The powerful women of an ancient empire

With no cities or courts, the formidable and nomadic Xiongnu kingdom sent princess emissaries to control its frontiers.

The raiders came from the north. They came on horseback, the skilled bowmen shooting powerful arrows with expert precision. They ruined and burned the crops, which the Han Chinese villagers living on China’s northern frontiers in about 200 BCE tended to with great attention. The Han Chinese called the invaders “Xiongnu”, which meant “fierce slave”, a pejorative term aimed to emphasise the barbarians’ “inferiority”.

In reality, however, the Xiongnu outperformed their Chinese neighbours in military expertise and political organisation. Comprised of different ethnic tribes, the Xiongnu were the world’s first nomadic empire, well-organised and formidable enough to cause so much trouble to the Han Chinese that the latter eventually resolved to build the Great Wall of China. More interestingly, behind the fierce bowmen, it was the powerful Xiongnu women who helped hold the empire together.

Piecing together the Xiongnu’s curious history has been a challenge because despite their high organisation and military prowess, the nation never developed a written language. “So the majority of facts we know about Xiongnu come from their graveyards and their enemies,” said Christina Warinner, a group leader in the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute.

And the graveyards tell an interesting story, as a recent study has proven that a surprisingly high number of elite Xiongnu burials hold female remains.

Archaeologists excavating Xiongnu burial sites across Mongolia have long posited that remains in some of the richest and most elaborate graves were female. However, it was only when genetic sequencing technologies finally came of age a few years ago that Warinner’s Max Planck team was able to confirm the female gender of several elite burials with absolute certainty, publishing their study findings in the journal Science in April 2023.

These findings have changed scientists’ perspective on how Xiongnu expanded their territory and held their nomadic empire together, and the important role their women played in politics and economy.

We may think of empires as stationary entities that build cities, palaces and courts to maintain their rule, but some nomadic kingdoms were incredibly robust. Predating the famed Genghis Khan empire by about 1,000 years, the Xiongnu empire lasted from the 2nd Century BCE to the late 1st Century CE and occupied the territory of modern-day Mongolia with its northern borders stretching all the way to Lake Baikal in today’s Russia.

Besides being skilled warriors, Xiongnu were also avid purveyors of luxury goods, which they acquired from across Eurasia through the trading routes of the ancient Silk Road – including Chinese silks, Roman glass and Egyptian beads. The elite Xiongnu women held important positions in society and were involved in politics. In a way, Xiongnu women were the virtual glue – or perhaps the silk ties – that held together the roaming kingdom, which didn’t have permanent cities or brick-and-mortar fixtures to assert its presence.

“Xiongnu women held great imperial power along the frontier, often holding exclusive noble ranks, maintaining Xiongnu traditions, and engaging in both steppe power politics and the Silk Road networks,” said Bryan Miller, assistant professor of archaeology at the University of Michigan, US, also on the Max Planck team. “They were highly respected.”

“These burials of women often have grave goods in them that are symbols of power and leadership,” added Warinner.

At the elite cemetery of Takhiltyn Khotgor, located in the Mankhan district of Khovd province in western Mongolia, the researchers found monumental tombs clearly built to honour the women. Resting in elaborate coffins decorated with Xiongnu’s imperial symbols of golden sun and moon, each female was surrounded by a host of commoner males placed in simple graves. One tomb contained six horses and a chariot.

At the nearby Shombuuzyn Belchir cemetery, women similarly occupied the wealthiest graves, accompanied by luxury items of their earthly life, including Chinese mirrors, silk clothing, wooden carts, faience beads and animal offerings.

The tombs look like upside-down pyramids with rectangular bases above ground (archaeologists call them terraces) that narrow as they protrude into the earth. “When you excavate it, it’s basically shaped like an inverted pyramid that leads up to 20m down into the ground,” explained Ursula Brosseder, a prehistorical archaeologist at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology in Germany (who wasn’t part of the Max Plank study).

Archaeologists have also found ornamental belts in Xiongnu’s burials, another type of artefact indicating high societal status. Decorated with large plaques and adorned with beads and stone pendants, they look “like Christmas trees with everything hanging down from the waist”, said Brosseder. “A belt is a very important symbol of status and rank, but it [typically] belongs to the male sphere and not to the female sphere,” she explained. “What is really interesting is that only the Xiongnu in this time period gave the belts to the women and not so much to the men.”

The ability to ride horses and shoot the bow was one of the Xiongnu’s main skills. “Some people call horses the ships of the land, because ships and horses were some of the fastest travel that existed prior to industrialisation,” said Warinner. The Xiongnu domesticated the horses, which were native to the steppe, and they also learned to shoot the bow while riding, so they were dangerous at both far and near distance. The Han Chinese were of no match to them. “Even when they built the Great Wall of China, it never worked,” Warriner said. “The Xiongnu just rode around it.”

Xiongnu women drew the bow and rode horses too, but whether any followed men into the battle is less clear. Some female graves contained equestrian equipment, but researchers can’t tell with certainty whether women fought alongside men. “I think we should not exclude that there were also warrior women,” said Brosseder. “It doesn’t mean that all the women participated in the army,” she added, “but they definitely could horse ride and also shoot the bow, just for the normal purposes of having a better life at the steppe.”

Genetic research helped Max Planck’s team discover another interesting fact. The women buried at the empire frontiers near China were genetically very different from the surrounding Xiongnu population. Instead, they were closely related to a man thought to be one of Xiongnu kings, whose grave was excavated in 2013 in central Mongolia.

The team believes that the king married his female relatives to the frontier clans to strengthen political alliances and keep the empire strong. “We think that the king was sending his daughters to control the rural parts of the empire, politically and economically,” said Bayarsaikhan. There, they acted as emissaries and maintained contacts with the Silk Road trade networks. “So, it was an important practice,” he said, adding that these Xiongnu traditions laid the foundations for the success of the future Mongolian empire. When building his own nomadic kingdom, Genghis Khan followed the Xiongnu “marriage playbook”: Mongolian queens, who ruled a millennia later, were well-known for their political powers, Bayarsaikhan said.

One may think that the women were just pawns in the male-dominated empire-building schemes, but the rich burial sites speak of the opposite, said Miller. “If the women were just pawns, their own modest burials would be next to their lavishly decorated husbands, but that’s not the case. These women were part of powerful marriage alliances and kept the whole empire together cohesively. They were highly honoured and highly decorated.”

Were Xiongnu unique in embracing a different set of gender rules? Not necessarily. On the contrary, the findings show that we “shouldn’t expand the Victorian era mindset about the roles of women to all cultures throughout history,” explained Miller, who is working on a book about Xiongnu and their culture. “I’m hoping that people may realise women actually had a lot of power in pre-modern societies,” he said.