Origins — The Altai Steppe
c. 1000 BCE – 4th century CE · The Altai mountains and the inner-Asian steppe corridor
The Varaha story begins not on a city wall but in the high pastures of the Altai mountains — the four-country massif (today straddling Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, and the Xinjiang region of China) that has, for three thousand years, served as the demographic engine of inner Asia. From the Altai’s southern foothills came the wave of mounted, boar-totem clans whose later branches the Chinese, Persian, and Sanskrit chroniclers would name variously as Hephthalites, Heda, Yetha, Alkhan, White Huns, House of Waraz, and — much later — Varaha.
Why the Altai
The Altai matters because it is, geographically, the hinge between three ecological zones — the Siberian taiga to the north, the Eurasian steppe to the west, and the Tarim and Mongolian basins to the south and east. Pastoralist peoples settling its valleys could ride west into Sogdiana, south-east into the Ordos, or south through Dzungaria into the Tarim. Every major steppe confederation of antiquity — including the cousin-lineage of the Xiongnu on the Mongolian side — drew its founding stock from this region. Slab-grave burial culture, the long-bow with bone reinforcements, the short broad-chested steppe horse, and the gold-inlay boar-and-deer animal style associated with the Varaha’s ancestors all appear first in the Altai’s archaeological horizons of c. 1000–700 BCE.
Cousins on the eastern steppe — the Xiongnu
From the southern Altai, a parallel branch of the same broader steppe stock moved east into Mongolia and forged what Sima Qian’s Shiji calls the Xiongnu (匈奴, Hsiung-nu) confederation — twenty-four tribes under a supreme shanyu. The Xiongnu are kin, not parent: they are the Varahas’ cousins on the eastern steppe, and the two lineages share genetic, material, and totemic markers (notably the boar in gold animal-style inlay) without one descending from the other. Touman (the first historically attested shanyu), his son Modun, and Han Emperor Wendi’s edict of 162 BCE situating the Xiongnu shanyu as the Han emperor’s equal, all belong to the Xiongnu strand of this story. The Varaha strand — running through the Hephthalites and the House of Waraz — keeps to the Altai-and-westward route.
This distinction matters because it is precisely the conflation of “Hun” with “Xiongnu” by later European chroniclers (Ammianus, Procopius, and ultimately Edward Gibbon) that has muddied the Indian record. The Alkhans who would come south across the Hindu Kush were not Attila’s Mongolian Huns — they were a western, Altai-rooted lineage that had spent three centuries in Bactria and the House of Waraz before they ever saw the Indus.
Linguistics
The Altai speech-area was multilingual from the beginning, sitting at the contact zone of Yeniseian, proto-Turkic, proto-Mongolic, and Tocharian. Modern comparative work — Edwin Pulleyblank, Alexander Vovin, Stephan Georg, George van Driem, and Lajos Ligeti — places the Xiongnu elite in the Yeniseian family (today represented by Ket); the western branches that became the Hephthalites and the House of Waraz progressively Iranicised as they moved into Bactria and Sogdiana, until by the fifth century CE their inscriptions are written in Bactrian in Greek script with a few Sanskrit and Khotanese loanwords. The boar word — Sanskrit varāha, Pahlavi warāz, Old Turkic tonuz — preserves the totem across all three families. Atwood (2012) and Kim (2016) survey the alternative Turkic and Mongolic readings.
The horses
The Altai-born steppe horse — short, broad-chested, slow to tire, with a trot that allowed an archer to release at full gallop without losing balance — is the technological foundation of every Hunnic empire that follows. Vegetius, writing in the late fourth century CE in his Epitoma rei militaris, describes the Hunnic horse as ugly to Roman eyes but unmatched on long campaign. The Mahabharata’s Sabha Parva describes the Shweta-Hunas and Hara-Hunas presenting horses from the Vakshu (Oxus) at Yudhisthira’s court; Kalidasa, six centuries later, paints the Hunas as bearded riders along the same river. The Lakhi jungle between Bhatinda and Bhatner is named in Rajasthan tradition as the nadi-bharu — the breeding ground — of the Varahas’ later horse trade.
The boar as totem
The boar is not, on the steppe, a Vishnu-avatar borrowed from Indian theology — it is older. It appears on Altai-region funerary inlay as a fierce solar animal (the parallel pieces from the Gol Mod tomb in Mongolia and the Tillya Tepe tombs of northern Afghanistan are the best-known examples — Brosseder & Erdene 2011; Hiebert & Cambon 2008), travels west with the migration, and reappears in Sassanian Iran as the form taken by Verethragna, the Mazdean god of victory. It enters Hungarian heraldry as the Pecheneg ruling clan Thonuzoba (Old Turkic tonuz, “boar”, + oba, “house” — Anonymus’s Gesta Hungarorum, c. 1200 CE). When the Varahas of north-west India later identified themselves with Vishnu’s third avatar, they were reading their own ancient Altai totem into a familiar Indian iconography rather than borrowing one. The Bamiyan boar (Figure 22 in the book), the Eran boar of Toramana, and the Chalukya boar crest are all branches of the same long tradition.
Westward through Bactria
By the late third and fourth centuries CE, climatic stress, Han pressure on the Xiongnu cousin-confederation, and the rise of the Sassanian empire combined to push the western Altai clans across the Tian Shan into Bactria. Iranian and Chinese sources begin to call them Hephthalites, Heda, Yetha, and Ye-ta-i-lito. The Sogdian merchant Nanaivande’s letter of 313 CE — recovered from a watchtower west of Dunhuang — is the earliest surviving written reference to the migration in progress. From Bactria the road runs to the throne of Persia, where the lineage is admitted into the Sassanian aristocracy as the House of Waraz.
Continue to Migration West, or read more on the parallel Xiongnu cousin-lineage.
In this era
- Touman — first historically named shanyu of the cousin Xiongnu confederation
- Timeline c. 1000 BCE – 313 CE
- Primary sources — Sima Qian’s Shiji, Han Emperor Wendi’s edict of 162 BCE, the Sogdian Letters, the Altai slab-grave horizon
