Starting from a heartland in what’s now central Mongolia, the Xiongnu Empire (brown) spread across a large part of northern Asia, taking hold around 2,200 years ago. In the last decade, geneticists and archaeologists have ramped up efforts to study these sites and ancient records to decipher the Xiongnu Empire’s political organization and technological achievements. Today, remnants of Xiongnu culture largely consist of more than 7,000 tombs, some heavily looted and many yet to be excavated, in Mongolia and nearby parts of China and Russia. Unlike in Rome or Egypt, mobile groups of Xiongnu animal herders accomplished this feat without building cities, forming central bureaucracies, devising a writing system or mobilizing masses of farmers to produce food. A common political system headed by Xiongnu imperial rulers formed about 209 B.C. Long before the Mongol Empire arose, Asia’s first nomadic empire, horse-riding Xiongnu people, conquered ethnic groups across the continent’s northeastern and central expanses ( SN: 1/29/10). In an age that spawned the ancient Roman and Egyptian empires, Mongolia’s Xiongnu Empire broke the rules of imperial expansion.
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