Summary: People who have watched the TV series "Wang Zhaojun" know that Wang Zhaojun married Zhu Lidan Yu after the death of her husband Hu Han Evil Shan Yu, zhu Tired Dan Yu after shan Yu's death, and then married her grandson Shan Yu. If in the eyes of the Han Dynasty south of the Great Wall or to present-day people, this is a "beastly and inferior" behavior that is very contrary to human morality.
Wang Zhaojun married his "son" Gao Tao Moduo
As a result, countless people have asked why the Xiongnu people have the custom of "marrying a son after a husband dies, and marrying a grandson when a son dies". I think there are three reasons for this:
First, the harsh living environment has led to this need for reproduction.
The Xiongnu are in the north of China, where the weather is poor, every winter will exceed half a year and heavy snow, and the summer precipitation is scarce, they can obtain very limited living resources, the natural population growth is very slow. By the beginning of the Han Dynasty, there were only more than 1 million people in the vast 10 million square kilometers of desert land in the desert south and the north. Even today, more than 2,000 years later, the population of Outer Mongolia is only 3 million people.
The living environment here is very cruel
The population there is small, slow, and unstable, and sometimes a big plague, a big war, is very likely to lead to the demise of a tribe or a people.
If a nation does not have an ever-increasing population, the nation naturally cannot continue, so the preservation and development of the population of the Hun nation has become the greatest politics of the Huns.
For this "national policy", so the Xiongnu had the custom of women "marrying sons to death, sons marrying grandchildren", and it became a norm for fathers to marry their mothers and brothers to sisters-in-law, and women naturally became the reproductive tools for continuing the nation.
In the eyes of the Huns, this was all extremely normal.
Wang Zhaojun
Women in the Huns wanted to be widowed? This is also impossible, of course, there is no such thing as a woman's chastity. In the northern steppes, only women who can have children are great women, single women are women who do not love race, women who are not patriotic, women are not allowed to be single!
Of course, men are not allowed to be single if they do not leave home, and when Su Wu went to Beihai to herd sheep, Shan Yu forced him to marry a Xiongnu woman and give birth to a son; Zhang Qian, who went to the western region, was captured by the Xiongnu and was forced to marry and give birth to a child; the most powerful thing was that Li Ling, who was captured, also married Shan Yu's daughter as a donkey, and his descendants eventually multiplied into the main body of today's Kyrgyz nation.
It is only in the eyes of the Zhongyuan scholars, who have been brainwashed by Confucian ethics, that this is no different from pigs, dogs, animals and beasts.
Second, the Property of the Huns was mainly cattle and sheep, and the accumulation was very slow, and the need to keep the property from being divided formed this custom.
If a woman dies and her husband does not marry a later nephew (not a biological) or her husband's brother, she is bound to take away her husband's property, so that the overall wealth of a family will be diluted, which is not conducive to the establishment of strong families and clan tribes.
Third, objectively speaking, this is also to protect women from living.
The grassland is sparsely populated, sometimes there is no family for tens or hundreds of kilometers, and there are many wild beasts such as wolves in the grassland, and the objective conditions for women to naturally choose a mate in ancient times were not available. Women in bad natural conditions, if there is no man, basically the possibility of survival is not.
Wolves often attack herders' cattle, sheep and herders
For a month, or even months, I didn't see a single outsider
In addition to the Xiongnu, the Mongols, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hezhe, Manchus, etc. in the north, as well as the Tibetans in the southwest, the Turkmen in Central Asia, and the Wusun people, all have this habit, and this kind of "acceptance of marriage" is a common custom, not unique to the Xiongnu.
There is also a Kazakh proverb that says, "After the death of a horse, the skin goes to the master, and after the death of the brother, the wife returns to the brother."
Ethnic minorities in southern China, such as the Miao, Zhuang, Li, Hani, Buyi, and Yi ethnic groups, also have similar customs of marrying widows and sisters-in-law.
The Buyeo (present-day Ben) and Goguryeo (present-day Korea and Korea) also had the habit of "wives and widows".
In fact, before the Han Dynasty in China, there was also this situation, including brothers and sisters-in-law, brothers and sisters-in-law, and some sons and daughters (father concubines) as wives. After China entered the patriarchal society, the widows of fathers and concubines and brothers were treated as part of property (inheritance).
By the Warring States period, this kind of concursive marriage began to be condemned ethically and morally; in the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang eventually banned it in the form of legislation.
Conclusion: The custom of Xiongnu women "marrying their sons to the death, and marrying their sons to their grandchildren" is a patriarchal feudal bad habit that goes against the personal will of women. Modern times are an era of equal rights for men and women, and these customs are basically non-existent all over the world.