The White Huns ruled Central Asia for a century, yet their origins remain a puzzle
From about 450 to 560 CE, a people called the Hephthalites dominated a swathe of Central Asia from Sogdia to the Tarim Basin. Persians, Byzantines, Chinese and Indians all knew them, under a dozen names. Yet nobody kept a list of their kings, and historians still disagree about where they came from or what language they first spoke.
Their heartland was Tokharistan, just north of the Hindu Kush range, covering what is now southern Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan, with a capital probably at Kunduz. They became a military force around 450 by defeating the Kidarites, conquered Sogdia by 479 and pushed into Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin by 493. They also meddled in Persian politics, helping Peroz I take the Sasanian throne from his brother. Their empire was a confederation mixing nomadic bands with settled city dwellers, and it never crossed south of the Hindu Kush, where the related Alchon Huns held sway.
In their own inscriptions and coins, written in the Greek-derived Bactrian script, they called themselves Ebodalo, often shortened to Eb. A seal that Nicholas Sims-Williams made public in 2011 depicts an early ruler in a radiate crown, labelled lord of the Hephthalites. The name itself has competing explanations, perhaps a Khotanese word for strong or a Persian phrase meaning the seven Al. Indians called them Sveta Huna, White Huns.
Origin theories split mainly into Iranian and Turkic camps. Kazuo Enoki argued in 1959 that they were East Iranians native to Bactria; Richard Frye cautiously agreed while calling them probably a mixed horde. The view now described as most prominent, advanced by Etienne de la Vaissiere, holds that they were Turkic in origin and later adopted Bactrian. Whether they were connected to Attila's Huns in Europe is unresolved: some scholars see a shared migration out of the Altai in the 4th century, possibly driven by drying pastures, while others think they took the Hun name simply to intimidate enemies.
Procopius, the 6th-century Byzantine historian, set them apart from other Huns, describing a settled people under one king who dealt justly with neighbours. Their power ended around 560, when the First Turkic Khaganate and the Sasanians crushed them together. Smaller Hephthalite principalities lingered under Turkish and Persian overlords until 625.
Source: Hephthalites
