Harsh territory abounded across the top of Eurasia.
In the far north
the bleak, open wilderness of the tundra stretched in a thin strip from
Scandinavia to Siberia; immediately to its south lay a wider band of
forest, the taiga. This Arctic territory was populated mostly by
hunters like the Yukagir of northern Siberia and by reindeer
pastoralists like the Lapps of northern Scandinavia.
But between this northern world and the civilizations
far to the south
lay the Eurasian steppes, reaching Manchuria in the east and Hungary in
the west. Like the uplands of Persia, this belt of grasslands did not
bear fine fruits. But it was the homeland of the horse and doubtless
the scene of its domestication. Already in the time of Cyrus the
steppes were teeming with nomadic pastoralists. These pastoralists were
hard men, and those whose economies were built around the horse had
military advantages.
A Latin author of the fifth century A.D. had this to
say of one such
people, the Huns, who at the time were invading the western Roman
Empire: "Scarce has the infant learned to stand without his mother's
aid when a horse takes him on his back. You would think the limbs of
man and horse were born together, so firmly does the rider always stick
to the horse, just as if he were fastened to his place: any other folk
is carried on horseback, this folk lives there."
Nomadic pastoralists were supremely mobile. Scholars
dither as to
whether or not to identify the Huns with the Hsiung-nu who threatened
the northern frontier of China starting in the late third century B.C.
But it is a matter of record that in the thirteenth century A.D. the
Mongols attacked both Germany and Japan.
The earliest people of the steppes to have a serious
impact on the
outside world were probably the Indo-Europeans, though they were by no
means exclusively pastoralists. In our survey of the regional
civilizations of Eurasia we repeatedly encountered peoples speaking
languages of the Indo- European family; already in ancient times such
languages could be found as far afield as the British Isles and
northeastern India, and the fact that they constitute a family means
that they must go back to a single ancestral language—"proto- Indo-
European."
Some of the ancient expansion of the Indo-European
languages took place
as late as the first millennium B.C., but a good deal of it must be
older. One set of clues is linguistic. Though we have no direct
knowledge of the ancestral language, it is possible to reconstruct some
of its vocabulary by the systematic analysis of common elements in the
vocabularies of the known daughter languages (screening out later
loanwords in the process). Such reconstruction points to an economy in
which farming was well developed, especially on the pastoral side,
where it included the domesticated horse; wheeled vehicles were
certainly in use, but such metallurgy as existed may have been limited
to copper as opposed to bronze.
From an archaeological point of view the most diagnostic
elements are
the domesticated horses and the wheeled vehicles. The horse must surely
have been domesticated somewhere in its natural range; this takes us to
the steppes, where both the domesticated horse and the cart make their
appearance in the archaeological record in the fourth millennium B.C.,
prior to the onset of the Bronze Age. Within the steppes there is
reason to pick out the region to the north of the Caspian and Black
Seas as the most likely Indo-European homeland. All this can only be a
hypothesis, but it is undoubtedly the best available. What is
satisfying about it is that it also provides us with a measure of
explanation of the Indo- European expansion that must have followed in
the third millennium. A people whose way of life includes horses and
carts is mobile, and at the same time it has a military advantage over
pedestrian peoples, whom it is liable to push aside or assimilate.
Yet, of all the steppe peoples of history, only the
Mongols came close
to creating a Eurasian empire. Their highly destructive conquests in
the thirteenth century A.D. included large parts of East Asia, the Near
East, and eastern Europe (the lack of steppe to the west of Hungary
does something to explain their failure to push on into western
Europe). In the end, however, their imperial venture came to nothing.
The far-flung Mongol empire lasted only a few decades; already in the
thirteenth century, it was divided into increasingly autonomous states,
and most of these disappeared in the course of the fourteenth century.
Just as signifpent is the fact that the Mongols had brought no
civilization to spread among their battered subjects, tending rather
toward eventual assimilation into the local milieu. In the end, the
cultural map of Eurasia after the Mongols did not look very different
from what it had been before.
There was, however, one thing the Mongols did for Eurasia.
For a period
of a few decades, after their initial conquests and before the
disintegration of their states, the Mongols made it possible for people
to travel from one end of Eurasia to the other. Thus the Christian monk
Rabban Sauma, born into a Turkish people living on the northern
frontier of China, found his way from Peking to Bordeaux, while the
Venetian merchant Marco Polo traveled to China with his father and
uncle and found employment in the service of the Mongol ruler there.
This mobility was not an unmixed blessing—it probably helped to spread
a vicious epidemic of plague from one end of Eurasia to the other in
the middle of the fourteenth century. But it did provide an
unprecedented opportunity for the civilizations of Eurasia to learn
more about each other. In Iran, for example, it became possible in
Mongol times for a reader of Persian to consult systematic accounts of
the histories of China and western Europe (see figure 23; that everyone
looks oriental reflects the strength of Chinese artistic influence in
Iran in this period). We will come back to the implications of this
widening of Eurasian horizons in the next chapter.
