Touman

First historically attested shanyu of the Xiongnu confederation · late 3rd century BCE

Touman (頭曼; Mongolian transliteration Tümen) is the earliest Xiongnu ruler whose name and reign are preserved in a written source. The Shiji (史記) of the Han historian Sima Qian, completed in the late second century BCE, describes him as the leader who first welded the twenty-four tribes of the eastern steppe into a single political unit. Touman ruled a confederation that stretched from the Ordos plateau north to the Selenga river, with a “left wing”, a “right wing”, and a centre — the standard tripartite structure of every later steppe empire.

Significance for the Varaha story

Touman matters here because his confederation is the cousin-lineage of the western Altai clans who would later become the Hephthalites and Alkhans. The Xiongnu and the western Altai branches share material culture (slab-grave burials, the steppe horse, the boar-and-deer animal style in gold), genetic markers (Mongolia North Neolithic admixture, see the Genetic Evidence page), and totemic continuity (the boar). What separates them is geographic direction: Touman’s line moves east toward Han China; the Varaha line keeps west.

Modun and the succession

Touman attempted to disinherit his eldest son Modun in favour of a younger child of a junior wife. The Shiji’s well-known story — Modun training his picked horsemen to shoot wherever he aimed his whistling arrow, until they were willing to shoot at Touman himself — ends with Modun killing Touman around 209 BCE and unifying the Xiongnu in his own right. Modun’s reign would establish the Xiongnu as the equal of Han China; his treaties with Han Emperor Gaozu, and his son Laoshang’s diplomatic exchanges with Wendi (whose 162 BCE edict to the shanyu we still possess), are the first instances of a steppe ruler treating with the Chinese empire as equal sovereign.

Sources

• Sima Qian, Shiji, ch. 110 (Hsiung-nu lieh-chuan)
• Ban Gu, Han Shu, ch. 94 (Xiongnu zhuan)
• Higham, Encyclopedia of Ancient Asian Civilizations (2004), entry “Xiongnu”
• Kim, H. J., The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe (2013)
• Atwood, C. P., “Huns and Xiōngnu: New Thoughts on an Old Problem” (2012)