ABSTRACT

Herding and hunting are the most common traditional ways of life and production among the Altaic nomads. A Chinese account of the Hsiung-nu style of life, in the Shih chi, written in the first century B.C., indicates that at that date herding and hunting were extremely important in the daily life of the people and had conditioned certain attitudes and patterns of behavior. Hunting serves economic, military, political, and diversionary functions in a nomadic life-style. Economically, it is an important means of sustenance—an alternative to pastoral production by which natural game is killed in order to save the domesticated herds from depletion. The diet common among nomads is unique and quite distinct from that of agricultural people. In the Shih chi, Ssu-ma Ch'ien explained that the main diet of the Hsiung-nu, largely meat, was the same for both nobility and commoner.