Proto-Mongols

The proto-Mongols sprang from a region occupied by humans and other hominid species since the Stone Age, over 800,000 years ago. During the Bronze and Iron Ages, people lived there, forging tribal alliances, populating the area, and clashing with early China. The Rouran Khaganate (from 330 to 555) was conquered by the Gokturks, who built the First Turkic Khaganate (from 552 to 744), eventually subjugated by the Chinese Tang dynasty's expanding might. The Yenisei Kyrgyz destroyed the Uyghur Khaganate (from 744 to 848) and put an end to the Turkic rule in Mongolia. The para-Mongol Khitan people formed the Liao dynasty in China, which governed Mongolia and parts of eastern Siberia now known as the Russian Far East, northern Korea, and North China from 916 to 1125. Over the succeeding few hundred years, the Jurchens in China quietly fostered Mongol conflict to distract them from invading China. Genghis Khan was able to unite or overcome the warring tribes in the 12th century, welding them into a single fighting force that went on to form the world's biggest contiguous empire, the Mongol Empire, which eventually conquered all of China. His conquest of the Western Liao and Western Xia dynasties led by the Khitai, concluding with his grandson Kublai Khan's defeat of the Southern Song dynasty led by the Tangut. In 1271, Kublai established the Chinese Yuan dynasty.

Early Stone Age hominins lived in Mongolia 850,000 years ago, according to archaeological data. Bronze-working peoples lived on the Mongolia Plateau by the first millennium BC. Mongolians began to form clan alliances and lived a hunter and herder lifestyle after introducing iron weapons in the 3rd century BC. The origins of more recent occupants can be traced back to Inner Asian forest hunters and nomadic tribes. They lived in a vast arc of land stretched from the Korean Peninsula in the east, over northern China to modern-day Kazakhstan, and west to the Pamir Mountains and Lake Balkash. During maximum of recorded history, this has been a hotbed of migrations and invasions to the southeast (into China), southwest (into Transoxiana, modern-day Uzbekistan, Iran, and India), and west (into Pakistan) (across Scythia toward Europe). Western Mongolians were nomadic Indo-European speakers by the eighth century BC, perhaps Scythians or Yuezhi. Many more tribes, such as the Slab Grave culture and the Ordos culture, lived in Mongolia's central and eastern regions.

According to some sources, the Xiongnu were one of the Mongols' forefathers, though it is unclear whether they were proto-Mongols. The Xiongnu were a nomadic people who ruled the Asian steppe for more than 500 years, beginning in the late 3rd century BC. The Xiongnu incursions pushed the North Chinese dynasties to commence construction of the Great Wall. A. Luvsandendev, Bernat Munkacsy, Henry Hoyle Howorth, Bolor Erike, Alexey Okladnikov, Peter Simon Pallas, Isaac Jacob Schmidt, Hyacinth and Byambyn Rinchen, among others, relied on a proto-Mongolian origin for the ethnic core of Xiongnu. Other theories about the Xiongnu's ethnolinguistic identity include Turkic, Yeniseian, Iranian, Uralic, and multiethnic. The yurt on the cart-mounted usage of the composite bow, board game, horn bow, and extended Song are all cultural commonalities between the Xiongnu and Mongols. Mongolian long songs are thought to be at least 2000 years old.

The Donghu are a proto-Mongol and/or Tunguz people recorded in Chinese history as far back as the 4th century BC. Modern researchers believe the Donghu's language is proto-Mongolic, as opposed to the Xiongnu's. The Donghu were one of the first peoples the Xiongnu subdued. The Donghu had separated along geographical lines by the 1st century AD, with the proto-Mongolic Xianbei in the northern and the Wuhuan in the south. After the Chinese drove the Xiongnu back into their homeland, the Xianbei began moving into the region abandoned by the Xiongnu (presumably from the north or northwest). Through the 2nd century AD, the Xianbei had started invading Chinese farmland south of the Great Wall, establishing an empire that, despite its brief existence, gave rise to several tribal governments along the Chinese border. The Tuoba, a subgroup of the Xianbei, lived in modern-day China's Shanxi Province and was one of these states. The Wuhuan were also prominent in the second century, but they vanished after that, presumably due to the Xianbei western expansion. In battle, the Xianbei and Wuhuan deployed mounted archers and had only temporary military leaders rather than hereditary chiefs. Their economy was based on agriculture rather than full-scale nomadism. The Wuhuan was forced out of Inner Asia and into the Russian steppe in the 6th century.

Chinese suzerainty over sections of Inner Asia lasted only until the early 2nd century AD. Once the Eastern Han Dynasty fell in the early 3rd century AD, suzerainty was limited exclusively to the Gansu corridor. As a result, the Xianbei were able to foray into a China plagued by internal strife and governmental instability. By 317, nomadic peoples had conquered all of China north of the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang), including the Xianbei from the north, the Xiongnu remnants from the northwest, and the Chiang people of Gansu and Tibet from the west and southwest. As these factions fought each other and repelled the vain attempts of the shattered Chinese dynasties south of the Yangtze River to reclaim the territory, chaos reigned. The Tuoba ruled the region between the Yangtze and the Gobi by the end of the fourth century, which included much of modern-day Xinjiang. Among AD 338 and 376 in the Shanxi province, the Tuoba arose as the largely sinicized state of Dai and established authority over the region as the Northern Wei Dynasty. Northern Wei soldiers reconstructed the Great Wall and drove out the Ruruan, also known as Ruanruan or Juan-Juan, by Chinese chroniclers, a recently arising nomadic Mongol people in the steppes north of the Altai Mountains. The Huns also invaded Europe in the 4th century, leaving the steppes north of the Aral Sea. Like the Chinese in the 2nd century, Northern Wei had entered the Tarim Basin in Inner Asia by the middle of the 5th century. However, as the empire spread, Tuoba tribal customs were displaced by Chinese ones, a change that not all Tuoba welcomed. Northern Wei had only briefly resisted the Ruruan, who had forced the Xiongnu to the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea, and was now raiding China. The Ruruan created a great nomadic kingdom in the late 5th century that stretched far north of Northern Wei. The title khan was most likely first used by the Ruruan.

Northern Wei was fast crumbling due to anti-sinicization revolts by semi-tribal Tuoba armed formations when calamity struck the prosperous Ruruan Empire. The Gokturks revolted against their Ruruan kings, dubbed Tujue by Chinese chroniclers. The revolt started in the Altai Mountains, where numerous Turks worked as serfs in the iron mines. As a result, they benefited from holding one of the key bases of Ruruan power from the start of their insurrection. The Gokturks defeated the Ruruan between 546 and 553, establishing themselves as the most powerful force in North and Inner Asia. This was the start of a conquest pattern that would have a lasting impact on Eurasian history for more than 1,000 years. The Gokturks were the first to use the more well-known term. They are also the first Inner Asian people whose language has been decoded, according to inscriptions in a runic-like Orkhon script discovered in 1896. It wasn't long until tribes north of the Gobi, known as the Eastern Gokturks, followed Xiongnu, Xianbei, Tuoba, and Ruruan. They had invaded China in previous centuries. The Gokturks' attention was quickly drawn to China's richness, just as it had been to their forebears who had dwelt in the mountains and steppes. These new pirates met little opposition at first, but as China steadily recovered from years of disarray, border fortifications hardened toward the end of the sixth century. The old GokTurk polity was divided into eastern and western halves, with some Eastern GokTurk accepting Chinese rule. For a brief moment around the beginning of the seventh century, a new Gokturk confederation, led by Tardu, the Western GokTurk monarch, attacked China once more. Tardu's army besieged Chang'an, China's capital at the time, in 601. Tardu, on the other hand, was turned back, and when he died two years later, the GokTurk kingdom was once again fractured. Despite this, the Eastern GokTurk continued to plunder, occasionally threatening Chang'an.

Between 629 and 648, a reunited China under the Tang dynasty (618-907) destroyed the Eastern GokTurk's power north of the Gobi. It established suzerainty over the Kitan, a seminomadic Mongol people who lived in what is now the Chinese provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin and formed an alliance with the Uyghurs, who lived between the Altai Mountains and Lake Balkash. The Tang invaded the Western GokTurk between 641 and 648, restoring Chinese rule over Xinjiang and levying tribute west of the Pamir Mountains. In 744, the GokTurk empire came to an end. The Tang ruled Central Asia, Mongolia, and parts of Inner Asia for more than a half-century. Tang rule extended to both sides of the Great Wall. The Tang extended Chinese control into the Oxus Valley during this time. At the same time, their associates, the Uyghurs, conquered maximum of western and northern Mongolia, extending the Uyghur seminomadic kingdom from Lake Balkash to Lake Baykal by the middle of the eighth century. Despite these devastating losses, the Tang recovered and held their borders with the help of the Uyghurs. The Chinese were supposedly embarrassed by the Tang's reliance on northern friends, so they secretly pushed the Kirghiz and Karluks to attack the Uyghurs, driving them south into the Tarim Basin. The Uyghur empire fell apart in 846 as a result of the Kirghiz action. Some Uyghurs moved to the Turpan Depression, where they founded the Kingdom of Qocho, which surrendered to Genghis Khan after several centuries. Ironically, the weakening of the Uyghurs worsened the Tang Dynasty's downfall and demise during the next fifty years.

The para-Mongolic Khitan extended in all orders in the latter half of the 9th century and the early years of the 10th century, free of Uyghur control. Eastern Mongolia, most of Manchuria, and the Sixteen Prefectures of northern China were all under Khitan authority by 925. Khitan chieftains crowned themselves Chinese emperors and chose a dynastic name in the Chinese tradition around the middle of the 10th century; their rule was known as the Liao dynasty (916–1125). The 11th and 12th centuries were a time of consolidation, leading up to the most important period in Mongol history, the age of Genghis Khan. During those centuries, a huge swath of deserts, mountains, and pasture land was populated by people who shared racial, cultural, and linguistic features and were fundamentally Mongol ethnologically. The ethnic and historical confusion caused by the parallels between the Mongols, GokTurks, and Tatars who lived in this region is significant. In general, the Mongols and closely related Tatars lived in the north and east; the GokTurk lived in the west and southwest; and the Tangut, who were more closely related to Tibetans than the other nomads but were not Turkic, lived in eastern Xinjiang, Gansu, and western Inner Mongolia. The Khitan had begun to shed their nomadic qualities as the Liao kingdom became more unified. As a method of cementing their empire, the Khitan created towns and ruled over their agricultural subjects. Many more Mongol tribes existed to the west and northwest of Liao, bound together in different weak alliances and groupings but with little national unity. The Tangut, who had taken advantage of the Tang fall in Gansu and eastern Xinjiang, had founded a kingdom, Western Xia (from 1038 until 1227), officially under Song suzerainty. The Uyghurs, who were loosely affiliated with the Song dynasty, ruled Xinjiang. Mongolians were primarily spirit worshipers, with shamans offering spiritual and theological advice to the people and tribe leaders.

Buddhism had infiltrated the area. In a seven-year battle (1115–1122), the Jurchen, progenitors of the Manchu, allied with the Song and reduced the Liao dynasty to vassal status. The Jurchen leader declared himself to be the founder of the Jin dynasty, a new Chinese kingdom. The Tungusic Jurchen conquered nearby Goryeo (Korea) in 1226 and invaded the land of their old allies, the Song, setting off a series of battles with China that lasted the rest of the century. Meanwhile, the defeated Liao monarch retreated to the Tarim Basin with a tiny remnant of his army. He joined with the Uyghurs and founded the Qara Khitai state, often known as the Western Liao dynasty, which soon ruled both sides of the Pamir Mountains. After that, the Jurchen switched their focus to the Mongols, who repelled them in 1139 and 1147.

According to ancient Chinese texts, some Shiwei tribes were considered the forebears of the Mongols. However, nothing is known about them. In the 6th to 12th centuries, the word "Shiwei" describes the Mongolic and some Tungusic peoples. They occupied the Hulun Buir, Ergune, Nonni, Middle Amur, and Zeya Watersheds east of the Greater Khingan Range during the 5th century. It is possible that they were separated into five to twenty tribes. Fish skins were supposed to be on their bodies. They may have been nomadic, spending the winter in the swampy lowlands and the summer in the mountains. The burial was done by exposing the body to the elements in the trees. Their language has been compared to Manchu-Tungusic and Khitan languages. From 550 until 740, the Turk dynasties appointed tuduns, governors over the Shiwei and collected tribute. It's possible that some Shiwei stayed and became the Ewenkis. The Kitans subdued the Shiwei in the late 9th century. The "Menggu" were a Shiwei tribe who lived around the Amur and Ergune rivers (Mongol). According to some academics, they, along with other Shiwei tribes and many other peoples from the area, went west from the forest to the proper Mongolian steppe.

The Xianbei state, the Rouran Khaganate, and the Liao dynasty were all founded by proto-Mongols.