The new
treaty was conducted according to steppe ritual conventions and,
most importantly, with terms conducive to the Chanyu’s ambitions to
assert himself as sovereign over all communities of “those who draw
the bow” in the steppe and as hegemon over the various lords of
Eurasia.
 Soon after the oath ceremony, the Chanyu returned northward as
planned to the core steppe regions of the Xiongnu Empire. Very little
is recorded of his subsequent actions, yet nomadic groups who had
previously submitted to the Han continued to withdraw from the
frontier. Even some high-level Chinese emissaries, once they made
the diplomatic journey to the Xiongnu court deep within the steppe,
did not return. Not until sixteen years later, in 31 BCE—when a new
Chinese Emperor had taken the throne and the last of the Chanyu’s
competitors within the Inner Asian steppes had been vanquished—
did Huhanye come confidently to the court of the Han Emperor to be
showered with lavish gifts and renew the peace treaty of his devise.
Even with the Chanyu in attendance at the court at Chang’an, the
Emperor could not undo the pact that bestowed such favor and
authority upon the steppe ruler.
It was upon this occasion that the Xiongnu ruler was also given a
Chinese bride to take as one of his secondary wives. Despite not
being a truly royal bride from the immediate Han ruling family, she
played a long-standing and significant role in accounts of Han–
Xiongnu politics. She was Lady Wang, the Bride Who Pacified the
Barbarians, and her tale has perpetuated the notion that steppe
nomads and their regimes can be undone once proponents of
Chinese culture infiltrate their society. It was through such historical
figures turned fictionalized legends that notions of Xiongnu
pacification lived on in historical memory.
Although the people and events surrounding the Chanyu Huhanye
have been associated with the deterioration of the Xiongnu Empire,
details embedded within the corpuses of historical records and
archaeological remains belie such a narrative. The texts that have
been used to spin the long-standing narrative of Chinese supremacy
need only be unraveled and rewoven with the growing body of
material evidence into a narrative that gives proper voice to the
protagonists of the Xiongnu story.
Chapter 1

Nomad Protagonists

To embark on the long and complex story of the Xiongnu, I present a

single inconspicuous artifact—a sheep anklebone. Rather than any of
the countless possible treasures pedestaled by museum exhibitions or
printed boldly in art collection catalogues, of the sort that fill
MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Objects, I choose something
that at first seems base but in actuality has significant implications for
an intricate understanding of Xiongnu culture, society, and empire
(Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1 Composite symbol (marking emphasized) on sheep anklebone from Gol
Mod II cemetery.
After Miller et al. 2006.

Over twenty years ago, the first Xiongnu individual I ever

investigated was a young child from a small grave. Within the
relatively meager burial were the partial remains of a foal and a few
lambs offered in remembrance of the youth, one who was dressed
with simple iron belt fittings and accompanied by a pile of worn
sheep bones probably used in some form of pastime. Although this
grave lay on the eastern flank of the largest known tomb of the
nomadic empire—a monumental and ostentatious burial that has in
more recent years yielded fantastic treasures of jade, silver, gold, and
exotic glass—the bones with markings in the small grave of the youth
remain uppermost in my thoughts about the nomadic empire.
 The surface of this particular sheep anklebone is smooth from
repeated handling. Animal astragali, called shagai in modern
Mongolian, are found in ancient and medieval contexts throughout
Eurasia, and are still used today as gaming pieces and for fortune-
telling in steppe cultures. The widespread use of these objects
reflects a large suite of similar cultural traditions, albeit with local
variations, that span the vast territories of the Eurasian steppes.
Here, however, I focus more on the implications this object has on
the inner workings of the first steppe empire.
In Xiongnu culture, ankle bones of sheep and other herd animals
served as personal adornments (bones with bored holes at the corner
to hang from bags and belts), as portable tools such as fire-starters
(bones with drilled burning indentations), or as playing pieces of
indeterminate function (worn bones, sometimes with markings). The
multiple uses of these livestock bones as personal possessions
convey the primacy of a pastoral way of life and echo perhaps the
multiple resources, from milk and meat to hair and hides, that
livestock provided for communities throughout the empire. But it is
the etchings on anklebones that speak to the economic and political
institutions. Considerations of these markings, via additional iterations
and material contexts of an extensive vocabulary of equivalent
symbols, generate questions about production, exchange,
administration, prestige, and authority in the Xiongnu Empire.
Markings of geometric design, often referred to as tamgas, have
long been prevalent throughout Eurasia but appear first among
steppe groups in the era when the Xiongnu Empire emerged. The
Xiongnu utilized these markings in multiple milieu—on the undersides
of wheel-made cook pots and storage jars, on bone handles of their
composite bows, etched onto imported luxury vessels, stamped onto
the eave tiles of their royal buildings, and carved on rock outcrops
throughout their realms.
Ancient art and modern tools alike demonstrate that these have
also been used as brands for livestock, and their presence in a variety
of material contexts of the Xiongnu may indicate similar practices of
denoting ownership. Many Xiongnu period signs have accordingly
been equated to clan or lineage emblems, though there are only a
handful of them with slight variations of the core elements.
Does this suggest that only certain groups retained clan signs or
were prevalent enough to be preserved in the archaeological record?
Furthermore, if each sign represents a single lineage group, then
what are the implications of composite signs, such as on the
anklebone from the child’s grave, for group interactions like clan
cooperatives or lineage alliances? Regardless of the exact meanings
of these signs or the possible groups being designated, they intimate
a scheme of articulating ownership—of storage pots and the contents
within, of prestigious exotica used in social performances of power, of
restricted arenas for ceremonies and monumental expressions of
authority, and of pivotal peaks and valleys for moving through and
utilizing the vast steppe landscape.
The repetitive use of many individual signs in different contexts
demonstrates a pervasive and codified scheme of symbols. These
symbols appear to have been integral in economic and political
endeavors.1 As many signs closely resemble runic marks of the Türkic
inscriptions centuries later, these could embody early iterations in
record keeping that were later utilized in the development of a
writing system among medieval steppe nomads.2
Historical tradition has long held that the Xiongnu had no form of
writing, citing Han court accounts that state they “are without written
documents and use spoken words for agreements and bonds.”3 Yet
other passages in the same chronicle betray the supposition that
these nomads were lacking any means of keeping accounts. “In
autumn [when] the horses are fat [they] hold a great gathering at
Dai Forest and examine and check the calculations of people and
livestock.”4 Was there perhaps a (as of yet unknown) complex system
of record keeping or ownership marking that is hinted at by this
written mention and by these recurring symbols?
Steppe societies in the centuries immediately after the Xiongnu era
are described as making marks on wood to keep records or tallying
sheep dung to calculate numbers of troops.5 Even in the Inca Empire
of South America, long series of knotted cotton or wool cords called
quipu were used for accounts of llamas, alpacas, chili peppers, and
other goods, demonstrating highly developed systems for managing
resources in the absence of formal writing.6 When considering such
alternatives to written characters for record keeping, the
archaeological artifacts and historical mentions for the Xiongnu era
signal alternative yet efficient methods of accounting among the
steppe communities.
Some markings on anklebones, including those found in the small
child’s grave, exhibit a series of hatches that could relate to a
numbering system. If so, then such marks could well be a vestige of
enumeration for which all other material renderings have not been
preserved. The histories seemingly credit any writing capabilities
among the Xiongnu to counseling from Han advisors, stating that one
defected minister instructed “the [Xiongnu] Left and Right [lords]
[how] to [prepare] documents and [keep] accounts so as to calculate
and record their multitudes of people and components of livestock.”7
However, the form and style of most Xiongnu markings are radically
different from Chinese characters. Even the recently discovered Han-
style bronze seal from a Xiongnu grave in Mongolia bears an
especially non-Chinese form of writing cast into the marking
underside.8 Despite the possible incorporation of some techniques of
accounting coming from the Han realms, these most likely reflect a
particularly steppe-derived system that developed during the Xiongnu
era.
While these markings may not constitute a writing system that
renders the spoken language(s) of Xiongnu constituents, they were
certainly charged with meaning and utilized in a structured fashion
for materials and places. Such etched and carved schemes for
accounting and ownership require us to alter our understanding of
how resources—whether in livestock, land, prestigious products or
even people—were controlled in the steppe and to expand our
notions of the kinds of social and economic institutions that could
facilitate the maintenance of a large empire. Rather than drawing up
Procrustean checklists of “empire” restricted by criteria such as full-
fledged writing systems—or, for that matter, much of the assumed
hard infrastructure like roads and market cities or soft infrastructure
like law codes and bureaucracy—we should consider a plethora of
possibilities for the social, economic, and political institutions
employed to manage resources and control communities on the level
of empires.
Reconsiderations of large nomadic conglomerates in many regions
of the world have begun to challenge the ways we think of formal
political entities, nomadic or otherwise. Even traditionally demoted
indigenous groups of the North American Plains are now discussed as
peer empires alongside the Spanish, French, and American regimes.
In these particular cases, the Great Plains entities are noted as
imperialistic in their outward actions, from their conquests to their
commercial networks that penetrated, exploited, and pushed back
against the colonial European empires.9 Yet they are not deemed
completely imperial from within, in so far as they lacked a king or
emperor who retained centralized authority over a hierarchy of ranks,
and they did not have clear territorial delineations.10
Historians and archaeologists have increasingly emphasized interior
dynamics, relying upon the available textual and growing material
records, respectively, in their analyses of governing systems and
constituent communities of early empires.11 Although most scholars
deem the Xiongnu entity to have been imperial in its outward military
and economic engagements, characterizations of its interior
constitution span a broad spectrum from tribal confederacy to
nomadic empire.12 Terms that seem contradictory are combined in
attempts to describe an entity that does not conform to traditional
classifications, including labels of “stateless empire” and “super-
complex chiefdom” employed by Nikolai Kradin.13
In response to struggles against constricting categorizations,
William Honeychurch and others have furthered the possibilities of
understanding by showing how pastoral nomadism and statehood
are, despite conventional narratives, not in conflict.14 This growing
body of scholarship concurs that the Xiongnu entity did possess
institutions of cohesive political organization and centralized authority
that were imperial in nature and set it apart from other nomadic
entities.15
 Nevertheless, summaries of world history continue to deem the
steppe and its societies as incongruous to any discussion of empire.
Even the large two-volume Oxford World History of Empire, omits the
historically and archaeologically attested Xiongnu and Türk empires,
leaving the Mongols to seem like a political enigma that emerged
surprisingly on the global stage.16 This may be, in part, due to the
many failed attempts to fit nomadic regimes into the predetermined
boxes of empire as necessarily bureaucratic and agrarian. As these
academic perceptions persist, we are left with the relentless base
assumption that nomads cannot formulate empires. But any
investigation of pre-modern polities should dwell less on their
categorization and more on their actions and operations.17
The Xiongnu may not have formulated an entrenched bureaucracy
of the sort for which the Persian, Chinese, and Mediterranean
empires are famous, but they did develop a complex political system
that fostered cohesion and centralized control. They may not have
established a polity with materially manifested borders or all-
encompassing domains, but they were firmly territorial and persistent
in their campaigns of dominance and resource extraction.
With archaeological and historical brushes in concert, this book
illustrates how nomads constructed a cohesive supraregional and
politically centralized regime that successfully managed a massive
and diverse surplus of resources for the benefit of a few—in other
words, an empire. The Xiongnu were imperial not only in their
outward actions but also in their interior operations. Politics were
hierarchical and pervasive, linking together communities of
neighboring and disparate regions of Inner Asia into a centrally
controlled regime mobilized for military and economic action.
The institutions for accounting invoked by the marked sheep bone
(with which I began this introductory discussion) call into question
entrenched assumptions about steppe pastoral peoples and their
capacity for social and economic complexity. Yet tamgas and other
markings highlight only one of the many new institutions of political
authority and wealth management of the Xiongnu, beyond mere
military might, that enabled the nomadic empire to have such deep
historical impact throughout Eurasia.
The Nomadic Alternative
Academic scholarship and popular literature alike continue to
marginalize nomadic societies. Nomads occupy worlds seemingly
outside of civilization and embrace alternative lifeways deemed at
odds with economic and political advancement.18 Their reliance on
livestock herds is reckoned incapable of the kinds of growth and
stability associated with large political regimes, and their mobile
lifeways, with communities purportedly able to “vote with their feet,”
are deemed a source of social fission antithetical to cohesive
governance.19
Yet nomadic societies comprise flexible social units and easily
conveyable wealth, both ideal for efficient large-scale operations.
Their pastoral engagements constitute resilient, not fragile, strategies
of long-term maintenance.20 Hence, nomadism is not a hindrance to
the creation of durable compositions, but rather presents so-called
alternative and equally viable trajectories for the development of an
extensive polity.21
Untangling nomadic traditions from their accumulated adverse
connotations requires first a recognition that the label “nomad” has
been a more cumbersome term than it should be.22 For societies of
the Eurasian steppes, this has led to the conflation of vast regions
and varied peoples into a single monolithic entity, in both cultural and
economic terms.23 But upon parsing nomadism, we find a range of
endeavors engaging a variety of livestock that may include
permanent villages and agriculture just as well as ephemeral
campsites and long-distance migrations.24
Despite prevailing connotations, the linguistic root of the word
“nomad” does not directly denote community movement so much as
the pasturing of animals, whether or not that task of pasturing
required shifts in residence.25 The frequently interchanged terms of
“nomadic pastoralism” and “pastoral nomadism” attempt to
distinguish between the variables of residential mobility and pastoral
economy enveloped by the label of nomadism. However, more and
more scholarship on so-called nomads has chosen to speak of
“mobile pastoralists” of many different sorts, whose lifeways lie
variably along intersecting spectrums of habitation (settled-to-mobile)
and subsistence (agricultural-to-pastoral).26
Pastoralists often diversify their herds in order to provide a plurality
of pathways to stable economies.27 But most societies that are
primarily pastoral are not exclusively so. The raising, pasturing,
moving, and harvesting of herds of domesticated animals do not
preclude engagements in hunting, gathering, or even farming (i.e.,
the raising and harvesting of domesticated crops). Hence, many so-
called nomads engage in pastorally based yet multiresource
economies.28
Similarly, not all steppe pastoralists continually moved great
distances. In Mongolia, the scales of mobility and patterns of land
use, as well as the compositions of local herds, have greatly varied
between regions.29 Instead of a constant engagement with long-
distance movements, what has characterized most of the steppe
pastoralists of Inner Asia is an intrinsic mobility; in other words, the
potential to enact community movement on periodic occasions for
regular pasturing shifts or in extenuating circumstances. Many herder
communities retained the capability of distant migrations, with their
tent homes and herds on the hoof, even if they stayed most of the
year within a small verdant stretch of a few kilometers.
The defining characteristic of Inner Asian nomads is thus more
their pastoral capital than their potential migrations, returning us to
the pastoral root of the term “nomad.”30 Herds of livestock were
managed just as fields of crops were, with long-term strategies of
material and labor investments, organized partitions and rotations,
and harvests with larger labor pools organized for maximum profits.
Prehistoric herders in the Eurasian steppes employed a variety of
sophisticated livestock management strategies. Pasturing circuits
particular to their local geographies maximized grazing potential,
extensions of animal birthing seasons increased production of
pastoral products, and foddering herds with collected grasses or even
millet to safeguard animals during the cold months.31
 Capital in pastoral societies such as the Xiongnu could take on
multiple forms, all of which fostered efficient control of wealth and
institutionalized wealth inequality that could support political elites.32
But beyond the material capital of actual herd animals, there is also a
host of social capital embedded within the relations and agreements
of pastoral communities. These include contracts for the sharing or
loaning of livestock; the use of particular grasslands, especially when
venturing outside of regular circuits; and the management of both
animals and lands.33 Complementing these contracts is a range of
cultural capital embodied in critical knowledge of the geographic
landscapes and social networks navigated by herder households and
the leaders of pastoral communities.
And just as these animals could be moved to new grazing grounds,
so were they more easily moved to trading places or harvesting labor
pools, assembled for taxation, and partitioned out to new households
and herders. Livestock particular to different regions, be they yaks in
the north or camels in the south, could be moved between different
regions of Inner Asia. As herds constituted motile wealth “on the
hoof” distinct from crops fixed to the land, unharvested stock was
more easily moved along with and between the equally mobile
communities. With widespread individual mobility afforded by horse
riding, people could also easily move between communities or be
mobilized for larger endeavors, military or otherwise.
Gainful management of livestock requires sufficient grass for
feeding them as well as sufficient people for herding and harvesting
them. Many households manage their herds through cooperative
communities of families that reside together for significant portions of
the year. In Mongolia, these units are traditionally referred to as
khoton or khot-ail, the latter being a binome referring to the herder
“households” (ail) that shared a “corral” (khot) of their collective
livestock.34 Each communal unit was centered on a collective herd,
rather than stuck to the land as at ordained crop fields, and tied not
so much to a specific plot of pasture as to a particular circuit of
continually negotiated pastures. While many herder communities
change composition with varied seasonal encampments, these
physically fluid collectives retained their social identity for cooperative
management in order to mitigate the risks of pastoral subsistence in
instances such as parched pastures or heavy winters.35 Such “camp
communities” constitute the building blocks of nomadic societies,
social units readily adaptive to variable environmental, economic, or
political conditions.36
Each herder community, or collection of closely linked communities,
frequently has certain households that retained greater affluence
than others did. And while wealthier families in the Inner Asian
steppe cannot usually sustain their larger herds on the pasture lands
in which they immediately reside, they can meet the demands of
growing livestock collectives through herd-sharing contracts. These
contracts allow them to partition their livestock out to other
households or communities as well as accord for labor pools that
expand workforces beyond their immediate households or even
community capacities when the most productive milking and shearing
seasons of harvest arise.
It is often the leaders of these more affluent families with access to
great material capital who are the ones that accumulate great social
capital, controlling the grazing circuits upon which herder households
rely. Although most camp communities of the past would have
formed through a combination of kith and kin relations, wealthier
ones could be more kinship-oriented, cultivating established lineages
to clearly distinguish those who were members of their clan unit with
access to greater capital. In early historical steppe societies like the
Xiongnu, the members of more elite households were those who
donned prestigious garments and belts, used hefty metal cauldrons
and other luxury wares when entertaining guests, resided in lavishly
adorned and furnished felt tents, and were laid to rest with ample
offerings in conspicuous graves.
Just as certain households or families within a community could
become more prominent than others, so could there arise a wide
spectrum of wealth differentiation between different communities of
the steppe, with certain leading families of those communities
bearing exclusive clan designations and rising above other locales.
These established lineages and their growing constituencies of
households served as the nuclei of nomadic societies and, in turn, as
the anchoring nodes for large political regimes.
In the thirteenth century, the greatest of such elite households in
Inner Asia were often referred to by the lavish tents in which they
dwelt—the “mobile palaces” called ordo or horde. Visitors to horde
camps of the Mongol nobles would come upon “carts stationed on
the [river] bank, the carts and tents [counting in the] thousands and
hundreds. Daily [they] had clarified hu-cream (butter) and beaten
lao-cream (kumiss) as sustenance . . . [and the ordo], its carts,
carriages, pavilions, and tents [made] gazing upon it of such majesty;
the ancient Great Chanyus did not have any luxury such as this.”37
While the term “horde” did not exist during the time of the Chanyu
rulers of the Xiongnu, the companies of retainers, guards, and
prominent households centered on a leading family, embodied by the
“mobile palace” of a noble nomad, certainly did. Even the famous
tents on wheeled vehicles of the Mongol elites, as described by
visiting European missionaries, find parallels in Xiongnu-era drawings
of tents on wheels etched onto birch-bark boxes.38
In this book about the Xiongnu regime and its constituents, I
employ the word “horde” as an apt, even if anachronistic, term to
encapsulate the political nuclei—their luxuries, supplies, entourages,
and all—of the steppe empire. The regiments of mounted warriors
that the camp leaders fielded, for which they became famous among
the non-steppe realms, were but one component of a horde. The
horde was at once a social, economic, and military unit.
In this vein, I aim to reach past the past several centuries of
pejorative connotations that grossly encumber the term “horde”—as
a throng of unorganized people, often of those who pose a violent
threat—in favor of adopting the Mongol-era emic meaning that
entailed a well-organized and mobile locus of wealth and power and
which in turn comprised the nodes of a larger political matrix.39
Hordes of nomadic regimes were categorically different entities
from regular khoton-like camp communities. They were convergences
of great social and material capital as well as military might. Large
quantities of livestock and other resources were distributed through
them, and critical contracts for managing herds and accessing
pastures were focused in their prominent households. In these
capacities, they often moved more in accordance with the needs of
itinerant governance than the needs of pastoral migrations.40
Whereas khoton were the building blocks of nomadic societies and
acted according to the needs of the herds, hordes were the building
blocks of nomadic polities and acted in accordance with the needs of
their ruling regimes.
In the chapters that follow, I analyze such building block units
through a nested perspective, expanding from local communities to
regional conglomerates to the empire as a whole, and focusing on
the myriad of materials and institutions used to weave their leaders
and constituents together. Communities in the steppe were fluid and
often moving, yet they still retained systematic interactions and
hierarchies of relations that enabled the formation of a centralized
political network. Economic institutions of pastoral systems allowed
for easy transference of capital at the same time as they allowed for
the maintenance of wealth inequality.41 These inequalities enabled
particular lineages to retain elite status, even building up over one
another with different rankings between them, to create a vast
hierarchical structure that spread across all of Inner Asia. Hence,
individual households combined into khoton groups that made up
single locales, and khotons coalesced into ever greater collectives,
linking several locales, under the leadership of local hordes under the
leadership of regional hordes. By dissecting the matrices of Xiongnu
realms and communities in a multiscalar fashion—spanning from a
single site to the entire empire—I aim to elucidate within the steppe
an agglomeration of complex political hierarchies and graded nodes
of wealth, ones on par with, even if seemingly different from, archaic
states and agrarian empires in other parts of the world.42
Nomadic elites could indeed build what other areas of the world
might render as kingdoms, and they most certainly founded the kinds
of regimes that elsewhere have been called empires. And while
pastoral economies and mobile communities are perhaps “alternative”
to the standard fare, they bore traditions that helped maintain polities
in the steppe no less sophisticated or impactful than the classic states
and empires that are the focus of most scholarship on the pre-
modern world.

The Mobile State

Mobile lifeways and mounted warfare have long been the presiding
features of narratives concerning steppe societies. In early Chinese
chronicles of Inner Asia, movement (xing) was the key descriptor for
steppe polities. The label of xing-guo—“mobile state” or “moving
state”—denoted polities throughout present-day Central and Inner
Asia that comprised people who “do not stick to the earth” and
fielded armies of mounted warriors.43 Chinese scribes recorded them
as all having equivalent customs to one another, often deemed equal
to those of the Xiongnu, and thereby lumped them into a monolithic
world of nomads who “herd livestock and follow water and grass
moving to and fro.”44 The subtext of the Chinese emphasis on mobile
lifeways for these foreign entities was that a populace needed to
“stick to the earth” if it was to provide the proper foundations for a
resilient society or stable polity. Yet the operations of the Xiongnu
and their constituents defy any purported ineptitude of mobile
practices for a successful state. On the contrary, they illustrate the
power wielded by a regime organized as a “mobile state.”
Mobility has long been reckoned the antithesis of political stability,
making nomadism an anarchist or utopian alternative of the state in
modern discourse. As for mobile people within a state, mobility is
seen as the ultimate art of not being governed.45 In the pervasive
Nomadology concept of Deleuze and Guattari, nomas and polis are
opposites. In this, nomadic groups are rendered specifically as non-
hierarchical collections of social actors who operate within non-
striated “smooth” spaces, which they do not organize or “code” in
any fashion, and whose movements are “perpetual, without aim or
destination.”46 As the above introduction to mobile pastoral lifeways
in the steppe has iterated, herder households neither wander amid
ecologically equivalent places nor move through socially smooth
spaces. And their social interactions and economic engagements both
engender and wield hierarchies.
From these and other models of nomadic societies comes the too
often repeated assumption that any apparatus based on mobility lies
in contrast to rational institutions of governance. The key disparity in
Nomadology between nomas and polis posits the former as a
machine of war at odds with the latter machine of state. When
delving into early East Asian history, one cannot help but hear this
dichotomous precept echoing the binary of wen-literati versus wu-
military that pervades Chinese political discourse. But whereas the
wen-wu incongruous dichotomy has been shown to be a false one,47
the nomas-polis dichotomy persists.
In traditional Chinese narratives of Eurasia, remaining mobile and
geared for war was deemed a joint strategy only for the early phase
of establishing a state, not for maintaining a state. The Confucianist
perspective on governance recounts the story of when the first
Emperor of the Han dynasty had vanquished all the Chinese realms
around and between the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers. The emperor’s
advisor allegedly asked, regarding the new imperial domain,
“Residing on a horse [you] obtained it, yet how can [you] govern it
on a horse?”48 This tale of a Han emperor contended that rulers had
to shift away from militarism and armed agents and instead embrace
a literati bureaucracy if they were to successfully govern their
domain.
As the tale lived on, the argument against the horse was pitched
mostly to non-Chinese rulers who sought to rule over the Central
Plains. However, during the centuries of northerner regimes in the
mid-first millennium CE, while this tenet was quoted it was also
questioned, arguing for a joint use of military and literati institutions
of governance.49 Through such uses the maxim came to embody less
an argument against militarism and more an argument against
steppe traditions in governance. The push for non-steppe traditions
was proposed even by advisors to the early Mongol khans who
conquered the Central Plains and realms further south.50
 Later, as the Manchus exerted sovereignty over the entirety of
Chinese domains, this long-standing adage transformed into a proviso
to foreign northerners that they must metaphorically dismount from
their steppe lifestyles and embrace the cultural protocols and
bureaucratic institutions of quintessentially Chinese traditions.51 Any
political regime inclined toward steppe traditions of nomads “on
horseback” rather than settled literati bureaucrats was doomed to
fail.
This stipulation of bureaucracy as the cornerstone of an empire,
and the associated incapacity of nomadic customs in forming an
empire, rears its head in Western political treatises as well.52
Historians repeatedly deduce that a regime without bureaucracy is a
confederacy rather than an empire, a loose entity of coercion and
indirect clients rather than an efficiently organized one with
structured territories.53 Without a literate bureaucracy, most scholars
have argued, the only means of control was military coercion. And a
polity of coercion is deemed categorically lesser than a territorially
structured and bureaucratic one.54
These assumptions about successful imperial regimes are so
inflated in historical traditions that they brim over the boundaries of
scholarly circles and spill into pop culture. When imperial
commanders in a fictional galaxy far, far away were told that their
empire would move ahead without a Senate and its officials, the
initial response was disbelief. “That’s impossible! How will the
emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?” The chief
governor then replied, “The regional governors now have direct
control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in
line.”55 With a web of loyal regional agents wielding the threat of an
unmatched imperial military, one doled out swiftly by the highly
mobile destructive force of a Death Star, a relatively small group and
their autocratic leader could theoretically retain control over a vast
empire. But this story, like those imprinted on most nomadic empires,
is one in which a fearsome regime struck great terror but did not live
long, or at least was not a fully fledged empire. Historical and
fictional narratives alike reiterate that a reliance on autonomous
agents in the provinces coupled with the threat of force emanating
from the center, even with the presence of mobile ruling bodies,
cannot sustain an empire.
In the galaxy far, far away, mobility was not only insufficient for the
ruling factions to maintain control over an empire, but it was also an
ideal strategy engaged by rebellious factions to evade imperial agents
and eventually undermine the empire. They could “vote with their
feet” and retreat to purportedly marginal environments, from which
they could still strike out against the regime.
These dual characterizations of those who embrace mobility bring
us back to the assumption that mobility itself is the antithesis of the
state—nomas and polis cannot coexist. But, as some historians of
steppe peoples and polities have argued, mobility among ruling
hordes and their constituent communities was not an obstacle to the
state. For rulers of nomadic regimes, mobility was the prime art of
governing. It was not power avoidance but power projection.56
Many scholars regard nomadic states as full of contradictions, like
mobility versus governance, and thus render them historical enigmas.
Yet, upon closer examination, we may discern sophisticated
institutions which, specifically because of their origins in pastoralism
and mobility, foster economic durability and political cohesion.57
Nomadic societies retain significant cultural capacity for cultivating
multiresource economies and managing political entities with thin
administrative bodies across extensive spaces.58 In this way, fluid and
mobile communities do not always bring about political fission.
Instead, they can be a means of fusion, creating more intricately
interwoven entities.
Greater investment in apparatuses of mobility fosters a more
efficient circulation of labor and material resources. The roads of the
Inca and Roman empires surely attest to the value of infrastructure
for the flows of things. Yet not all apparatuses of mobility were
physical constructs tied to the land. Pastoral institutions of livestock
and labor provide ample sources of wealth in the form of motile
material capital and alienable social capital that are more easily
hoardable and can flow through social networks of the state. But if
we lack the customary kinds of material evidence for empire, like
temples and cities or roads and storehouses, then to what sorts of
material vestiges can we turn so as to engage a narrative of empire
in the steppe?
Local and regional leaders in Xiongnu society maintained power
through their accumulation of immaterial social capital, to the benefit
of their own kin and hordes. But so did they brandish belts and other
material things that demonstrated their social affluence and their
exclusive membership in the larger regime. When wielded in social
engagements, such materials helped reinforce the hierarchical
relations and long-distance ties that maintained the political networks
of the empire; thus did they become material delegates of the
imperial regime.59
Since prestigious apparel, opulent feasting wares, and ostentatious
felt tents—the principal accoutrements and arenas for enacting
politics—were all easily transported along with the itinerant elite
households, and easily transferred among them, chiefs of varying
ranks were able to operate the empire without fixed infrastructure
like the palaces and treasuries on which archaeologists often rely to
delineate nodes of empire. We may then investigate the spatial and
social distributions of such material actants, which can be recovered,
as proxies of the politics and political nodes of empire rather than
looking only to cities, storehouses, and roads.
The “mobile state” polities of Inner Asia, as recounted by Han
chroniclers, were states certainly hinged upon a high capacity of
movements. Nodes of power in such regimes accumulated social
capital because material capital flowed through them. But, in this
way, they were more than just states that could move, shifting their
centers of power or even entire realms. They were cohesive regimes
in which livestock, goods, armies, agents, and even elite hordes all
moved with great adeptness into, out of, and amid varied domains.
Hence, rather than read xing-guo simply as “mobile-state” or “state-
of-mobility,” I construe it further into plurality as a “state-of-
mobilities”—in other words, a polity that comprises highly mobile
constituents and resources and is organized through non-fixed nodes
of a structured social network that mobilizes these foundations of the
political economy. In this vein, nomadic empires like the Xiongnu are
empires of mobilities, par excellence.
The key to maintaining any large polity, especially an empire, is to
increase available resources in excess of the biological needs of
constituent communities; in other words, a growing surplus with
great quantity and diversity that can serve the socioeconomic
agendas of the political regime.60 Empires of mobilities like the
Xiongnu accomplished this through investments in institutions of
efficient and far-reaching movements without the resource burdens
of maintaining fixed infrastructure, thereby allowing them to rapidly
seize control of vast resources spanning numerous regions. Rather
than taking over whole territories and blanketing them with
bureaucrats and colonies, the Xiongnu managed to bolster their
accumulative surplus by infiltrating other networks and
reappropriating existing nodes. As the imperial network grew, so did
the quantity and diversity of resources at its behest.
For communities throughout Inner Asia, cattle, horses, sheep, and
goats appear to have comprised the base of staple wealth, with other
domestic animals and even domestic crops as additions that varied
according to specific regions.61 Taxes and raids emphasized the
procurement of more livestock (or their hides) from a broad range of
areas that could bolster the primarily pastoral base of the steppe
economy. Hence, the Xiongnu regime relied on neighboring entities
not so much for any particular category of subsistence resource that
they completely lacked—namely grains—but more so for augmenting
the overall surplus of existing resources in the steppe for the imperial
economy.
But a surplus in livestock, chief among resources in the steppe,
could not be stockpiled in large store houses in the way that grains
could. Instead, large aggregates of animals had to be dispersed by
their elite owners to their constituent herder communities, each of
which managed and harvested collectives of animals with a breadth
of households, rich and poor, across different grasslands. As the
surplus of livestock and other materials of the empire grew, so grew
a need for a surplus in labor for harvesting and processing and for
managing agents to collect and distribute surplus resources. Thus
captured people were also resources to be distributed among
communities of the steppe. And, like a carrot and a stick, access to
surplus and threat of military force were complementary facets
driving a successful empire. However, once a regime could no longer
supply incentives of either sort—fodder or fear—local leaders would
no longer have any reason to recognize imperial authority and vast
realms would disintegrate into disparate regions.
The Xiongnu rulers became masters of whole worlds not by
administering control over all communities but by controlling
movements of all resources between communities outside of and
within disparate domains of the empire. Nomadic empires are indeed
territorial but in a way unlike their agrarian counterparts in the
Chinese Central Plains and elsewhere.62 It is the authority over the
movement of resources, more than sovereign claims to possess the
territories which bear them, that underwrites empires of mobilities.
Because of this, many of the regions into which the Xiongnu nomadic
empire exerted control yielded little to no structured vestiges of
political sovereignty.
How then, if we rely on built places to reconstruct the bodies of
ancient polities, can we map out the political landscape of a nomadic
empire such as the Xiongnu?63 How can we conceptualize the spaces
of a polity that was, relative to the contemporary agrarian empires of
Rome and China, cartographically invisible?64 In order to answer
these questions we must first detach our narrative from Childe-ish
preconceptions of civilization that tie social and economic complexity
to agriculture, cities, and densely landed populations.65
The most recurrent conundrum raised in discussions of nomadic
empires is the seeming sparsity of places and of people, begging the
same question posed to all empires of mobilities—be they steppe or
maritime—of how a group so small ruled an empire so vast.
Conventional understandings of empires dictate a primacy of
embedded infrastructure—in canals, roads, storehouses, and fortified
cities with markets and monuments. These built components, of
great material and labor investment, constitute conspicuous physical
evidence of the political landscape of empires.66 But the lack of these
particular forms of infrastructure did not present impassable problems
to nomadic regimes. Rather, this dearth of cities and such presents an
obstacle only to the prevailing scholarly discourses embedded in
circumscribed typologies and infrastructure checklists because they
are inaptly applied to analyses of imperial polities like the Xiongnu.
Infrastructure comprises far more than material building projects.
Broadly speaking, it is an “architecture for circulation,” whether hard
or soft, and includes social structures of management institutions and
agents as well as fixed built structures. All of these come together to
act as networks for the movement of goods and knowledge across
large spaces.67 In many respects, mobility facilitates all the
operations of empires; thus, the infrastructure for mobilities would
have been the primary concern of regimes like the Xiongnu.68 To
better elucidate the operations particular to nomadic empires, we
should therefore explore all possible modes of infrastructure.
At their cores, nomadic empires relied on the natural biological
infrastructure of grass and invested in ideological and social
infrastructure built from existing institutions grounded in their
pastoral economies.69 They capitalized on established movements,
namely the motility of herd wealth and subsistence, as well as the
mobility of herder communities, enabled by horses for individuals and
carts with cattle for households. All of these were well adapted to the
steppe lands of their core realms and to many of the surrounding
areas into which they expanded their economic endeavors of empire.
Codified institutions of authority and normalized practices of
operation, even without formal writing systems, could still include
schemes of accounting, ones intimated by tamgas and other
markings. But what other material or written evidence, aside from
marked bones, can we rely on to describe the structures and
operations of nomadic empires?
With their minimal physical infrastructure and fluid nodes of power,
nomadic empires, their elites, and their communities seem to evade
modern cartography, much in the same fashion as they often evaded
military forays of rival Chinese regimes. As they were neither nation
states nor settled state, technically speaking, they should not be
approached as bounded blobs of sovereignty with defined borders.
Despite the erection and maintenance of structures like the so-called
Great Wall, nomadic regimes penetrated and defied boundaries,
reaching deep into foreign lands to extract resources from their
markets and depots.70 They were not stagnant polygons of resource
containment but rather invasive constellations of resource extraction,
in which mobility itself was a resource that produced power
differences within the imperial society and counter to competing
polities.71
Nomadic societies may be fluid but they are not smooth or without
structure. Steppe pastoral communities, even if enmeshed in
migratory circuits, were often tethered to particular places in the
landscape, be they secure winter camps or potent ritual spots, that
formed matrices of operation. Landscapes of pastoralists were readily
transformable because the use of the natural landscape and its places
by herder households could be, and often were, renegotiated in
response to shifting ecological or social dynamics.72 Realms of
pastoral polities should thus be delineated less as quantified spaces
and more as matrices of people and the (sometimes moveable)
places at which they anchored.73
Instead of grand imperial narratives of cities (fixed spatial nodes)
as the foci of wealth and resources, we may think instead of elites
and other people (social nodes) as the foci of power through whom
material capital flowed and in whose hands social capital accrued.
This forces us to recognize the politics of space in an empire as
enacted through, and variably subject to, the politics of people,
especially those at the heads of constituent communities and the
networks between them. In short, political space was not fixed, but
rather socially constructed by the web of political actors and their
operations.74
Social approaches to political space allow us to discuss power
centrality in empires as something which could at times be divorced
from spatial constraints. Not all empires formed concentric political
regions radiating power out from singular metropoles of fixed capital
cities.75 Intricacies of political expanses, especially for nomadic
empires, reveal patchworks of integrated participating communities
that reached across great distances of core steppe realms and
vaulted into neighboring regions with dis-embedded enclaves and
islands of empire.76 Power was not only mobile, it also could be
partitioned into multiple social nodes separated by considerable space
yet still unfractured in its execution. In this way, we should not draw
a radial diagram or standard cartography of political polygons for
nomadic empires of mobilities. Instead, we should conceive of the
empire as a punctuated politico-geography; one structured as a social
topography of nodal actors in the political networks who collectively
operationalized the empire.
When mapping out the nodes of a Xiongnu politico-geography
across the spaces of Inner Asia, we are still in need of identifiable
correlates of the political hotspots. Since local leaders and regional
nobles throughout the steppe had to continually cultivate their roles
as agents of empire, we may look to the material tools and vestiges
of those political engagements. In particular, we may give special
attention to the array of imperial matter—the political things that
retained capacities for empowering actions derived from and linked to
the imperial regime.77
While the Xiongnu built neither roads nor cities (at least not the
kinds we so often imagine), they did invest in the construction of elite
graves and the maintenance of elite burial grounds. They wielded
prestigious and politically charged accoutrements, especially those
specifically indicative of the ruling regime, which allowed them to
enact the spectacles of politics that demonstrated their participation
in the empire.78 Many of these things accompanied privileged
persons into their graves. But aside from constructed funerary
spaces, much of this political performance would have occurred at or
within mobile structures or even in the natural landscape where
vestiges of these activities can still be found in etchings on rocky
hillsides. It is among these palettes of rock art, dispersed burial
grounds, deposits of luxury goods, and relatively inconspicuous
offering places and campsites that we must look for the seemingly
thin evidence of empire—a collective imperial matter that can
nonetheless provide us with a thick description of nomadic regimes
and their fluid empires of mobilities.
 Chronicles produced by contemporaneous neighboring regimes
frequently attempted to grasp the nomadic polities that continually
defied them. Yet, much the same as modern scholars, their efforts
were encumbered by perspectives that sought to define political
regimes as mechanical systems comprising landed bureaucracy and
bounded realms. Nomadic polities were organic entities that often
acted in seemingly unsystematic ways and could easily refocus their
political spaces, reconfigure their regional components, and reshape
their social and economic networks. It was their propensity to quickly
shift when individual pieces of the regime came under stress that
made them spatially incomprehensible to outsiders. But this is what
made them durable and successful.79
Nomadic empires were purposefully fluid. They were kinetic entities
that “embraced rather than eschewed mobility” and, by doing so,
were able to thrive.80 Leaders of steppe communities sought to keep
things, animals, and people in motion specifically because they
controlled the primary paths and comprised the primary nodes of
movements. They could quickly mobilize the motile resources, be
they livestock or warriors, easily transfer material and social capital,
and, if necessary, shift whole communities across their realms.
Nevertheless, historical narratives of nomadic regimes continually
consign them to a status of lesser capability. The mobile lifeways that
dominated their societies are deemed unstructured and the antithesis
of a stable state. But, as I have endeavored to show in this prelude
to the story of the Xiongnu, nomadic groups did not merely “wander
from place to place pasturing their animals” in harsh or so-called
marginal environments.81 They were calculating ecosystem engineers
and efficient managers of large webs of pastures, herds, and
households.82 And through this they were effective politicians and
state builders. The narrative I construct in this book thereby aims to
divulge a far more dynamic character of the Xiongnu regime, as one
that created an enduring empire of mobilities.
Reconfiguring the Narrative
World histories persistently portray nomads as marginal peoples
inhabiting marginal environments. Steppe realms are deemed neither
key central zones of development nor pertinent lands of civilization,
and the people within are neither the protagonists nor supporting
characters of history.83 They are the antithesis of progress, phantom
menaces of civilizations, and rendered “vagabonds of violence” or
“architects of apocalypse” who emerge from bleak lands to plunder
and cripple nations.84 With the perpetuation of such archetypes,
historical research gives way to popular histories and blends into
popular media, wherein icons like shadowy Hun warriors with clawed
fingertips and rugged horse-riding Dothraki storming in from distant
lands continue to plague our historical perspectives of steppe
societies.85
Some scholars have endeavored to push back against these
prevailing narratives, to present the Eurasian steppes as a center
stage of world history and, through this, fight to give a greater voice
to steppe peoples.86 But, despite such efforts, nomads are continually
relegated to the roles of outsiders and anarchists. Books that
specifically address Eurasia are often still encumbered by ill-fitting
models like Nomadology and other paradigms that carry with them
obstructive conceptual baggage—precepts that the ways of mobile
pastoralists are the antithesis of political development.87 Even
treatises that proclaim to give primacy to the steppe nomadic voice
begin contrarily with vignettes set firmly in the perspective of Chinese
protagonists. The Xiongnu indeed should “get the attention they
deserve,” but what kind of attention and treatment is that if they are
continually branded Barbarians at the Wall?88
If we do not reorient our perspectives, then we are doomed to
perpetuate millennia-old tropes of enigmatic marauding nomads.
Rather than denying them any capability as drivers of history, we
must strive to extract nomadic societies and the political regimes they
forged out from the “dark matter of history” and elevate them as
equal protagonists of history.89 Instead of continuing to marginalize
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 OUR SERMON.
In adopting this heading for a series of articles, which will be
continued as occasion offers, we are very far from intending to
startle our readers with a rush of theological disquisition. In proof of
our sincerity, and as an earnest of the gist of our discourses, we
have chosen as a standing text, or motto, the golden rule of “peace
and goodwill to all men;” but while we leave intact the functions of
the divine, it is our business, as we conceive it to be our duty, to
sermonize on the morals of trade, the social relations of every-day
life, and even the proprieties which enhance every species of
domestic enjoyment.
A right understanding of the relative duties of master and man, or
of employer and the employed, yields to no subject in importance;
peculiar incidents, induced by a rapidly increasing population, the
tendency of commercial wealth to accumulate in masses, and its
employment under the familiar term “capital,” through the agency of
individuals, in the construction of great works, constitutes, however,
an era in the Building trade to which former periods bear no very
strict analogy. In offering our humble opinions upon actuating causes
and their effects, be the subject what it may, we will never lose sight
of our text; we shall make use neither of angry words nor
denunciations; peace is too lovely to our minds, and charity too
imperative to be abandoned; we would dispel the darker and sterner
passions, giving every brother full credit for good intentions, and
assign occasional deviations from the path of right rather to
misfortune than intention. Whatever the class of men addressed or
dealt with, this, we are convinced, is the best and only true policy. It
may be very well for any one to talk of their anger being aroused, or
their indignation excited, and so on, and under such pleas to vent
abuse, imprecate a thousand vengeances, and the like, but, depend
upon it, fear is less to be relied on than love; we would win a child to
our love, not deter it by frowns and coercion;—we would have a
thousand friends rather than a single enemy.
Who has not heard of the tale of the traveller, upon whom the sun
and wind essayed their power? These elements, as the fable puts it,
were at issue as to which was superior, and agreed to rest the
decision upon the effect they should produce upon the first wayfarer.
Well, first the wind fell to work, and blew with all his might, to compel
the subject of their experiment to throw off his cloak, but the more
vehemently the man was assailed, the closer he wrapped the
garment about him; in turn the sun made trial of his power, and
genial warmth soon accomplished what the bluster of the ruder
element had made more and more difficult. So in human policy the
kindly glow excited by generous sentiments and actions will succeed
where threats, force, and even punishments have failed. The human
heart has no such obduracies but that charity will overcome them.
It is a part of our present purpose to refer to practical benevolence
of this nature, and it will be found in an extract from the Leeds
Mercury, given in another part of our paper, on the subject of the
treatment of workpeople, by Sir John Guest, at Merthyr Tydvil, and
the Messrs. Marshall, of Leeds. These, thank God, and for the
honour of our country, are not solitary instances. These gentlemen
stand not alone in the practice of that soundest principle of Christian
political economy which instructs the rich to dispense of their
abundance for the benefit of their poorer brethren. We have Master
Builders in every department, proprietors of large works and
establishments, whose names we could hold up to the admiration of
their craft and country, but we will not do this violence to their
unobtrusive merit, neither will we invite invidious comparisons by
such selections; we would rather hold up these Christian duties for
common emulation, and call upon all to “go and do likewise.”
We open, then, our exhortations to Masters, because we know
that the first impulse of benignant power must originate with them;
kindness from them may be likened to the sun in its influence, and
most surely will it be returned with usurious interest “into their basket
and their store.”
 Who ever saw the good father of a family putting firm faith in virtue
and honour, and regulating his household by their dictates, failing to
raise up virtuous, amiable, and honourable citizens? or, to put the
case stronger, who ever knew the man that acted upon opposite
principles succeed in sowing any thing but vice and discord? Depend
upon it, then, the same principles and rules apply in business, from
the overseer of the smallest undertaking to the governor of a nation.
Fatherly solicitude for those under our care, or for whom we bear
any responsibility, is as solemn and sacred a duty as the fulfilment of
contracts or engagements; nay, it is the first of duties between man
and man.
On the other hand, as to the workman,—fidelity—and more, the
same generous kindness towards his master is required, as that he
would receive; in fact, “to do unto others us you would be done by,”
is the great and universal secret of social happiness.
It is with this view of relative duties that we deem it of as much
importance to engage ourselves in giving good counsel to our craft,
as in enlightening them on principles of science pertaining to their
several callings; for of what avail will it be to a man to possess all the
knowledge of his art, if his heart be corrupt, or continue under vicious
influences? Away with, as dross, all the ability of the engineer,
architect, master builder, or workman, if the man be not endowed
with moral excellence. What are beautiful designs, imposing
structures, mechanical skill, or ingenious artifice in workmanship,
without a mind and heart in harmony with the superior inspirations
which virtue alone bestows? This, this indeed must come first as the
base of the pyramid. In any other case the pyramid may be there,
but it topples, leans, or lies on its side; the same inherent beauty
may exist, but its position and action are superadded elements of
deformity. Oh, how beautiful the human mind when lit up and guided
by the impulses of virtue! how terrible and loathsome when passion
and gaunt sensuality have their sway!
Guard, my beloved countrymen, against avarice, envy, malice;
avoid contentions; be moderate in the desire of gain; repine not at
another’s success in life, or the distinctions he may attain to; cast all
rancorous suggestions far from your heart; contend not in any unholy
spirit of craving competition; “live, and let live,” is a maxim which we
conjure you at all times to observe.
In times of commercial depression, aggravate not your own or
another’s suffering; these, like seasons of sickness and malady,
must and will have their recurrences, and they will recur more
frequently, and press more grievously, where brotherly love and
charity, the great preventative and remedy of human ills, are
neglected. Let none imagine it his privilege to be exempt from these
obligations; let us not, because we see a neighbour unmindful of his
duties in any of the multifarious walks of life, think ourselves justified
in departing from our superior policy; neither must we judge and
condemn; inflict, if you will, pains and penalties on yourself, but you
have no right to do so on another.
Pardon us, good brothers of our building fraternity, and you who
do us the favour to lend an ear to our counsellings, if we thus seek to
engage your attention, and offer our well-meant importunings.
Should your approving suffrages incite a continuance of our
vocation, it will be our ambition to discuss the relative duties of the
stations you respectively fill—master, apprentice, or workman; father,
brother, son, or husband; neighbour or friend; and to do as we have
now done, namely, try to improve each and all, and in doing so,
promote, in some degree, the cause of human happiness.
 TREATMENT OF WORK-PEOPLE BY
THEIR EMPLOYERS.
In an article under this head it was mentioned that the
parliamentary inquiry into the payment of wages in goods had
shewn, that there are persons extensively engaged in manufactures
of various kinds, who feel that the employment of bodies of
workpeople involves a degree of responsibility to care for their
general well-being, and who act on that conviction in a manner
highly creditable to themselves, and conducive to the excellent
object they have in view. These employers are of opinion that to
regard as a machine a man whose skill or industry assists them to
maintain their own families in respectability, is altogether unchristian,
and that by viewing workpeople in such a light, they would deprive
themselves of some of the finest opportunities of usefulness, and of
cementing the bonds of society.
Of course, as the intention in moving for a committee of the House
of Commons was to expose grievances, it was not likely that any
examples of conduct distinguished for its humanity would be found in
the pages of the report. As we remarked, however, when formerly
writing on the subject, illustrations of this kind might be obtained by
any one from our own neighbourhood. We had only last week the
pleasure of visiting an extensive range of school buildings just
erected on the best principles, in connection with Messrs. Marshall’s
mill at Holbeck. In that suite of rooms there are between 300 and
400 children under daily instruction, independent of about 160 boys,
who work half-time at the factory, and are at school either in the
morning or afternoon of every day; the same gentlemen have also
instituted girls’ and infant schools (which are situated elsewhere),
and a night school, attended by young men and women from the
mill, whose improvement in conduct as well as attainments, in
consequence of this arrangement, is spoken of as highly gratifying.
In the several schools every thing seems to be done to promote the
comfort of the young, and to cultivate habits of cleanliness and
decorum, as well as to impart an excellent plain education.[2] Plans
for affording the means of recreation to the adult workpeople have
also been devised in connection with these buildings; and all
manifests that a sincere interest is felt by the members of the firm in
the welfare of every class in their employ.
The principal example of attention to the interests of workpeople
which came under the notice of the parliamentary committee, was
that of Sir John Guest and Co., at their iron and coal works, Dowlais.
These works, which were established from thirty to forty years since,
“in an isolated place on the top of a hill,” in Glamorganshire, have
now a town around them (Merthyr Tydvil), and nearly 5,000 persons
are employed by this firm alone. In the first instance, great difficulty
was experienced by the workpeople in procuring the means of
lodging, but in the course of time this was removed by the erection of
a large number of cottages at the expense of the company, and by
the people being encouraged to build dwellings for themselves. The
cottages belonging to the firm are stated to be low-rented,
convenient, well built, well drained, and the taking of them is quite
optional with the workpeople; while the granting of loans to steady
men to build cottages for themselves has been pursued to a
considerable extent, and has been found to attach them to the place,
to keep them from the ale-house, and to produce and confirm in
them a feeling of independence.
The amount of each individual’s wages at this extensive
establishment is settled every Friday evening, and the whole of the
hands are paid on the morning of Saturday; shewing that a large
number of workpeople is no barrier to the early payment of wages if
employers are determined to adopt that highly beneficial practice.
Nearly twenty-four years ago, Sir John Guest and his partners
recognised the responsibility which attached to them as employers
by erecting large schools, near the works at Dowlais, chiefly for the
education of the children of their workmen, but (like Messrs.
Marshall) not confined to them. There are at present about 220 girls
and 250 boys under instruction, the children being admitted at the
age of six, and usually remaining until thirteen years old. The
teachers are well paid, and the whole expenses of the schools are
defrayed by the workpeople and employers together, in the following
manner:—Twopence in the pound is stopped every week “for the
doctor” from the wages of every one in the works, of which 1½d. is
appropriated to provide medical attendance for the families of the
workmen, and the remainder goes towards the support of the
schools. Each child is also expected to pay one penny a week, and
whatever is wanting to make up the amount incurred in maintaining
the educational establishments is contributed by the company. In
connection with the schools, it is worthy of notice that Mr. Evans, the
manager at Dowlais (from whose evidence our facts are drawn),
expressed before the committee a strong conviction, as the result
both of his own observation for above twenty years, and of the
statements of colliers themselves, that for a collier to put his child to
work in the pits very young is decidedly bad economy; instead of
gaining, the family loses by it in the long run, while the unfortunate
victim of error or cupidity becomes decrepit and unfit for work when
individuals of the same age are in possession of mature strength.
Very few of the children taught in the schools at Dowlais become
colliers, the greater number being qualified for employment as
carpenters, smiths, and, in some instances, even book-keepers. “We
derive very great advantage,” says Mr. Evans, “from having children
in the works who have been educated there; they are of great use to
us.” Here, then, is a proof to masters who have not yet exerted
themselves for the elevation of the families dependent on them, but
are disposed to do so, that such a course is not only beneficial to
others, but brings a reward to every one who adopts it. The medical
attendants on the workpeople at Dowlais consist of three regular
surgeons and a dispenser, whose services are remunerated chiefly
by the money stopped from the wages. In 1827 a fund for the relief
of the sick and aged was formed, one penny in the pound being
stopped every week to furnish the necessary supply for the wants of
those who are thus unable to provide for themselves; this fund is at
the disposal of a committee, elected yearly by all the contributors.
From the peculiar circumstances of the district, when the works of
Sir John Guest and Co. were established, and for many years after,
it was desirable and even needful that the firm should afford their
workpeople the means of obtaining the necessaries of life by
maintaining a shop on the premises. In 1823, however, they closed
it, but once again opened it at the request of the men in 1828. On the
act against truck shops being passed in 1831, the workmen were
called together and desired to state whether they wished the store
belonging to the firm still to be continued. The votes were taken by
ballot, and thirteen only were given for the discontinuance; but as
there was not perfect unanimity, the company thought it best that the
shop should be finally closed at that time; and the increase of
population having had the usual effect of attracting private
individuals to supply the wants of the community, the only result of
this step was to shut up an establishment where the labouring
classes were always sure of buying good articles at a moderate
price. The accommodation being no longer necessary, we think the
company’s decision was a wise one.
It is gratifying to find that no loss whatever has been entailed on
Sir John Guest and Co. by all the beneficial regulations adopted by
them on behalf of their workpeople. On the contrary, “by the
education of the people,” Mr. Evans states, “we have gained more
than we have spent upon them.” And this gentleman expressed
himself as feeling certain that if a similar system were extended over
the manufacturing and mining districts of the whole country, it would
prove the cheapest and most effectual mode of benefiting both the
working classes and employers, and consequently society at large.
Of course, the details of the system at Dowlais, or at any other
establishment of which an account is before the public, are not
essential to its being adopted with advantage in other parts of the
country, though the success which has attended those plans gives
them a title to careful consideration; the thing to be desired is, that
each employer should ask himself how far he can adopt the
principle, and then carry into operation the dictates of his own
judgment and conscience.—Leeds Mercury.

[2] The ventilation of the new school-rooms appears to be

remarkably effective—a point of great importance where so many
individuals are for three hours at a time congregated together.
The playground also is being extremely well laid out.
 Reviews.
Temples, Ancient and Modern, or Notes on Church Architecture. By
William Bardwell, Architect. London: Fraser & Co., and
Williams.
Mr. Bardwell, in the Preface to this work, states his object to be
—
“To endeavour to excite among architects a spirit of inquiry such
as cannot fail to prevent a repetition of those improprieties the
existence of which in our public edifices has so long afforded subject
for complaint and matter for criticism;” and “to put an end to that
inconsistency which is the cause of error,—namely, the tyranny of
custom and the caprice of fashion: which, while they compel the
modern architect to copy in little and with meaner materials the
sublime works of revered antiquity, indulge a laugh at his expense,
because his reproduction fails to excite those sensations of pleasure
and admiration which are inseparable from a contemplation of the
original.”
Passing over the first three chapters of the work, which, although
they contain much excellent matter of opinion, to which all may
subscribe, do nevertheless open a door to controversy, and this it is
our desire to avoid,—we come to Chapter IV. This is headed “Errors
in the details of late-erected Churches, a connected series of critical
observations;” and has for its object, by stringing together a number
of critiques from the Gentleman’s Magazine and other sources, to
call attention to the prevalent errors of past design, and to enunciate
correct principles for future practice. We quite agree with Mr.
Bardwell, that “notwithstanding the querulous tone in which the
writers have occasionally indulged, the extracts contain many hints
that may be permanently useful;” and would wish that the spirit of a
following paragraph could be always borne in mind by the critic and
reviewer. “The legitimate object of criticism,” says our author, “is to
improve the future, rather than to cast ill-natured censure upon the
past.” However, we cannot take exception to Mr. Bardwell’s
discharge of his duty. He has most appositely given these extracts
through a whole chapter, and placed them in admirable order for
study and profitable reflection. No one can read through this chapter
attentively without being impressed with a desire to contribute his
part to the rectification of such errors as are therein pointed out—it
will awaken many to an active investigation where other modes of
expression or remonstrance would probably fail.
In Chapter V. Mr. Bardwell enters into the great question that
awaits us at every approach to a comprehensive study in
architecture—the origin. Speculation on this point is in its nature
endless; but it is highly gratifying to feel occasionally that we are
thrown in the way of facts, and such it is the province of this chapter
to treat us to. With a little prefatory matter in the way of an assault
upon the hitherto deemed orthodox authorities on such subjects, and
upon the principle of adherence to rule and precedent, and upon the
little fables of an inventive tradition, assigning to this accident or that
the origin of this or that feature, plan, and style, we come to the
“burden of the book,”—Temples; and have a most interesting
dissertation on those of ancient character, or on what we may more
aptly term sacred edifices, memorials, or monuments.
“An altar of turf or of stones, stones of memorial, such as that set
up at the grave of Jacob’s beloved Rachel, the great stone near the
oak at Shechem, Absalom’s Pillar, Jacob’s Bethel, Samuel’s
Ebenezer, the Gilgal, or circle of stones, of Joshua; a heap of
unhewn stones, the Pandoo Koolies, of Hindostan, the numerous
pillars set up by the Phœnician merchants, on the shores of the
Mediterranean, in France, in Sweden; and in Great Britain, circles
and rows of huge stones, like those of Stonehenge, Abury, &c.;
cromlechs and logan stones, a portable ark, or tabernacle, were the
first sacred monuments. Next came the pyramid, a cylinder, whether
a cippus or a column; a cubical block, with a particular member
superadded to the regularity of mathematical proportions. A sphere
and a tetrahedron; and last succeeded a vase covered with a flat lid,
and adorned with various sculptures from the vegetable and marine
world.”
Thus Mr. Bardwell connects with religion the first memorable and
permanent efforts of Building Art—sacrifice he shows to have been
associated with, and to have guided the workings of, the first
builders, from the “primeval altar of little more than a raised hearth,
built generally of unhewn stones,” to the “column or stone pillar of
mystic character—‘And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took
the stone that he had put for his pillow, and set it up for a pillar, and
poured oil upon the top of it; and he called the name of that place
Beth-El.’” “The Greeks also erected pillars which they called
‘Baitulia,’ evidently derived from Beth-El, involving the same mystery,
and both supposed to be symbols of the Divine Presence.”
Chapter VI. increases in interest, and is devoted to the Temple of
Ammon.
“The Temple of Ammon, the remains of which archæologists, for
many powerful reasons, agree are extant in the enormous pile
known as the Temple of Karnac, is by far the most extensive, as well
as the most ancient, of the Theban edifices; properly belonging to
the whole period of the monarchy, and may with propriety be termed
the Temple of the Pharaohs, the majority of whom, in succession,
more particularly such as are celebrated in history, contributed their
efforts to its enlargement and magnificence. From numerous
authorities it seems clear that Ham, the son of Noah, the Amun,
Ammon, or Osiris of the Egyptians, must be considered as the
original founder of Thebes, or the city of Ammon, as his son
Mizraim, Misor, or Menes, was by common consent the founder of
Memphis; so that the temple of Ammon or Ham was, in all
probability, originally named from its founder, like the Temple of
Solomon at Jerusalem.”
We cannot take our readers along with us as we would by quoting
largely from this interesting chapter, nor will we presume to dispose
of the work by this brief and imperfect notice; it deserves much more
at our hands; it is written with an enlarged feeling, and a genuine
spirit of devotion to the sublime art upon which it treats; it is erudite,
and occasionally profound; but we must take our leave of it for the
present, concluding with another extract from the same chapter.
“The remains of Karnac are about 2,500 feet from the banks of the
Nile, on an artificial elevation, surrounded by a brick wall, about
6,300 yards in circuit. The chief front of the temple (the western) is
turned towards the river, with which it was connected by an alley of
colossal crio-sphinxes, leading down to the bank of the river. Here
the devotee would land who came from a distance to the shrine of
Ammon, and with amazement and a feeling of religious awe would
he slowly walk along between the majestic and tranquil sphinxes to
the still more magnificent propylæ of the building. This colossal
entrance is about 360 feet long and 148 high; the great door in the
middle is 64 feet high. Passing through this door-way, he would enter
a long court, occupied by a row of pillars on the north and south
sides, and a double row of taller pillars running down the middle.
These pillars terminated opposite to two colossal statues in front of a
second propylon, through which, after ascending a flight o’ twenty-
seven steps, we enter the great hypostyle hall, which had a flat stone
roof, supported by one hundred and thirty-four colossal pillars, some
of which are twenty-six feet in circumference, and others thirty-four.
The width of this magnificent hall (for the entrance is in the centre of
the longest side) is about 338 feet, and the length or depth 170 feet.
The centre column supported a clere-story, in which were small
windows. Four beautiful obelisks mark the entrance to the adytum,
which consists of three apartments entirely of granite. The centre or
principal room is 20 feet long, 16 wide, and 13 feet high. Three
blocks of granite form the roof, which is painted with clusters of gilt
stars on a blue ground. Beyond this are other porticos and galleries,
which have been continued to another propylon at the distance of
2,000 feet from that at the western extremity of the temple.”

English Patents for 1841. By Andrew Pritchard, M.R.I., &c.

Whitaker and Co., London. 2s. 6d.
We had commenced the selection of a list of patents from this
excellent compendium, with the intention of laying before our readers
all those pertaining to the Building Art, but found that we should have
to reprint nearly the whole of the book; so comprehensive is the
range we have chosen, and so ingenious the class we have the
honour to serve. Of 441 patents herein entered, by far the largest
proportion are as we have stated; and we can only, therefore, refer
to the work itself. Besides the above list of patents, there is
appended a copy of Letters Patent, an abstract of the Registration of
Designs Act, and a notice respecting its operation, concluding with a
useful Index, which shews at one glance what you would refer to.
The value of such a work as this is not to be estimated. All persons
intending to take out patents should look over its pages, as it may
save much trouble and expense. We know of many who would have
been great gainers had they had such a guide at their elbows.
 MISCELLANEOUS.
There is a consideration which entitles architecture to a decided
pre-eminence amongst the other arts. It is itself the parent of many
separate professions, and requires a combination of talents and an
extent of knowledge for which other professions have not the
smallest occasion. An acquaintance with the sciences of geometry
and mechanical philosophy, with the arts of sculpture and design,
and other abstruse and elegant branches of knowledge, are
indispensable requisites in the education of a good architect, and
raise his art to a vast height above those professions which practice
alone can render familiar, and which consist in the mere exertion of
muscular force. From these considerations it appears there is some
foundation in the very nature of architecture for those extraordinary
privileges to which masons have always laid claim, and which they
have almost always possessed—privileges which no other artists
could have confidence to ask, or liberty to enjoy.—Ency. Brit., Vol.
XIV., p. 280.
Alison on French Architecture.—In France we find that public
works have been reared at an expense not exceeding that of edifices
of little or no excellence in our own country, even although the
charges of building are not materially different in the two countries.
So true it is, that the most essential elements in architectural beauty
—genius and taste in the architect, are beyond the power of mere
wealth to command—that it is not money to construct beautiful
edifices, but the mind to conceive them, which is generally wanting.
It would seem, therefore, that it is the pure taste and noble
conceptions of the artists of Southern Europe, rather than in any
great excellence in the materials at their command, or the wealth of
which they have the disposal, to which we must ascribe their
remarkable superiority to those of this country.
Devonshire House, Piccadilly.—The additions and alterations
which are being made to this fine old mansion, the residence of His
Grace the Duke of Devonshire, are proceeding rapidly, and will add
considerably to the extent as well as to its internal arrangements. Mr.
Decimus Burton is the architect, and Messrs. Woolcott and Son are
the contractors, for these works, which will yet take many months to
complete. The Duke is for the present staying at his princely abode,
Chatsworth.
Church Extension.—There are now twelve new churches
building, or about to be commenced, in various parts of the
metropolis; one in the Kent-road, in the parish of St. George,
Southwark; one in the parish of Paddington; another on the site of
the Old Broadway Chapel, Westminster; a large church, with a lofty
Gothic tower, in which a musical peal of bells is to be placed, in
Wilton-square, Knightsbridge; three in Bethnal-green parish, and a
church in St. Pancras parish. Sites have been chosen for a new
church in the Waterloo-road district of Lambeth parish; another in St.
Botolph Without, Aldgate, in the county of Middlesex; and a third in
St. George’s-in-the-East. The new parish church of St. Giles’s,
Camberwell, building on the site of the old edifice, which was
destroyed by fire, is progressing rapidly, and will be a noble and
spacious edifice. The new church at Paddington will be a great
ornament to that neighbourhood. The University of Durham has
granted 400l. towards the erection of a new church at South Shields.
It is intended to build a new Roman Catholic Church in the eastern
part of the metropolis. The site chosen is a large piece of ground on
the south side of the Commercial-road, and it is expected that the
total cost of the edifice and the purchase of the ground will not fall
short of 30,000l.
 NOTICES.
To Advertisers.—This first impression of Five Thousand is
reserved for sale in London and the large Provincial Towns. The next
impression of five thousand will be stamped, so as to pass post-free,
and will be circulated gratuitously on the 7th of January, 1843,
amongst that number of the nobility, gentry, clergy, professional men,
and principal tradesmen, all over the United Kingdom, according to a
list which has most generously been placed at our disposal for that
purpose by a friend. It is important, therefore, to advertisers that they
should seize the opportunity thus afforded them of a special and
select notification of their business among a class of such
importance. It may be affirmed, indeed, that a circulation of this
character and amount is superior to one of four times the number of
copies dispersed at random, in the ordinary way of sale. Additional
advertisements, therefore (if sufficient in number) will be inserted in a
Supplement to accompany this gratuitous circulation, as well as the
future sale, and should be sent to the Office at latest, on Thursday,
the 5th of January. The charge for advertisements in the Supplement
will be 15s. per quarter column, 1l. 10s. per half column, and so on;
smaller advertisements according to agreement. To insure more
attention to the Supplement, as well as to secure an additional
circulation for it, it will contain matter of interest as to the progress of
the first impression, correspondence, and the like. Our prospects
hitherto have been so far gratifying as to give us confidence that the
whole number of 20,000 copies of the Precursor will be disposed of!

To our Readers.—As we do not choose to trust our own

judgment on a subject in which so many are interested besides
ourselves, and as it is so easy to obtain an opinion by which we may
be guided, we think it right in this place to invite attention to our
views on the subject of the future character of “The Builder.” Before
a month shall have elapsed, at least 20,000 numbers of this paper
will, in all probability, have been circulated, and will have passed
under the review of twenty times that number of readers. They, and
in particular our Building friends, will have made up their minds as to
whether “The Builder” is a work to be encouraged—it certainly is
not our desire to attempt to force the point, although we would use a
little “gentle violence” to develope the evidence—and this we may be
supposed to be doing now. We have said that there are two parties
to this, as to every other question—the public and ourselves. It is not
for us to tell the public that they know nothing of their own wants,
and to attempt to force them into the belief that such a paper as “The
Builder” is absolutely necessary, but unless we had taken this step
on our own responsibility, the question would have remained
undetermined. What we would ask of the Building public then is—Do
you wish to have a periodical devoted to your interests, as we
propose? and whether would you have it a Magazine and Advertiser
simply, or as a Newspaper conjoined? In the former case it might be
weekly or monthly, in the latter it must necessarily be weekly. As to
the price and size: If a Magazine and Advertiser of twelve pages of
the size of our present number, we should say 3d. the number,
stamped 4d.; if a Newspaper of sixteen pages, we do not think it
could be less than 6d. Every body has seen the Illustrated London
News, and allowing for difference in the character of the illustrations
(those in “The Builder” being devoted entirely to art and science),
you will be able to judge of the appearance which the latter will
present. We are only anxious to undertake no more, or, no less, than
can reasonably be expected to be carried out. If it should appear
from experience of the working that more can be accomplished, we
shall most gladly acknowledge and act upon it, by either enlarging
the paper, or reducing the price. But we still think that to conjoin the
character of a Magazine and Newspaper, and at the cost of one to
give the advantages of both, will be to study the true economy of our
cause.
The readers, therefore, have much of the settlement of the
question in their own hands—even to the influencing of the
advertisers. All advertisers look for papers of large circulation, and
as advertisements are a great means of support to a newspaper, it is
evident that the more “The Builder” is supported by the mere
reader, by so much the more does it stand a chance of support from
advertisers. We venture, therefore, to speak in this business as
though we were ourselves less concerned in its issue than we really
feel to be—and we urge upon our honoured fellow-craftsmen to
make this paper their own. Let it be a sign or standard of union.
We do not ask to have subscriptions forwarded, but we would
respectfully request to be favoured by an immediate intimation front
all parties as to their willingness to subscribe, and which they would
prefer, a Magazine alone, or Magazine and Newspaper.
We trust it will be considered that we are pursuing a
straightforward and ingenuous course, willing to be guided by
circumstances, rather than to seek to force or control them, or to
stake upon our own presumptuous judgment that which a prudent
and discreet man would say should be left to the decision of the
common voice and experience.
Pardon us if we once more urge you to rally round “The Builder.”
 ADVERTISEMENTS.
BAZAAR PANCLIBANON, 58, BAKER-STREET, PORTMAN-
SQUARE.—KITCHEN RANGES, STOVE GRATES, FURNISHING
IRONMONGERY.—The stock of this vast establishment has been
renewed, with an extensive selection of every description of
domestic furniture, usually found in the ironmongery department.
Every requisite for the Kitchen, in Copper, Iron, or Tin, of first-rate
qualities, the prices being marked in plain figures, for READY
MONEY. Kitchen ranges and cooking apparatus upon approved
principles, including useful and modern improvements. The higher
class of goods comprises an enlarged assortment of register and
stove grates, in steel and black metal, with fenders and fire-irons to
correspond, suitable to drawing and dining rooms, libraries, halls,
and chambers, in various styles of ornamental embellishment now in
vogue, and of improved modes of construction, calculated to insure
safety with economy.
A very large assemblage of baths, of sound make, and adapted to
all purposes of health and comfort; comprehending shower, plunge,
and vapour baths; those proper to the nursery, with hip, foot, and
knee baths, and peculiar shapes convenient for embrocation; among
these enumerated, are varieties fitted with practical improvements
for the ready application of this valuable resource to the invalid, or in
cases of sudden indisposition.
A commodious saloon has been added to receive a new stock
containing Appendages to the tea table, including papier maché and
iron tea trays of great beauty of design, and tasteful display of
ornament. Tea and coffee urns and coffee machines of the best
quality, of London make, comprising every useful improvement in
those articles.
Tea services in Britannia metal, of superior quality, and in
considerable variety of shape and pattern. A costly display of plain