It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's podcast

we are talking about the Shognu, this remarkable ancient empire in central Asia. This was,

shall we say, the origins of the Huns. We've got our future Hunnic podcast too, so stay

tuned for that. But in this podcast we are talking about the extraordinary Shognu that

had connections with Dynasties and ancient China, but we can also see links between the Shognu

and the ancient a chyminid Persian empire to the west, absolutely fascinating and to talk

through to provide an overview of the Shognu with a particular focus we'll be looking at,

hierarchy, the political structure and more including globalization. I was delighted to be joined

by Dr. Brian Miller from the University of Pennsylvania. Brian is a fantastic speaker as you're

about to find out. So without further ado, here's Brian. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having me. Now this is an amazing topic, the Shognu. Well first of all, can we say that

they are ancestors of the Mongols and is this the first nomadic empire that we know of?

As far as what is the first nomadic empire, I would say yes without getting into long discussions

of what is an empire, what is not an empire, the real issue of what empires are and is there

political beasts that spread across multiple economies, multiple cultures, multiple regions,

and really bring it into one unified system, economic system, political system, social system,

to varying degrees. And what we see the Shognu regime doing is just that. And the other issue of an

empire is it is centrally controlled. There is like a small group of people of lineage groups of

clans that are kind of control of everything that's happening. So in that regard, yes, it is an

empire. And could we say that they are the predecessors of Genghis Khan and the Mongols that we know so

well from the Middle Ages? In a very long drawn out fashion, yes, I would say definitely. A lot of

the things that they're doing in the Shognu period are definitely the early experiments and things

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