Deguignes' general history of the Huns, Turks, Mongols and western Tartars

Joseph de Guignes (Deguignes), a Paris scholar of Chinese and Arabic, set out to write one continuous history of the 'western Tartars': the Huns, Turks, Mongols and their successor states from antiquity to his own century. He argued that the Huns who reached Europe were the Xiongnu of the Chinese annals. He travelled nowhere; he worked from Chinese histories (partly via Gaubil and Visdelou), Arabic and Persian manuscripts and European travel books. This corpus has the 1756 to 1758 Paris edition (Desaint and Saillant) in several Getty scans (T0628 to T0632) and the 1751 prospectus (T0627).

How they knew

Compiled from others

Who “Tartar” means here

For Deguignes 'Tartares' is an umbrella for all the nomadic peoples of inner Asia and their descendants, from the Xiongnu and Uighurs to the Mongols, the Uzbeks, the Nogais and Timur's armies, divided into 'Eastern' and 'Western' Tartars.

Why read it

The great eighteenth-century synthesis that fixed the idea of 'Tartary' as a single history; it shows how much (and how little) a learned European of the 1750s thought he knew.

Watch out

Derivative by design, and argued: the Xiongnu-Hun identification and his tidy genealogy of peoples were his theories, not settled facts. Passages on later peoples (Uzbeks, Nogais) are borrowed from travel books and older compilations.