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The Old World’s Medieval Untouchables and Other Random Historical Facts

Khalid Elhassan March 17, 2020 33 min

Pancho Villa - Mexican Revolution — General Pancho Villa before a firing squad in 1912. Wikimedia

32. The Nomad Chieftain Who Used His Defeated Enemies’ Skulls as Cups

Long before Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, there was Modu Chanyu (234 – 174 BC), a formidable Eurasian Steppe warrior and chieftain who was in the habit of turning his defeated enemies’ skulls into cups from which he drank blood. He unified the nomadic tribes of the eastern Steppe, and founded the Xiongnu Empire. Dominating the eastern Steppe from Central Asia to Manchuria, the Xiongnu menaced the Chinese to their south for centuries. They forged a complex relationship that alternated between trade and raid, marriage treaties and tribute and war.

In 200 BC, China’s Emperor Gaozu, founder of the Han Dynasty, tried to bring the Xiongnu to heel. Modu led the Chinese invaders on a merry chase through the Steppe, while harrying their supply lines and keeping them on constant edge with frequent skirmishes. When the Chinese were exhausted, Modu ambushed and trapped them in a disadvantageous locale, cut off from resupply and reinforcement.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.