Deconstructing Nomad Empires

In the Bible Adam and Eve get to name everything. That was the last recorded instance of people agreeing what names should be given to what. Confucius argued that misnaming things would lead to societal chaos. History writing requires naming the protagonists, and defining their relationships. Not coincidentally modern history writing emerged more or less at the same time as the science of numismatics, since ancient coins proved to be a sure method for identifying the names of ancient rulers and their dynastic connections to one another. 

How do we know when we name an ancient people if this name corresponded to their own sense of whom they were? Identity politics existed in ancient times just as today. Peoples often assumed prestigious names for political reasons.  The European Avars, according to their steppe rivals, did not descend from the formidable Avars of Asia—they had been slaves to the latter, and they had run away and misrepresented themselves as the real thing. The so-called Heavenly Turks subdued a number of steppe peoples, the Uyghurs, the Nine Oghuz, the Karluks, and the Kirghiz. But because their life-style as horse breeders appeared so similar to the Muslims of Oxiana, all of them wound up being recorded in Persian and Arabic texts as Turks, and this name has stuck. 

Modern identity and even international politics place great importance on ethnicity, often seeking to identify the roots of current ethnic groups in a more or less legendary past.  Reality offers us intersectionality, an inconvenient dilemma for historians and nationalists alike. I stayed once in a “Kurdish” village in southeastern Turkey. The male villagers, surprisingly however, spoke Turkish while the women spoke Arabic.  When my hostess found out that I understood Arabic, she was tickled pink. Whenever I spoke to her husband in Turkish she remonstrated with me, “Ihki ‘arabi, ya Dawud!” 

In this book I try to avoid essentialism around either ethnicities such as Turks, Pashtuns, Tajiks or Tibetans, i.e., the assumption that the people we know today existed in the same guise in the past. For example, some historians emphasize the continuity of ancient peoples, using erudite, but often controversial, onomastics to connect the ancient Tokharians with the later Wusun or the Yuezhi.   Are these the “same people” or are they merely the same name for different peoples, like the Welch of Britain and the Welsche of Switzerland? In any case the reader still must follow, as in a Russian novel, a huge cast of hard-to-remember names.  

To make the narrative easier to follow, and avoid having to split hairs about the language or the DNA haploid types of ancient peoples, I do not name specific protagonists unless absolutely required to do so. I found it unavoidable to speak of the Scythians (but do not differentiate between them and the Sokolatai, Sauromates, Sakas and Alans), Turks (in all the flavours in which they came in ancient times), the Khitans (but not the Xianbei, the Ruanran or the Avars). I also pass over the many exonyms, i.e., the names that the Indians or the Chinese used to refer to groups like the Turks or the Afghans.  To help readers who may want to consult a standard history like the Cambridge Histories, I append a list of all my simplifications.  I also call all the rulers of the steppe “khan” at the expense of the qaghans, tekins, tarkhans and idikuts. I can’t help but thinking that Edward Lear had a hand in inventing these titles.

Likewise I avoid the essentialism “nomad”. The word suggests to most readers an immutable and isolated lifestyle that sets the nomads apart from the farmers. Recent fieldwork emphasizes the continuities between herding and farming, and between rural and urban living in the steppe.  What does appear to be a major distinction between the two lifestyles is horse breeding. This gets around the problem that some peoples practice long distance migration (like the Mongols)  involving the whole community, whilst others practice transhumance (like the Kurds of Iran),  where only the shepherds move the flocks. But both the Mongols and the Kurds raise horses.  This is a full-time occupation, and gives the peoples who practice it a distinctive lifestyle, even if their agricultural and animal husbandry practices may differ from one region to another. Some of them herd camels, some buffalos or even yaks, but the constant feature of the horse breeders is that they live symbiotically with large herds of horses.  Horse breeding as a lifestyle is not only highly characteristic of the steppe peoples, it is also a very homogeneous and conservative lifestyle.  Archaeological and anthropological evidence points to a strong continuity in the lifestyle of the steppe horse breeders, even as we see the Turks replacing the Scythians, and the Mongols replacing the Turks.

I don’t use the word “tribe”, if I can help it. Many readers assume “tribe” has a fixed meaning, whilst it does not. Anthropologist delight in deconstructing the use of the word tribe by steppe peoples. One investigator asked the Shahsevan Turkmen of Iran about their tribal organisation. Informants mentioned the existence of 4 to 18 tribes and issued conflicting genealogies. Few of the tribal names seemed older than the early 1800s. The steppe tribes can best be thought of as political parties. Just as the Democrats of Thomas Jefferson’s time are not today’s Democrats of Biden, the Tatars of Genghis Khan’s time are not the Tatars of the Russian Federation. Like political parties, tribal groups have emerged and disappeared. In lieu of “tribe” I prefer to use the word peoples. For very large groupings a term like confederation is justified. When we talk about a small group with a defined marital policy (i.e., endogamous vs exogamous), we can call it a clan. Tribe is anything in the middle and maybe nothing. 

I have had to make the distinction between settled and steppe states, but the distinction should be less than meets the eye. French anthropologist J.P. Digard contrasts the steppe society of “horsemen” (cavaliers) and the settled society of  “squires” (écuyers). Both groups used horsepower for political purposes. The steppe is more coloured by the horsemen because they form such a big percent of the population. In the steppe everyone rides. In settled society horse riding is a sign of social class. The squires play an important role in the settled states because they represent the horse power.

Both kinds of states ruled settled and steppe peoples, though in different proportions.  States originating on the steppe relied on horse power to govern. Their khans did not build monumental capitals or palaces, but rather travelled around their realm with magnificent tent encampments.  They did this to show themselves to the ever-mobile horse breeders on whose political support they relied for power. Their power was based on loyalty, not on ownership of land. Rulers of settled states often based their power on ownership of lands (crown lands).  They built capital cities that functioned symbolically like mandalas, focusing the power of the heavens onto a single city, to a specific palace, to a throne room. Settled people came to pay obeisance to the king. The king did not travel to see his subjects.

Settled and steppe states practiced violence in an equal measure. As the Pirate of Penzance sung, “But many a king on a first-class throne/If he wants to call his crown his own/ Must manage somehow to get through/More dirty work than ever I do.” Both settled states and steppe states jealously managed the balance of power between themselves and other actors.  Clients who waxed too powerful underwent preemptive attacks.  Struggling independent states found themselves victims of their neighbour’s ambition. Frequently raiding served to test the balance of power. The outbreak of wars, less frequent, not all of them very violent, allowed states to adjust the balance of power by small degrees, rather than risking existential conflicts.  In the same way the kings and the khans managed the rivalries between princes, sub-chiefs,  and ministers, banishing and executing them occasionally, to preserve their own prestige. When they flinched in this duty the vizier or sub-chief did not hesitate to make replace his master. Kings and khans also promoted, demoted and executed the members of their harem, and again for the same reason, to recalibrate the power dynamics the women’s quarter.  Likewise the women replaced the kings and khans with their brothers or sons when the opening arose.  I see little difference in the behaviour of the settled states or the steppe ones in this respect. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.