Proto-Mongols
The para-Mongol Khitan people[2] founded also referred to by Chineses sources as Liao dynasty (916–1125) and ruled Mongolia and portions of the eastern coast of Siberia now known as the Russian Far East, northern Korea, and North China.
With the appearance of iron weapons by the 3rd century BC, the inhabitants of Mongolia had begun to form clan alliances and lived a hunter and herder lifestyle.
They inhabited a great arc of land extending generally from the Korean Peninsula in the east, across the northern parts of China to present-day Kazakhstan and to the Pamir Mountains and Lake Balkash in the west.
During most of recorded history, this has been an area of constant ferment from which emerged numerous migrations and invasions to the southeast (into China), to the southwest (into Transoxiana—modern Uzbekistan, Iran, and India), and to the west (across Scythia toward Europe).
By the eighth century BC, the inhabitants of western Mongolia evidently were nomadic Indo-European speakers, either Scythians or Yuezhi.
[5] The identity of the ethnic core of Xiongnu has been a subject of varied hypotheses and some scholars, including A. Luvsandendev, Bernát Munkácsy, Henry Hoyle Howorth, Bolor Erike,[6] Alexey Okladnikov, Peter Simon Pallas, Isaac Jacob Schmidt, Hyacinth and Byambyn Rinchen,[7] insisted on a proto-Mongolian origin.
Chaos prevailed as these groups warred with each other and repulsed the vain efforts of the fragmented Chinese kingdoms south of the Yangtze River to reconquer the region.
Northern Wei armies drove back the Rouran (referred to as Ruanruan or Juan-Juan by Chinese chroniclers), a newly arising nomadic Mongol people in the steppes north of the Altai Mountains, and reconstructed the Great Wall.
The Rouran, only temporarily repelled by Northern Wei, had driven the Xiongnu toward the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea and were making raids into China.
In the late 5th century, the Rouran established a powerful nomadic empire spreading generally farther north of Northern Wei.
Northern Wei was disintegrating rapidly because of revolts of semi-tribal Tuoba military forces that were opposed to being sinicized, when disaster struck the flourishing Rouran Khaganate.
It was not long before the tribes in the region north of the Gobi—the Eastern Göktürks—were following invasion routes into China proper used in previous centuries by Xiongnu, Xianbei, Tuoba, and Rouran.
From 629 to 648, a reunited China proper under the Tang dynasty (618-907) destroyed the power of the Eastern Göktürk north of the Gobi; established suzerainty over the Khitans, a semi-nomadic proto-Mongol people who lived in areas that became the modern Chinese provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin; and formed an alliance with the Uyghurs, who inhabited the region between the Altai Mountains and Lake Balkash.
Between 641 and 648, the Tang conquered the Western Göktürk, reestablishing Chinese control over Xinjiang and exacting tribute from west of the Pamir Mountains.
Tang dependence upon their northern allies was apparently a source of embarrassment for its rulers, who surreptitiously encouraged the Kirghiz and the Karluks to attack the Uyghurs, driving them south into the Tarim Basin.
During those centuries, the vast region of deserts, mountains, and grazing land was inhabited by people resembling each other in racial, cultural, and linguistic characteristics; ethnologically they were essentially Mongol[citation needed].
The similarities[citation needed] among the Mongols, Göktürk, and Tatars who inhabited this region cause considerable ethnic and historical confusion.
In Gansu and eastern Xinjiang, the Tangut—who had taken advantage of the Tang decline—had formed a state, Western Xia (1038–1227), nominally under Song suzerainty.
A Tungusic people, the Jurchen, ancestors of the Manchu, formed an alliance with the Song and reduced the Liao dynasty to vassal status in a seven-year war (1115–1122).
Scarcely pausing in their conquests, the Tungusic Jurchen subdued neighboring Goryeo (Korea) in 1226[citation needed] and invaded the territory of their former allies, the Song, to precipitate a series of wars with China that continued through the remainder of the century.
During the 5th century, they occupied the area east of the Greater Khingan Range, what is the Hulun Buir, Ergune, Nonni (Noon), Middle Amur, and the Zeya Watersheds.
A few scholars believe they, other Shiwei tribes, and many other peoples from the area moved west from the forest to the Mongolian proper steppe[citation needed].
