Origins
There are several theories regarding the origins of the White Huns, with the "Turkic" and "Indo-European Iranic" theories being the most prominent.
For many years, scholars suggested that they were of Turkic stock, and it seems likely that at least some groups amongst the Hephthalites were Turkic-speakers. In 1959, Kazuo Enoki proposed that they were probably East Indo-Iranians as some sources indicated that they were originally from Tokharestan, which is known to have been inhabited by Indo-Iranian people in antiquity. Richard Frye is cautiously accepting of Enoki's hypothesis, while at the same time stressing that the Hephthalites "were probably a mixed horde". More recently Xavier Tremblay's detailed examination of surviving Hephthalite personal names has indicated that Enoki's hypothesis that they were East Iranian may well be correct, but the matter remains unresolved in academic circles.
According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica and Encyclopaedia of Islam, the Hephthalites possibly originated in what is today eastern Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They apparently had no direct connection with the European Huns, but may have been causally related with their movement. It is noteworthy that the tribes in question deliberately called themselves Huns in order to frighten their enemies.
Some White Huns may have been a prominent tribe or clan of the Chionites. According to Richard Nelson Frye:
Just as later nomadic empires were confederations of many peoples, we may tentatively propose that the ruling groups of these invaders were, or at least included, Turkic-speaking tribesmen from the east and north. Although most probably the bulk of the people in the confederation of Chionites and then Hephtalites spoke an Iranian language... this was the last time in the history of Central Asia that Iranian-speaking nomads played any role; hereafter all nomads would speak Turkic languages.
Read more about this topic: Hephthalite Empire
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