A nomad is a member of people having no permanent abode, who travel from place to place to find fresh pasture for their livestock. The generic title encompasses the varied ethnic groups who have at times inhabited the steppes of Central Asia, Mongolia and what is now Russia and Ukraine. They domesticated the horse around 3500 BCE, vastly increasing the possibilities of nomadic life[2][3][4] and subsequently their economy and culture emphasised horse breeding, horse riding and nomadic pastoralism; this usually involved trading with settled peoples around the steppe edges. They developed the chariot, wagon, cavalry and horse archery and introduced innovations such as the bridle, bit and stirrup and the very rapid rate at which innovations crossed the steppelands spread these widely, to be copied by settled peoples bordering the steppes. During the Iron Age, Scythian cultures emerged among the Eurasian nomads, which was characterized by a distinct Scythian art.
The boundary of 13th century Mongol Empire and location of today's Mongols in modern Mongolia, Russia and China.
Scythia was a loose state or federation covering most of the steppe, that originated as early as the 8th century BCE, composed mainly of people speaking Scythian languages and usually regarded as the first of the nomad empires.[5] The Scythians were Iranic pastorialist tribes who dwelled the Eurasian Steppes from the Tarim Basin and Western Mongolia in Asia to as far as Sarmatia in modern day Ukraine and Russia. The Roman army hired Sarmatians as elite cavalrymen. Europe was exposed to several waves of invasions by horse people, including the Cimmerians. The Scythians and Sarmatians enjoyed a long age of dominion in the 1st Millennium BCE, but at the start of 1st Millennium CE they were displaced by waves of immigrations of other people, to the East, in the steppes east of the Caspian Sea. They were dislocated by the Yuezhi people and were forced to assimilate into them, and many of these Eastern Scythians (Saka) moved and settled in the Parthian Empire in the region later named as Sakastan.
The western Iranians, the Alans and Sarmatians, settled down and became the ruling elite of several eastern Slavic tribes[6] and some of these Iranians also assimilated into the Slavic cultures,[7] while others retained their Iranian identity, and their languages are spoken today by the modern Ossetian people.[8] Various peoples also expanded and contracted later in history, including the Magyars in the Early Middle Ages, the Mongols and Seljuks in the High Middle Ages, the Kalmuks and the Kyrgyz and later the Kazakhs up to modern times. The earliest example of an invasion by a horse people may have been by the Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves, following the domestication of the horse in the 4th millennium BCE (see Kurgan hypothesis). The Cimmerians were the earliest invading equestrian steppe nomads that are known in Eastern European sources. Their military strength was always based on cavalry, and they were among the first to have developed true cavalry.[9]
Historically, areas to the north of China including Manchuria, Mongolia and Xinjiang were inhabited by nomadic tribes. Early periods in Chinese history involved conflict with the nomadic peoples to the west of the Wei valley. Texts from the Zhou dynasty (c. 1050–256 BCE) compare the Rong, Di and Qin dynasty to wolves, describing them as cruel and greedy.[10] Iron and bronze were supplied from China.[11] An early theory proposed by Owen Lattimore suggesting that the nomadic tribes could have been self-sufficient was criticized by later scholars, who questioned whether their raids may have been motivated by necessity rather than greed. Subsequent studies noted that nomadic demand for grain, textiles and ironware exceeded China's demand for Steppe goods. Anatoly Khazanov identified this imbalance in production as the cause of instability in the Steppe nomadic cultures. Later scholars argued that peace along China's northern border largely depended on whether the nomads could obtain the essential grains and textiles they needed through peaceful means such as trade or intermarriage. Several tribes organized to form the Xiongnu, a tribal confederation that gave the nomadic tribes the upper hand in their dealings with the settled agricultural Chinese people.[10]
During the Tang dynasty, Turks would cross the Yellow River when it was frozen to raid China. Contemporary Tang sources noted the superiority of Turkic horses. Emperor Taizong wrote that the horses were "exceptionally superior to ordinary [horses]". The Xiajiasi (Kyrgyz) were a tributary tribe who controlled an area abundant in resources like gold, tin and iron. The Turks used the iron tribute paid by the Kyrgyz to make weapons, armor and saddle parts. Turks were nomadic hunters and would sometimes conceal military activities under the pretense of hunting. Their raids into China were organized by a khagan and success in these campaigns had a significant influence on a tribal leader's prestige. In the 6th century the Göktürk Khaganate consolidated their dominance over the northern steppe region through a series of military victories against the Shiwei, Khitan, Rouran, Tuyuhun, Karakhoja and Yada. By the end of the 6th century, following the Göktürk civil war, the short-lived empire had split into the Eastern and Western Turkic Khaganates, before it was conquered by the Tang in 630 and 657, respectively.[12]
Nomadism persists in the steppe lands, though it has generally been disapproved of by modern regimes, who have often discouraged it with varying degrees of coercion.
Chronological division
Chronologically, there have been several "waves" of invasions of either Europe, the Near East, India and China from the steppe.
Bronze Age spread of Yamnayasteppe pastoralist ancestry into two subcontinents—Europe and South Asia—from c. 3300 to 1500 BC.[13]
^. International Museum of the Horse. Archived from the original on 2016-07-19. Retrieved 2015-01-27.
^"Horsey-aeology, Binary Black Holes, Tracking Red Tides, Fish Re-evolution, Walk Like a Man, Fact or Fiction". Quirks and Quarks Podcast with Bob Macdonald. CBC Radio. 2009-03-07. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
^Annamoradnejad, Rahimberdi; Lotfi, Sedigheh (2010). "Demographic changes of nomadic communities in Iran (1956–2008)". Asian Population Studies. 6 (3): 335–345. doi:10.1080/17441730.2010.512764. S2CID 154140533.
^Vernadsky, George (1 January 1969). A History of Russia. Yale University Press. p. 22. ISBN978-0-300-00247-8. "Though the Alans were originally typical nomads, in time some of their clans settled down and, as they mixed with the native agricultural population, gradually came to dominate several of the east Slavic tribes,
^Ascherson, Neal (30 September 1996). Black Sea. Macmillan. p. 242. ISBN978-0-8090-1593-1. "In the same way as the Sarmatian 'Croats', they dominated and then melted into Slav populations around them."
^Grant, Anthony P. (10 January 2020). The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact. Oxford University Press. p. 488. ISBN978-0-19-087690-6. " In terms of language, Ossetians are descended from a medieval people called the Alans,³
^Meyers, Eric M. (1997). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East. Oxford University Press. p. 11. ISBN978-0-19-511216-0. "Cimmerians were among the first mounted nomads to use real cavalry; the objects from their graves include personal ornaments, weapons , and horse harnesses: most importantly horse bits of North Caucasian types..."
^ abDi Cosmo, Nicola. "Ancient Inner Asian Nomads: Their Economic Basis and Its Significance in Chinese History". The Journal of Asian Studie 53, no. 9 (1994): 1092–126.
^Susan E. Alcock (2001). Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and past. Cambridge University Press. pp. 19–. ISBN978-0-521-77020-0.
^Wang, Zhenping and Joshua A. Fogel (Ed.). 2017. Dancing with the Horse Riders: The Tang, the Turks, and the Uighurs. In Tang China in Multi-Polar Asia, 11–54. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Retrieved 12 Feb 2018[ISBN missing]
^"Steppe migrant thugs pacified by Stone Age farming women". ScienceDaily. Faculty of Science - University of Copenhagen. 4 April 2017.
Drews, Robert. Early riders: The beginnings of mounted warfare in Asia and Europe. N.Y.: Routledge, 2004 (ISBN0-415-32624-9).
Golden, Peter B.Nomads and their neighbours in the Russian Steppe: Turks, Khazars and Qipchaqs (Variorum Collected Studies). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003 (ISBN0-86078-885-7).
Hildinger, Erik. Warriors of the steppe: A military history of Central Asia, 500 B.C. to A.D. 1700. New York: Sarpedon Publishers, 1997 (hardcover, ISBN1-885119-43-7); Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001(paperback, ISBN0-306-81065-4).
Kradin, Nikolay. 2004. Nomadic Empires in Evolutionary Perspective. In Alternatives of Social Evolution. Ed. by N.N. Kradin, A.V. Korotayev, Dmitri Bondarenko, V. de Munck, and P.K. Wason (p. 274–288). Vladivostok: Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; reprinted in: The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogues. Ed. by Leonid Grinin et al. (р. 501–524). Volgograd: Uchitel'.
Kradin, Nikolay N. 2002. .
*Kradin, Nikolay. 2003. Nomadic Empires: Origins, Rise, Decline. In Nomadic Pathways in Social Evolution. Ed. by N.N. Kradin, Dmitri Bondarenko, and T. Barfield (p. 73–87). Moscow: Center for Civilizational Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences.
Littauer, Mary A.; Crouwel, Joost H.; Raulwing, Peter (Editor). Selected writings on chariots and other early vehicles, riding, and harness (Culture and history of the ancient Near East, 6). Leiden: Brill, 2002 (ISBN90-04-11799-7).
Shippey, Thomas "Tom" A. Goths and Huns: The rediscovery of Northern culture in the nineteenth century, in The Medieval legacy: A symposium. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 1981 (ISBN87-7492-393-5), pp. 51–69.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Eurasian nomads.
Nomadic Art of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Eurasian nomads
January 20, 2023
eurasian, nomads, were, large, group, nomadic, peoples, from, eurasian, steppe, often, appear, history, invaders, europe, western, asia, central, asia, eastern, asia, south, asia, scythian, shield, ornament, deer, gold, nomad, member, people, having, permanent. The Eurasian nomads were a large group of nomadic peoples from the Eurasian Steppe who often appear in history as invaders of Europe Western Asia Central Asia Eastern Asia and South Asia 1 Scythian shield ornament of deer in gold A nomad is a member of people having no permanent abode who travel from place to place to find fresh pasture for their livestock The generic title encompasses the varied ethnic groups who have at times inhabited the steppes of Central Asia Mongolia and what is now Russia and Ukraine They domesticated the horse around 3500 BCE vastly increasing the possibilities of nomadic life 2 3 4 and subsequently their economy and culture emphasised horse breeding horse riding and nomadic pastoralism this usually involved trading with settled peoples around the steppe edges They developed the chariot wagon cavalry and horse archery and introduced innovations such as the bridle bit and stirrup and the very rapid rate at which innovations crossed the steppelands spread these widely to be copied by settled peoples bordering the steppes During the Iron Age Scythian cultures emerged among the Eurasian nomads which was characterized by a distinct Scythian art Contents 1 History 2 Chronological division 3 See also 3 1 By region 4 References 5 Bibliography 6 External linksHistory Edit Approximate extent of Scythia within the area of distribution of Eastern Iranian languages shown in orange in the 1st century BCE Cuman Kipchak confederation in Eurasia c 1200 The boundary of 13th century Mongol Empire and location of today s Mongols in modern Mongolia Russia and China Scythia was a loose state or federation covering most of the steppe that originated as early as the 8th century BCE composed mainly of people speaking Scythian languages and usually regarded as the first of the nomad empires 5 The Scythians were Iranic pastorialist tribes who dwelled the Eurasian Steppes from the Tarim Basin and Western Mongolia in Asia to as far as Sarmatia in modern day Ukraine and Russia The Roman army hired Sarmatians as elite cavalrymen Europe was exposed to several waves of invasions by horse people including the Cimmerians The Scythians and Sarmatians enjoyed a long age of dominion in the 1st Millennium BCE but at the start of 1st Millennium CE they were displaced by waves of immigrations of other people to the East in the steppes east of the Caspian Sea They were dislocated by the Yuezhi people and were forced to assimilate into them and many of these Eastern Scythians Saka moved and settled in the Parthian Empire in the region later named as Sakastan The western Iranians the Alans and Sarmatians settled down and became the ruling elite of several eastern Slavic tribes 6 and some of these Iranians also assimilated into the Slavic cultures 7 while others retained their Iranian identity and their languages are spoken today by the modern Ossetian people 8 Various peoples also expanded and contracted later in history including the Magyars in the Early Middle Ages the Mongols and Seljuks in the High Middle Ages the Kalmuks and the Kyrgyz and later the Kazakhs up to modern times The earliest example of an invasion by a horse people may have been by the Proto Indo Europeans themselves following the domestication of the horse in the 4th millennium BCE see Kurgan hypothesis The Cimmerians were the earliest invading equestrian steppe nomads that are known in Eastern European sources Their military strength was always based on cavalry and they were among the first to have developed true cavalry 9 Historically areas to the north of China including Manchuria Mongolia and Xinjiang were inhabited by nomadic tribes Early periods in Chinese history involved conflict with the nomadic peoples to the west of the Wei valley Texts from the Zhou dynasty c 1050 256 BCE compare the Rong Di and Qin dynasty to wolves describing them as cruel and greedy 10 Iron and bronze were supplied from China 11 An early theory proposed by Owen Lattimore suggesting that the nomadic tribes could have been self sufficient was criticized by later scholars who questioned whether their raids may have been motivated by necessity rather than greed Subsequent studies noted that nomadic demand for grain textiles and ironware exceeded China s demand for Steppe goods Anatoly Khazanov identified this imbalance in production as the cause of instability in the Steppe nomadic cultures Later scholars argued that peace along China s northern border largely depended on whether the nomads could obtain the essential grains and textiles they needed through peaceful means such as trade or intermarriage Several tribes organized to form the Xiongnu a tribal confederation that gave the nomadic tribes the upper hand in their dealings with the settled agricultural Chinese people 10 During the Tang dynasty Turks would cross the Yellow River when it was frozen to raid China Contemporary Tang sources noted the superiority of Turkic horses Emperor Taizong wrote that the horses were exceptionally superior to ordinary horses The Xiajiasi Kyrgyz were a tributary tribe who controlled an area abundant in resources like gold tin and iron The Turks used the iron tribute paid by the Kyrgyz to make weapons armor and saddle parts Turks were nomadic hunters and would sometimes conceal military activities under the pretense of hunting Their raids into China were organized by a khagan and success in these campaigns had a significant influence on a tribal leader s prestige In the 6th century the Gokturk Khaganate consolidated their dominance over the northern steppe region through a series of military victories against the Shiwei Khitan Rouran Tuyuhun Karakhoja and Yada By the end of the 6th century following the Gokturk civil war the short lived empire had split into the Eastern and Western Turkic Khaganates before it was conquered by the Tang in 630 and 657 respectively 12 Nomadism persists in the steppe lands though it has generally been disapproved of by modern regimes who have often discouraged it with varying degrees of coercion Chronological division EditChronologically there have been several waves of invasions of either Europe the Near East India and China from the steppe Bronze Age spread of Yamnaya steppe pastoralist ancestry into two subcontinents Europe and South Asia from c 3300 to 1500 BC 13 Bronze Age Proto Indo Europeans see Indo European migrations Kurgan theory and the later Indo Aryan migrationIron Age Classical Antiquity Iranian peoples Cimmerians Wusun ParthiansParniSakaIssedones MassagetaeScythiansSarmatiansSigynnaeYuezhi Hephthalites Late Antiquity and Migration period AlansAvarsGepidsGothsHunsRugiansXiongnuEarly Middle Ages Turkic expansion Magyar invasion CumansBashkirsBurtasBulgarsKarluksKhazarsKhitanKimaksKipchaksMagyarsUyghursGurjarsHigh Middle Ages to Early Modern period Mongol Empire and continued Turkic expansion MongolsTurkomenNogaisPechenegsTartarsKalmyksKazakhsKyrgyzKarakalpaksYoruksDzungar KhanateSee also EditEurasiatic languages Inner Asia Nomadic empire Steppe Route Lev GumilyovBy region Edit For a more comprehensive list see List of nomadic peoples Nomadic peoples of Europe Nomads of IndiaReferences Edit the Steppe Map Biome Eurasia Peoples amp Animals Britannica www britannica com Matossian Shaping World History p 43 What We Theorize When and Where Domestication Occurred International Museum of the Horse Archived from the original on 2016 07 19 Retrieved 2015 01 27 Horsey aeology Binary Black Holes Tracking Red Tides Fish Re evolution Walk Like a Man Fact or Fiction Quirks and Quarks Podcast with Bob Macdonald CBC Radio 2009 03 07 Retrieved 2010 09 18 Annamoradnejad Rahimberdi Lotfi Sedigheh 2010 Demographic changes of nomadic communities in Iran 1956 2008 Asian Population Studies 6 3 335 345 doi 10 1080 17441730 2010 512764 S2CID 154140533 Vernadsky George 1 January 1969 A History of Russia Yale University Press p 22 ISBN 978 0 300 00247 8 Though the Alans were originally typical nomads in time some of their clans settled down and as they mixed with the native agricultural population gradually came to dominate several of the east Slavic tribes Ascherson Neal 30 September 1996 Black Sea Macmillan p 242 ISBN 978 0 8090 1593 1 In the same way as the Sarmatian Croats they dominated and then melted into Slav populations around them Grant Anthony P 10 January 2020 The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact Oxford University Press p 488 ISBN 978 0 19 087690 6 In terms of language Ossetians are descended from a medieval people called the Alans Meyers Eric M 1997 The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East Oxford University Press p 11 ISBN 978 0 19 511216 0 Cimmerians were among the first mounted nomads to use real cavalry the objects from their graves include personal ornaments weapons and horse harnesses most importantly horse bits of North Caucasian types a b Di Cosmo Nicola Ancient Inner Asian Nomads Their Economic Basis and Its Significance in Chinese History The Journal of Asian Studie 53 no 9 1994 1092 126 Susan E Alcock 2001 Empires Perspectives from Archaeology and past Cambridge University Press pp 19 ISBN 978 0 521 77020 0 Wang Zhenping and Joshua A Fogel Ed 2017 Dancing with the Horse Riders The Tang the Turks and the Uighurs In Tang China in Multi Polar Asia 11 54 Honolulu University of Hawaii Press Retrieved 12 Feb 2018 ISBN missing Steppe migrant thugs pacified by Stone Age farming women ScienceDaily Faculty of Science University of Copenhagen 4 April 2017 Bibliography EditAmitai Reuven Biran Michal editors Mongols Turks and others Eurasian nomads and the sedentary world Brill s Inner Asian Library 11 Leiden Brill 2005 ISBN 90 04 14096 4 Drews Robert Early riders The beginnings of mounted warfare in Asia and Europe N Y Routledge 2004 ISBN 0 415 32624 9 Golden Peter B Nomads and their neighbours in the Russian Steppe Turks Khazars and Qipchaqs Variorum Collected Studies Aldershot Ashgate 2003 ISBN 0 86078 885 7 Hildinger Erik Warriors of the steppe A military history of Central Asia 500 B C to A D 1700 New York Sarpedon Publishers 1997 hardcover ISBN 1 885119 43 7 Cambridge MA Da Capo Press 2001 paperback ISBN 0 306 81065 4 Kradin Nikolay 2004 Nomadic Empires in Evolutionary Perspective In Alternatives of Social Evolution Ed by N N Kradin A V Korotayev Dmitri Bondarenko V de Munck and P K Wason p 274 288 Vladivostok Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences reprinted in The Early State Its Alternatives and Analogues Ed by Leonid Grinin et al r 501 524 Volgograd Uchitel Kradin Nikolay N 2002 Nomadism Evolution and World Systems Pastoral Societies in Theories of Historical Development Journal of World System Research 8 368 388 Kradin Nikolay 2003 Nomadic Empires Origins Rise Decline In Nomadic Pathways in Social Evolution Ed by N N Kradin Dmitri Bondarenko and T Barfield p 73 87 Moscow Center for Civilizational Studies Russian Academy of Sciences Kradin Nikolay 2006 Cultural Complexity of Pastoral Nomads World Cultures 15 171 189 Kradin Nikolay Nomads of Inner Asia in Transition Moscow URSS 2014 ISBN 978 5 396 00632 4 Littauer Mary A Crouwel Joost H Raulwing Peter Editor Selected writings on chariots and other early vehicles riding and harness Culture and history of the ancient Near East 6 Leiden Brill 2002 ISBN 90 04 11799 7 Shippey Thomas Tom A Goths and Huns The rediscovery of Northern culture in the nineteenth century in The Medieval legacy A symposium Odense University Press of Southern Denmark 1981 ISBN 87 7492 393 5 pp 51 69 External links Edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to Eurasian nomads Nomadic Art of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art fully available online as PDF which contains material on Eurasian nomads Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Eurasian nomads amp oldid 1132794164, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,
