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I recently read The Turks in World History [0] which summarizes much of the various steppe cultures from antiquity to modern day. Among the interesting tidbits in the book is the idea that many "states", such as they may be called, seemed to have risen and fallen for (at least) the last ten thousand years in the region. States seemed to form at once spontaneously and inevitably before the various fractious power structures decayed their authority and disassembled them, before their next build-up.
There's a bunch of other interesting things in the book too. Like describing the long history of the Turkic cultures military structure of two "left" and "right" generals handling literally the east and west flanks of the empire; the rituals of power succession that survive in echoes today involving horses, untouchable "charismatic" families, the sacredness of the rulers blood (and implication that if they are to be killed it must be bloodless), and how the legitimacy of the ruler depends on their visitation of ritual sites often situated along river basins or oases;
Also the Uyghurs apparently had their own empire that terrorized the everloving hell out of ancient China to the point where China paid them tribute to cease their raids, and was even forced to appoint one of them as royalty.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Turks-History-Carter-Vaughn-Findley/d...
I think one of the first to notice that was Ibn Khaldun in the 1300s in his famous book Muqaddimah.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah
Before the advent of industrialisation, when hunanity was still in the mathusian trap, the observation probably was true.
It is probably a cliche to respond this, but Dan Carlin's Wrath of the Khans is a really great listen
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-wrath-of-...
Dan Carlin recently interviewed Harl about "Empire of the Steppes" on his addendum channel.
That series was my introduction to Hardcore History and to this day, my favorite series. The best podcast series on one of the best podcasts.
Recommend Kings and Generals series on Mongols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzatw32j-i4
I'm careful about who I get my history from. I hadn't heard about Kings and Generals before your comment, and their video library looked quite enticing. So I started looking into whether I could regard them as generally trustworthy. The first red flag was that I could find zero names of anyone involved in the project. Their web site[1] doesn't say anything at all about who is involved. That is a MAJOR red flag in my experience. If you can't put your name behind the history you're sharing, then something is probably wrong.
The second red flag is that I searched for "kings and generals" on the r/askhistorians subreddit. I found only a few reviews of it and they weren't great. r/askhistorians tends to be quite critical of popular or simplified history, a little too much for my taste, so I don't mean to give their reviews too much weight. But from what I could see, it was Not Good.
Mind you, these are red flags. It doesn't mean all of the videos made by Kings and Generals are bad or completely false. But it's enough for me to not even bother watching them at all until something convinces me otherwise.
Not always fond of the use of "tribes" (which in itself is a pretty dated concept) to describe what was a complex empire. While certain early medieval kingdoms or duchies are called such (and not tribes) while being just one family governing over a small area, with a much simpler administrative structure.
Also recommend the work of Simon Berger, who pushes more for the empire of the steppes not being simply "nomadic tribes" but a proper nomadic state: https://www.academia.edu/106272853/Nomadic_State_in_the_Sede...
For those who speak French there is also this very in-depth series of videos on that topic (steppes), which also goes over the work of Simon Berger and some very early historians encounter with the steppes cultures: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKZgJ2XooL3ARUPRafV2y3972...
Somewhat related, Tim Cope took arguably one of the best jollies ever; from Mongolia to the Danube, a three and a half year, 10,000 km journey on horseback:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17286667
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2027949/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NCDPQhSz_E
It's a surprisingly good tale if you can find the book or DVD about the place, he learnt how to ride on the go and met quite a few people on the way.
While I have not read the book, I have listened to and watched Harl's "Barbarian Empire's of the Steppes" on Audible and Wondrium.
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Barbarian-Empires-of-the-Step...
It is chock full of information and Harl has a very engaging style of presentation. You can tell you are being taught by someone who has both a deep knowledge and love of history.
I would recommend listening to these lectures if you enjoy history.
Looking forward to reading the book as well.
I second this -- Harl's courses are fantastic, and really enjoyable to listen to.
I read genghis khan and the making of the modern world a while back, it was an excellent book.
TARTAAAAARIA :D
Nomads basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to peasant communities because your settlement will be raided until it ceases to exist.
In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly.
Eventually, settled societies concentrated sufficient amount of military and industrial power in one hands that nomads could no longer compete and fell apart, and these steppes were finally populated by villages and towns.
Some of the smarter nomad communities figured out how to avoid that fate and settled down by themself.
That's certainly a take.
There have been nomadic pastoralists living alongside partially and fully sedentary agriculturalists in Central Asia for thousands of years. The parts of the continent that are inhabited solely by nomads are those areas that are largely unsuitable for sedentary life and were adapted into environments suitable for pastoralists instead.
The idea of nomad communities that subsist solely on raiding poor sedentary farmers is one that gets a lot of play in historical documents (conveniently written almost exclusively by people living in sedentary communities), but it's not a narrative that's well supported as the historical norm by the archaeology in most areas. Instead, much of what we see is produced by complex economic systems involving mutually beneficial trade between these groups. You might have heard these kinds of systems called "silk roads", for example.
> conveniently written almost exclusively by people living in sedentary communities
This is false. The Turkic and Mongolic peoples of the steppe have a well-developed epic tradition that goes back centuries. And that epic tradition celebrates raids on sedentary communities for plunder and as a display of bravery and political leadership.
Epics were not written down until quite recently. There is some medieval Mongolian literature (e.g. the secret history), but it's fairly limited. Most study of mongolians using historical literature is done from Chinese and other sources. Same issue with Turkic sources. Even Timur is known from only a few contemporaneous sources, with most of the extant historical sources being written after his death.
You also shouldn't take stories as necessarily accurate portrayals of daily life. Killing dragons and other monsters wasn't a viable route to power due to their rarity, but it's a popular legitimizing myth that shows up all over the place in early medieval European literature. Similarly, while early modern Spain did have "explorers" charting strange new lands and ahem, "romancing" women like their early modern literature (often inspired by that same literature), it was not a typical career for most Spaniards.
Raiding happened, but it was not the sole or even necessarily a primary means of economic subsistence depending on where and when.
> was not the sole or even necessarily a primary means of economic subsistence
Because peasants were good at hiding and plain out avoided living where they would be an easy raiding target. Which is my point exactly.
In many of those cases the settled peoples they coexisted with are the settled descendents of those same nomadic raiders. That shared ethnicity, language, trade, and intermarriage is what protected them.
The nation of Turkey is a strong historically recent and well documented example of that, with Turkic tribes displacing Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks, not coexisting with them (long term). In short periods, of course there were some cases of peaceful coexistence, but power politics always finds a way to capitalize on ethnic divisions through violence.
Bulgaria and Hungary are much earlier era examples (still visible in genetic testing) . The displaced Slavic and Germanic tribes refugee crisis brought upon various Roman crises in multiple waves, ultimately driving the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
From about 3000 BC (the fall of the Cucuteni–Trypillia farming culture to the Yamnaya nomads) to about AD 895 (the conquest of the Carpathian basin by the Hungarians), each nomad community that settled down could count on eventually being conquered by one or another of their distant cousins who stayed on horseback.
I question whether the agricultural lifestyle is a better lifestyle for humanity than pastoralism in some kind of utilitarian or consequentialist sense, provided the conquest of and parasitism upon agricultural peoples could be factored out. Pastoralists had generally taller stature and better dentition than agriculturalists until the industrial revolution. Pastoralists maintained smaller populations, and avoided the negative externalities of settled agriculture, e.g. soil exhaustion under intensive irrigation, pests and disease from close-quarters living.
Agricultural lifestyle isn't great per se, but once you create a centralized state and industrialize it becomes no-brainer. We do not know other way to put stuff in space and make computers than agriculture followed by industrialization.
And I don't see how you can ever factor out conquests and taking peasants as slaves.
Not that settled agricultural societies didn't take/use slaves, from Greece to Rome, to the USA...
Also: do we need to put things in space, and to have computers? Are our lives fuller from that?
Yes, we do absolutely need to put things in space and have computers, because it is the way to progress and see what's next possible in this setting, and then decide what to do while having even more opportunities and options.
If we are not doing that we are not sentient species but a kind of animal that happens to speak and use some rudimentary tools.
> do not know other way to put stuff in space and make computers than agriculture followed by industrialization.
It remains to be seen if this results in a better lifestyle for humanity
It already did?
Alternatively, settlers made nomadic life untenable because their territory was continuously decimated by walls, tolls, people claiming the open land was now theirs, accusations of stock theft, etc.
It's very much a PoV thing that plays a great deal upon what world view a commenter has been conditioned to hold.
And I thought that people always try to settle and agriculture anywhere they could. Only where they couldn't that people have to resort to pastoralism. There's a reason why China didn't expand agriculture into Mongolia steppe.
It's a bit more nuanced than that and they have, at great expense. Human subsistence strategies tend to be well optimized for the conditions they exist in. Greater Mongolia, both the modern country and what's now the province of Inner Mongolia in China, does have areas of arable land. One of the major issues is these areas tend to shift over time. Some years, one valley gets sufficient rainfall, some years, another. Pastoral communities can easily adapt to this and other marginal conditions much more effectively.
But you can also approach these issues with say, a couple centuries of large-scale agricultural development projects like China has done in Inner Mongolia. If you build massive irrigation networks and invest heavily in other technologies, you can develop the area for sedentary agriculture at the expense of the grasslands.
Farming is a _lot_ more work than hunting and gathering (if food is plenty) and people mostly resorted to it out of desperation, and farmers had to be _forced_ through slavery to do the work throughout most of history.
Sure, but since most of my ancestors were peasants, and since we have too few examples of modern successful nomadic societies, I believe my PoV is reasonable.
The tragedy is that their society will be raiding; will be taking people and selling as slaves; and, obviously, will get smashed with impunity as soon as an opportunity presents.
From the pastoralist's point of view their hunting grounds are being raided by agriculturalists. And it is states -- which are without exception agricultural socieities -- that are responsible for the vast majority of human slavery in history.
> since most of my ancestors were peasants I believe my PoV is reasonable.
Uh, that is... quite a leap there. Not sure that one follows from the other.
"Xiongnu", the early Chinese ethnonym for their nomadic northern neighbors, literally contains a word meaning "slave".
As long as you paid them the taxes they required (via local chieftains) you were quite safe as a peasant. Of course, ignoring the initial conquest.
You're probably thinking of the later Crimean Tatar raids that were indeed a very big nuisance North and West of the Black Sea, that area only got pacified for good once it came under Russian control (that's why cities like Kherson and Odessa have been founded by Tsarist Russia in late 18th century).
> Nomads basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to peasant communities because your settlement will be raided until it ceases to exist.
Nonsense. Huge swaths of eurasian landmass is uninhabitable because of harsh climate ( siberia, gobi, etc ) or the distance from water sources. Even today, most of eurasia is empty.
> In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly.
Dumbest thing I've read in a long time. These 'malaria and tsetse fly' improved the lives of settlers by enabling trade. Modern history was made by these nomads. Everything from the italian renaissance to the discovery of the new world was a result of trade by these 'malaria and tsetse flies'.
> Eventually, settled societies concentrated sufficient amount of military and industrial power in one hands that nomads could no longer compete and fell apart, and these steppes were finally populated by villages and towns.
Wrong again. It wasn't settled societies that did this. The nomads conquered settled societies and militarized and developed them. From the mongols in much of eurasia, the vikings in europe, the turks in the middle east, etc.
> Some of the smarter nomad communities figured out how to avoid that fate and settled down by themself.
Avoid what fate? The nomad communities conquered and ruled.
> Huge swaths of eurasian landmass is uninhabitable because of harsh climate
This gets repeated over and over but looks false.
Why is the city of Ryazan on five centuries older than the city of Voronezh just 200 km to the south? One is in cold swampy forests and the other one is temperate grasslands. And you see this pattern everywhere where barely arable places such as Vjatka are populated for a long time but Krasnodar only recently populated.
>> settlement
Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist.
"Not unlike [insert pathogen or reviled insect here]" (in quotes b/c I can't seriously compare humans to such things without revulsion; just an instructive parallel).
The "Great" Wall of China, interestingly, walls in vast areas of steppe and former Xiongnu grazing land.
Eurasian nomad wealth was overwhelmingly the "spoils" of trade, not raiding – and countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors. Eventually, Eurasian trade patterns shifted from overland (the "silk road") to maritime routes, and the interior of the continent fell into a terminal recession. Until then (e.g. the Jungars) nomads continued to play an outsized role.
Some of the smarter nomad communities are still nomads. And 99% of developed/developing world population (including those with nomad ancestors) resemble pre-modern sedentary populations just as little as they do pre-modern nomad populations in their modes of life.
> Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist.
Sure - it was a Hobbesian war of all against all, until the settled cultivators made a better world.
> countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors.
If the nomads make war on you unless you "trade" with them then that's blackmail, not voluntary trade.
And if A and B voluntarily engage in mutually beneficial trade, and C who rules over B (and holds trade and aliens both in contempt for ideological reasons) obstructs B and A from trading in order to weaken A, what is that?
> Nomads basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to peasant communities because your settlement will be raided until it ceases to exist.
> In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly.
Nomadic raids on settled communities turn out to involve a population loss of about 1-3%. A medieval war will probably cost 10-20% of the population caught in the fighting grounds (and do remember that warfare is endemic in Medieval Europe). Malaria killed about 20-30% of the attempted settlers.
Such raids will also happen annually. Why not? They led to large chunk of most fertile lands of Eurasia[1] ( not having any permanent population way into the second millenium. They absolutely treat peasants as a resource and they will over-hunt it.
If you live under the defense of forest, you can still settle there and lose 1-3% of population every decade or so because you're good at hiding. If you are trying to live in the steppe, you will be over-raided and scattered.
WTF are you talking about? There were tons of ancient civilizations in the Eurasian land mass.
> In this fashion they were not unlike malaria and tsetse fly.
So this is plain old racism, right?
Plain old racism is people who live on an island then cross the ocean in the boat and then treat locals as inferiors.
People who live alongside nomads for millenia and exchange raids / conquests are not racists.
The former should never be lecturing the latter.
Well, I am not the former. And here's a lecture for you: comparing human beings to diseases and insects subject to eradication is plain old racism when the latter do it as much as when the former do.
Fitting that this was posted on Columbus Day.