Xianyun
Xianyun society was fairly uniform culturally, with a high level of concentration at the top, and was capable of coordinated action against the Zhou dynasty.
"Xianyun" was probably their self-designated endonym, while the Zhou tended to call them using the general term Rong, (戎, "Warlike people").
[4] These terms were rather interchangeable: a poem probably composed during the reign of Yih (899–892 BCE) describes incursions alternatively by the Rong (戎) and the Di (狄), and concludes that the Xianyu destroyed everything.
[11] The earliest archaeological records mentioning the Xianyun appear in great number during the reign of King Xuan of Zhou (827/25–782 BCE).
The song "Sixth month" (Liu yue) says that the battlefield was between the lower courses of the Jing (泾河) and Luo rivers and the Wei valley, very close to the center of the Zhou state.
[13] In 840 BCE, the fourteenth year of reign of King Li of Zhou (877–841 BCE), the Xianyun reached the Zhou capital Haojing, as reported in the inscription of the Duo You ding: "It was in the tenth month, because the Xianyun greatly arose and broadly attacked Jingshi, [it] was reported to the king.
Some scholars (e.g. Jaroslav Průšek) suggest that their military tactics characterized by sudden attacks could only have been carried out by highly mobile troops, most likely on horseback and relate the appearance of the Xianyun to migrations from the Altai region in Chinese or, more specifically, the appearance of Scythians and Cimmerians migrating from the west.
[13][16] Due to pressure from the Xianyun or the Quanrong, the Western Zhou dynasty collapsed in 771 BCE and had to withdraw from the Wei River valley, moving the capital away from Xi'an, to Luoyang about 300 km to the east.
[24][25][26][27] They stated that Xunyu (獯鬻) or Xianyun were terms that designated nomadic people who later during the Han dynasty were transcribed as "Xiongnu" (匈奴).
[28] Wang Guowei (1877–1927), as a result of phonetical studies and comparisons based on the inscriptions on bronze and the structure of the characters, came to the conclusion that the tribal names "Guifang" (鬼方), "Xunyu" (獯鬻), "Xianyu" (鮮虞), "Xianyun", "Rong" (戎), "Di" (狄), and "Hu" (胡) given in the annals designated one and the same people, who later entered history under the name Xiongnu.
[41] Li points to evidence from the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, the Classic of Poetry, Guoyu, the Bamboo Annals, and that when the name Xianyun became written graphically pejorative as 獫狁 with the 犭"dog" radical, the character 獫's notion of dog[a] motivated the coining of Quanrong (犬戎; lit.
[Buqi] herewith makes for my august grandfather Gongbo and Mengji [this] sacrificial gui-vessel, with which to entreat much good fortune, longevity without limits, and eternal pureness without end.
), and the taking of 50 prisoners.
