I came across the following link, which was posted in /r/Archaeology:
The tagline reads as follows: "Inscription carved into Mongolian mountain in 89AD tells the story of how the Han dynasty defeated the nomadic Huns"
I don't have much credence for the article in general, but I was interested in a Chinese newspaper using the word Hun to describe the nomads commemorated in the find. I understand the consensus to be that Huns, as followed Attila, were not a single tribe but a group of other peoples united by military success.
I read that one theory identifies the Huns with the Xiongnu Confederation, either as being the Huns or driving them west; is this theory accepted in Chinese scholarship? Or, can it be that I have fallen victim to a newspaper intern choosing the most popular term in English for nomads in the first century?
The idea of "naming" nomadic tribes is an interesting question since it really depends on how they termed themselves and how they were termed by others.
What we know of steppe dynamics is usually routed in theories that have been established by scholars such as Barfield and Jagchid. They argue that steppe history, much like Chinese dynastic history, is routed in a circular formation. There are usually three players within the Chinese dynastic cycle (The Chinese, The Turkic, and the Manchus) but can be replaced by who ever was present thus the Turkic get replaced by Mongols. The Steppe version instead revolves around two groups, unlike the Chinese dynastic cycle. In rough terms these began with Indo-European and proto-Turkic, changed to Turkic and Mongolian and by the 1250's CE had settled on Mongol or Mongol variants as Mongolia receded into declining importance in chronicles especially those written in Central Asia.
I am in the camp of considering the The Xiongnu Confederation as a proto-Turkic group who had driven out the Indo-Europeans although it is likely that the confederation was composed of a number of Indo-European tribes. The "Turkic" group, which emerged for the first time in history as the Gok-Turks in the 6th century CE had not emerged yet and from my estimation the only group that did exist, as evidenced by the historical accounts, were the Huns. This is proven, at least from my point of view, in the fact that the common term for the Hephthalites was called the "White Huns" and that they were different either the Rouan-Rouan or the Gok-Turks. They in turn were driven out by the Indo-European Rouan-Rouan.
So I guess the article naming the Xiongnu as Huns would be correct in terminology. In regards to Chinese scholarship, I don't know of any specific scholar who focuses on this period although scholars like Jagchid did write articles in Chinese thus it could be a possible avenue of dissemination. I do not read Chinese very well so unless someone else could provide more information on that side, at least in Western scholarship it is clear that the Xiongnu could very well be considered the Huns as the history of their migration to the west, in a similar nature to those such as the Scythians, fit into the narrative as evidenced by historical chronicles.
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