<P> One especially severe round of nomadic rebellion in the early 4th century has led to the certain identification of the Xiongnu with the Huns . A letter (Letter II) written in the ancient Sogdian language excavated from a Han Dynasty watchtower in 1911 identified the perpetrators of these events as the xwn, "Huns", supporting de Guignes' 1758 identification . The equivalence was not without its critics, notably Otto J. Maenchen - Helfen, who argued that xwn was a general name and could refer to anyone . More recently other evidence was noticed: Zhu Fahu, a monk, translated Sanskrit Hūṇa in the Tathāgataguhya Sūtra and in the Lalitavistara Sūtra as "Xiongnu". Vaissière reconstructs the pronunciation as * Xi ong nuo . Moreover, the Book of Wei states that the king of the Xiongnu killed the king of Sogdia and took the country, an event is datable to the time of the Huns, who did exactly that; in short, "...the name of the Huns is a precise referent and not generic ." </P> <P> While their actual identity is still debated, the Huns have often been considered a Turkic people, and sometimes associated with the Xiongnu . Orosius has the Huns riding down upon the Ostrogoths in the year AD 377 totally by surprise, "long shut off by inaccessible mountains" and apparently of hitherto unsuspected existence . Whatever may have been his reasons for making such a statement, he and Goths might have found ample reference to the Huns in the classical geographers, such as Pliny and Ptolemy; in fact, some were already in Europe . The mountains were mythical as the Ostrogoths were located on the Pontic steppe, an easy target for Hunnic cavalry . </P> <P> While in Europe they incorporated others, such as Goths, Slavs, and Alans . </P> <P> The Huns were not literate (according to Procopius) and left nothing linguistic with which to identify them except their names, which derive from Germanic, Iranian, Turkic, unknown and a mixture . Some, such as Ultinčur and Alpilčur, are like Turkish names ending in - čor, Pecheneg names in - tzour and Kirghiz names in - čoro . Names ending in - gur, such as Utigur and Onogur, and - gir, such as Ultingir, are like Turkish names of the same endings . </P>

Which early groups migrated into modern day turkey and iran