Topic: The Rise and Collapse of the Bronze Age: 3000-1000 BCE
Nomadic Societies
Not every one nor every area was folded into the embrace of agricultural civilizations and societies. World historians are paying increasing attention to nomadic herding peoples, whose economy and society contrasted with the more standard pattern. These smaller groups of people were capable of great impact because, of necessity, they moved around considerably. They were in a position to contact and influence civilizations, and to link civilizations through trade.
Nomadic populations were smaller than those of the civilizations, with economies that developed fewer resources. This was one reason that nomads recurrently pressed into other areas, to relive population pressure. Indeed, nomadic peoples show up in world history particularly when they migrated into more settled areas, or when they invaded. But they also, more systematically, provided trading contacts, though which ideas and techniques could spread. And they introduced some important techniques of their own.
EARLY NOMADIC SOCIETIES
We do not know when nomadic societies developed, for they have left few written records and no real architectural monuments. They may have begun before the first civilizations emerged. Nomadic societies ultimately developed particularly in the region of the huge grassy plains of Central Asia and in southern Arabia. Nomadic regions generally are characterized by rainfalls sufficient for developing grasslands but less adequate for settled agriculture.
The first groups of nomads to break into the historical record were the Indo-Europeans, who periodically intervened in the civilizations of the Middle East and India for a thousand years, beginning about 1500 BC. Some Indo-European groups invaded civilized areas and established their own empires—such as the Hittites, who fit into the series of empire-invaders in Mesopotamia. Indo-European incursions into India increasingly threatened the later phases of Harappan civilization. Early Indo-Europeans used war chariots drawn by horses, but gradually they developed the equipment needed to ride horses directly.
Another early nomadic group that played an important rule in larger world history, also from central Asia, was the Xionghu known in Europe as the Huns. The Hun invasion in China caused great devastation from the 4th century BC on. Like the Indo-Europeans before them, Hun movements were probably initially due to droughts and internal warfare in central Asia, but then, achieving success, they took on a life of their own.
The camel was domesticated by 1700 BC as a pack animal. Its capacity for traveling with huge loads, for more than 20 days without new water, was ideal for nomadic life in the deserts. Cattle-raising nomads also played a role in parts of Africa.
NOMADIC SOCIETY AND CULTURE
Seasonal travel was fundamental to the nomadic way of life. Harsh weather forced movement in search of adequate food, and too much in one place exhausted the available vegetation. Most nomadic groups usually traveled the same routes, year after year.
But droughts or other hardship could promote change. While nomadic groups usually respected each other’s routes, problems could cause conflicts as one group tried to muscle into the territory of another.
Animals formed the core of the cultural interests of nomadic societies, with religion usually emphasizing animal sacrifices. Size of herd was the measure of wealth in nomadic societies. Animals were also the core of the nomadic economy. Nomads traded in leather, wool, milk products, and bone sculptures.
The harshness of the nomadic environment, plus periodic warfare, introduced a common note of violence into nomadic life. Nomadic societies emphasized the importance of honor, or what anthropologists call courage culture. Strong, warlike men dominated, and their leadership was dependent on a willingness to meet physical challenge. Nomad cultures valued courage and heroic action above all other achievements. In addition to recognizing brave leaders, nomadic organization depended on kinship relations in small bands, usually 30 to 150 people. These bands could, however, assemble into much larger groups in response to crisis.
Nomads were outstanding fighters. Because their economic activity required much less time than that of agricultural peoples, there was more opportunity to train for battle. Easy familiarity with horses (or other animals) made for excellent military skills as well. Nomads’ ability to ride for long distances often allowed them to draw the armies of civilizations out, where, exhausted, they could later be picked off.
NOMADS AND CIVILIZATIONS
Nomads are particularly famous in history when they invaded. Civilized peoples, from the Chinese to the Romans, feared and condemned nomads as offspring of evil spirits, the ultimate barbarians. Without question, nomadic invasions were important, particularly, when they were part of larger migrations that could change the population structure as well as political leadership. The role of the Indo-Europeans in shaking up civilizations in the Middle East and India is obvious, and this basic pattern repeated in the classical and postclassical periods.
But nomads often had a peaceful, mutually beneficial relationship with agricultural societies, and this pattern had its own historical significance. Nomads often traded with farmers for useful goods, including vegetables, silks, and iron tools and weapons. In turn, the meat and milk products provide by the nomads could supplement meager diets for frontier farming communities. Nomads also provided war horses for civilizations in China, India, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Artistic interactions with settled societies also occurred. Scythians, a nomadic people in what is now southern Russia, influenced, and were influenced by Greek artisans in colonies around the Black Sea. The result was elaborate and intricate jewelry in which Greek techniques married Scythian styles and artistic themes.
Nomadic societies were also sources of invention, for limited resources did not preclude some specializations and indeed could encourage new techniques. Iron working probably first developed among nomads in Central Asia, who later brought it into the Middle East. Felt, the cloth that mixed wool and fur, was another creative products from nomadic Central Asia.
Nomads often received tribute payments from agricultural societies, to keep them at bay. Chinese silk trade (beginning of the Silk Road) began with tribute shipments to nomads in central Asia. Civilizations governments often hired nomads as mercenary soldiers. At the end of the Roman Empire, nomads were hired to protect frontiers—Germans in Europe, Arabs in the Middle East. Obviously, this practice could backfire when the guards gained additional organizational skills and turned against the host society. Nor surprisingly, many civilizations spent a great deal of money trying to keep nomads out—as with the Great Wall in China, or the frontier garrisons of the Roman Empire.
Nomadic invaders, including former border guards, often incorporated the institutions and values of a civilization when they were able to take over, changing more than the societies around them. It was often hard to maintain a nomadic identity. Many nomads feared the lure of civilization, worrying that they would become soft and often pulled back lest they be corrupted.
The skills and values of nomadic peoples gave them a world history role grater than their relatively small population suggest. At the same time, their conditions of life made it difficult to develop durable civilizations of their own, of even to dominate farming societies for very long. So there are exceptions to generations about the limitations of the nomadic way of life. Generally, however, when it came to setting up more complex states, nomadic peoples depended on picking up techniques, and some of the personnel, of established civilizations.
So the nomadic intrusions into world history tended to be dramatic but brief. Often, they caused more change by what they prompted agricultural societies to do in defense, in organizing government resources to guard against attack, than by what they did themselves.
THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF NOMADS
Nomadic societies challenged civilizations at various points through invasions and migrations, facilitating trade, and bringing new techniques and ideas.
Violence and war grab the history headlines where nomads are concerned, but they may not be the main points. Nomads pioneered all the great overland trade routes that joined civilized areas in Asia, Europe, and Africa, from the river valley through the postclassical centuries. They showed the way across the Sahara desert, through other merchants and missionaries follow. They cut through central Asia, along the fringe of the Himalayan Mountains.
To be sure, nomads often threatened the trade routes, and the Roman or Chinese emperors might send troops against these land-based pirates. But they also served as facilitators along the routes, offering protection for merchant groups, providing animals and hospitable way-stations. Sometimes they traded directly; more often, they cooperated with merchant groups. At key points in world history, before the definitive rise of ocean-based transport and then the railroad, nomadic shaped trade routes were the lifeline of connections among the major civilizations. Religions such as Buddhism and Islam spread peacefully along these routes, while artistic styles from centers such as Greece fanned out along the routes as well. The mobility of nomads was long fundamental to world trade.
Sometimes, when nomads picked up some additional pointers from civilizations with which they were in contact, contributions were more direct. Warfare against Chinese forces in western China in the 8th century, by nomadic armies that had converted to Islam, brought the capture of Chinese craftsmen who knew how to make paper. This, in turn, resulted in the rapid spread of papermaking in the Middle East and north Africa, and then more widely.
Nomads also contributed to the spread of knowledge of new crops, even when they did not cultivate them directly. Sometimes they carried new diseases as well, the downside of contact. More obviously still, they recurrently added to the technology of war, with their equipment for horses and skill in hit-and-run attacks copied by the armies of civilizations.