Steppe nomads are largely overlooked in the scope of
history. We hear of the bow and arrow totting and horse riding Scythians or
Huns or Avars or Cumans but know little about them. They are folks that
inhabited the narrow band of steppe some 400 to 500 miles wide that runs 6,000
miles across Asia from Mongolia through
central Asia to the Caspian Sea and can include the Pannonian plain of Hungary
and the Anatolian highlands of Turkey. These folk began to inhabit these grassy
plains and domesticated the horse in the mid 5th millennium B.C. They
maintained domestic herds of sheep, cattle, camels, horses and goats and lived
a nomadic life.
From 4500 B.C. the steppe peoples of upper Caspian Sea
spread over central and southern Asia and Europe. Recent DNA testing has established
the fact of an extensive migration of peoples throughout these areas, spreading
the Indo-European language in the process. So the NAZI’s happen to be right
about one thing in their understanding of a process of an expansion of an Aryan
race. A race they erroneously claimed to be some kind of superior version of
mankind with claim to dominate other peoples. However, evidence shows that the
expansion was not simply a transmission of Indo-European language from one
people to another, as others held as more plausible. It was a people
supplanting other peoples across a wide area.
***
Of course NAZI race theories turned into an odious
justification to exterminate a whole ethnic group. The race idea as we know, centers
on an idea of a Master race or people, the Aryans. Under this thinking Folks
that is peoples, through a Darwinian evolution, struggle for dominance, survival
of the fittest, in this case became the Aryans. Scientific evidence shows that Aryans (Indo-Iranians/Indo-Europeans) from
Caspian Steppes used the domesticated horse as a means to spread throughout a
vast area of Eurasia, from India through Europe in the Mid-5th
Millennium, evidence of which is based on transmission of the Indo-European
languages and genetic markers. The racial component of Indo-European migration
is albeit highly controversial. There
are some who discount the idea of an invasion of blond, blue eye nomads into
Northern India completely or push the invasion back in time to some 50,000
years.
NAZI’s placed special emphasis on the superiority of the
Nordic peoples, a supposed segment of the Aryans, so people like the Slavs were
deemed inferior and were rightfully meant to be oppressed. All this thinking,
being frightfully twisted and evil, can be found in the writings of Hans F. K.
Gunther, a 20th century race
thinker, several of whose books, could be found in Hitler’s library, and seen
to have been well worn. The question one has to ask oneself, who’s to blame,
the NAZI’s or Darwin? Today talk of the superiority of one race or group over
another is rightfully forbidden but the Darwinian ideas remain. I suspect the
idea of racial superiority, once advocated by Darwinists, have been besmirched
by the odious application of its ideas.
The ideas bandied about today regarding evolutionary
progress are nearly as fanciful, as those of the National Socialists.
Socio-biology purports all manner of benign characteristics to human kind that
have arisen from the bestial Evolutionary struggle for survival: including
kinship, love and art. Most of the theories are based on fanciful supposition
and imagination with little or no evidence to support them and neither
falsifiable nor verifiable, the required characteristics of most of science
endeavors. The most inexplicable to evolutionary thinking is the presence of
altruism. How would anyone who gained a purported survival advantage that comes
with altruism (a characteristic that promotes the welfare of the group) pass
this adaptation along, since they unlike their compatriots, will willingly
sacrifice their altruistic genes in lieu of another’s more selfish genes? It’s
unlikely that the altruistic individual has a survival advantage to another who
lacks it. The first to acquire such
altruistic gene would willingly give themselves up to the wonderment of the
other that lacks it and not pass it along.
I am certain something more complex and
profound is operating in the world than just bare, raw survival instincts. Because
if altruism generates a survival adaptation then it’s love not struggle for
survival that drove evolution.
***
As I am wont to do, I have digressed into a polemic that has
little to do with the subject of the blog. Back to the Steppe. Steppe peoples
played a huge role in history but their role is rarely recognized. For one they
didn’t have written language, so they couldn’t record their history. They
didn’t construct buildings and structures either, nor literature nor art. Their
religion was either folk religion or borrowed from others. So it was up to the settled civilized peoples
to record their history.
The important idea to
remember about the steppes peoples, when united they were the most formidable
military forces in Eurasia. We in civilized cultures presume a superiority
with our institutions and art and writing and architecture, so the military
superiority of the steppe peoples comes as a surprise.
Since they lived in grassy plains they could raise vast
numbers of horses, far more than settled peoples. The war horse was a great
expense to settled peoples. A war horse eats well over 30,000 calories a day
versus 3-4,000 for a man. So a cavalry troop of a 1000 horses would have at
same nutrition demands as something like 10,000 soldiers would have. Steppe armies could have several horses as
backup and reserve for each warrior as well, thus a steppe army of 20,000 might
have upwards 100,000 horses far surpassing the number a civilization could
muster.
Steppe people’s
military prowess and tactics were far superior to settled peoples. When the
civilized army, far less mobile, went out to pursue the steppe peoples, these
peoples would disappear into the vast grass lands of the steppes. When the
steppe peoples came to attack the civilized infantry, they would use a variety
of hit and run tactics to defeat them.
Steppe nomads could stand off and assail the standing infantry with
thousands of arrows and decimate them at a distance. When the standing army chose
to pursue, after being harried, they would be at a disadvantage losing unit cohesion,
which the steppe cavalry would then destroy them in detail. In fact, without settled villages or cities an invading
army would have little to nothing to attack and nothing to pillage or live on
for that matter in contrast to invading a settled country.
One example of the futility of tracking down the steppe
peoples is recorded by the Greek historian, Herodotus. The Scythians had
previously invaded Persia and contributed to the death of Cyrus the Great, the
founder of the vast Persian Empire in 530 B.C. Cyrus the Great is referred to
as the anointed (messiah) by Isaiah in Chapter 45. This is the same Persian Empire that the Spartan
“300” fought at the battle of Thermopylae. Herodotus reports the expedition of
the later Persian King, Darius in the steppe north of the Black Sea in 513 B.C.
The Scythians, a nomadic steppe peoples, employed standard evasive tactics and never
allowed themselves to meet the Persians in a set battle. The Persians, with an
immense military force (transported by 600 ships with countless thousands of
troops), attempted to bring the Scythians to battle but succeeded in only
wandering around the grassy steppe, being harassed by them, running out of
provisions, food and water, dying with sickness. Additionally, Scythians would
have no cities to pillage. They returned
to Thrace (Northern Greece) then to cross back into Asia Minor again. Herodotus
records that the Scythians weren’t any problem after this chastening. Yet it goes without saying, a massive
expedition of that nature couldn’t be carried out each year.
Settled peoples ofttimes would employ mounted steppe peoples
as auxiliaries to aid them in fighting the nomadic steppe peoples. But
ultimately the settled peoples didn’t have a full proof method of fighting the
stepped peoples until the appearance of the hand gun. The musket wasn’t
accurate beyond 40 or 50 yards, which was less than the bow and arrow deadly,
with armor piecing abilities, at distances far beyond that.
Part of the military superiority of the Steppe peoples comes
from the advantage that was the composite bow that they employed. It was made
of wood, bone, sinew and glue. The bow could be small enough to shoot from
horse back. It had recurves to enhance the power of the bow. This bow allowed
them to stand afar and pelt the enemy with thousands of armor penetrating
arrows from 100 yards or more away. This was not the English long bow, fired
off by the stationary the English yeoman, but a mobile band on horseback.
The steppe peoples employed a saddle as well that allowed
them to use their bow and arrows hands free, so they could remain on horseback
as they shot. Latter in the first Millennium A.D. stirrups began to appear that
greatly enhanced the riders’ ability to control the horse.
One of the first steppe peoples mentioned in literary
sources are the Scythians. The Scythians first used mounted warfare back in the
9th Century. The Greeks spoke of them. They contributed to the
demise of the Assyrian Empire 612 B.C. The Persian King Darius led an
expedition against them in 513 B.C. but never was able to force them into a set
battle. The Scythians would only harass and retreat before Darius’s huge expedition
into what we know to be the Russian Steppes. After suffering sufficient loss
and deprivation in pursuit of the Scythians for a month to do battle, Darius
set up eight forts and returned having conquered enough Scythian territory to
make them respect the Persians.
The bottom line is that not many expeditions to subdue the
Steppe nomads were successful. Various strategies were employed by the Chinese
who fought them throughout its history. Divide and conquer diplomacy was tried,
using one group of Steppe nomads to attack another. More times than not the
Steppe peoples were divided. It was when they were united like the Huns or the
Mongols they became a terror.
Another device, tribute
was paid to pacify them. The hope here is that the leadership of the group can
be kept happy by being bought off. Of course, over time the demands became greater
and greater.
Expeditions against them were very expensive, and since they
were migratory livestock herders there were no cities to conquer. A civilized
army could rarely engage them into battle as previously mentioned but would
have to suffer hit and run raids, plus there were no cities or crops to
destroy. Interestingly, the nomad
domesticated the horse, but this population of the stepped came AFTER
agriculture was undertaken. Remember that the Steppe folk were a livestock
herder first: sheep, goats, cattle. So the settled agriculturalist migrated to
the grassy steppes to pursue animal husbandry. Then became champions of the horse,
used to overshadow the settled peoples.
The Turks and Parthians, among many others, for example came
off the steppe and overwhelmed the settled society, as did the Mongols. Huns,
steppe peoples said to be related to the fearsome Xiongnu (pronounced shwang-new)
on the far Eastern side of great Steppe next to the Chinese, drove the
so-called barbarians before them and even attacked the Rome Empire and led to
its downfall in the 5th Century A.D.
The Eastern Romans were able to deflect the Huns to the West and who
wrecked it, relieving the Eastern to exist for another 1,000 in some form or
another until 1453.
When the steppe peoples united they could overwhelm
civilized societies. But they didn’t have ability to lay siege to cities. The
exception was the Mongols, the most famous of all the steppe peoples and the
most successful. They were able to acquire the siege technology from the
Northern Chinese in the early 13th Century and thus waylay fortified
cities. They easily destroyed settled societies and used great brutality to do
so. Cities were depopulated and whole populations either executed or marched
off, heedless of any deaths resulting, to be employed at conquering other
cities. The most notorious example of the brutality of the Mongols was the
destruction of Bagdad in 1258. Bagdad was the location of Islam’s Caliphate,
the spiritual head of Islam. Bagdad was a metropolitan city of a million people
or more. After a siege that lasted from January 29 to February 10, 1258, the
city was subdued. Three thousand of the cities dignitaries come out of the city
to negotiate the surrender of the city. These were slaughtered. And the rest of
the city was put to the sword, countless died, some sources say up to a 1
million. Bagdad didn’t recover until several centuries later.
Curiously, there have been revisionist views of the effect
of the Mongol conquest, one recently being the book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford.
Mr. Weatherford has quite an affection for those marauding Mongols. In fact
they are meant to appear quite enlightened and tolerant, far more so than the
civilizations that they slaughtered. These are not your daddy’s monstrous
Mongols. In contrast they are the linchpins to the modern world that promoted
exchange between the civilizations of Eurasia, which their conquest over all
the vast steppe lands accomplished. Nonetheless, the Arabs of the Middle East
never forgot their brutality and the Chinese rejoiced when they expelled them in
1368 A.D.
The arrival of the Mongols accompanied large scale
population declines. According to one scholar they reduced carbon footprint in
the atmosphere by several hundred tons of carbon di-oxide, as a result of the
world’s surface reverting back to forestation; crop lands were no long being
cultivated. I guess you could say they were environmentally friendly. One of
the strategies of the Mongols was to turn farm land back into grass land. I
presume to provide grazing for their horses.
The Mongols were the most successful killers of all time,
attributed to killing 20 million people. Current revisionist historians have
belittled the figure, but this brutality is a story told by the losers. Sometimes
it is more accurate when the winners don’t write the history.
