Eurasian nomads

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The Eurasian nomads were a large group of nomadic peoples of the Eurasian Steppe who often appear in history as invaders of Europe, The Middle East, and China.

History

This generic title encompasses the ethnic groups inhabiting the steppes of Central Asia, Mongolia, and what is now Russia. They domesticated the horse, and their economy and culture emphasizes horse breeding, horse riding, and a pastoral economy in general. They developed the chariot, cavalry, and horse archery, introducing innovations such as the bridle, bit, and stirrup. "Horse people" is a generalized and somewhat obsolete term for such nomads, which is also sometimes used to describe hunter-gatherer peoples of the North American prairies and South American pampas who started using horses after the Europeans brought them to the Americas.

The earliest historical phases of China involved conflict with the nomadic Rong and Xiongnu peoples to the west of the Wei valley. The Roman army hired Sarmatians as elite cavalrymen. Europe was exposed to several waves of invasions by horse people, from the Cimmerians in the 8th century BCE, down to the Migration period, and the Mongols and Seljuks in the High Middle Ages, and the Kalmuks and the Kyrgyz and later Kazakhs down into 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). Cimmerian is the first invasion of equestrian steppe nomads that we can grasp from historical sources.

The concept of "horse people" was of some importance in 19th century scholarship, in connection with the rediscovery of Germanic pagan culture by Romanticism (see Viking revival), which idealized the Goths in particular as a heroic horse-people. J. R. R. Tolkien's Rohirrim may be seen as an idealized Germanic people influenced by these romantic notions. Similarly, George R. R. Martin's nomadic Dothraki people are heavily influenced by the lifestyles and cultures of historical horse people.

Linguistic division

Linguistically, these peoples may be divided into several large groups:

Altaic^a

• Mongols
• Turkic

Indo-European

Proto-Indo-Europeans (Chalcolithic / Bronze Age)

Indo-Iranians (Bronze / Iron Age)

• Indo-Aryans
• Iranians

Uralic

• Ugric (Magyar)
• Finnic

^a Perhaps a Sprachbund.

Chronological division

Iron Age / Classical Antiquity

• Cimmerians
• Issedones
• Wusun
• Parthians
• Parni
• Saka
• Issedones
• Massagetae
• Scythians
• Sarmatians
• Sigynnae
• Yuezhi
• Hephthalites
• Iazyges

Migration period

• Alans
• Avars
• Gepids
• Goths
• Huns
• Rugians
• Xiongnu

Middle Ages

• Bashkirs
• Burtas
• Bulgars^a
• Khitan
• Kalmyks
• Khazars
• Kimaks
• Kipchaks
• Magyars
• Mongols
• Turkomen (not to be confused with the modern Turkmen people)
• Nogais
• Petchenegs
• Seljuks
• Slavs
• Tartars

Modern

• Kalmyks
• Kazakhs
• Kyrgyz
• Qaraqalpaqs
• Yörüks

^a Nomadic only between the conquest of the hypothetical Kingdom of Balhara and the formation of Great Bulgaria.

See also

• Eurasian Steppe
• Horse archer
• Eurasiatic languages
• Nomadism
• Nomadic empire
• Nomadic pastoralism

By region

Main article: List of nomadic peoples

• Nomadic peoples of Europe
• Nomads of India

Bibliography

• Amitai, 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. (р. 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

• 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