12-2. Nomads and the Desert Drift-Sand

The nomad then is the son and product of the peculiar and variable constitution — which nevertheless is an indivisible economic whole — of the Asiatic background. Any agriculture, worthy of the name, is impossible in the steppes and deserts — the few oases excepted — on account of the dryness of the summer, when animals also find no food. Life on the steppes and deserts is only possible in connexion either with the Siberian grass-region or with the mountains. This life is necessarily extremely hard and restless for man and beast and it creates a condition of nomadism, which must at the same time be a mounted nomadism, seeing that a wagon would be an impossibility in the long trackless wanderings over mountain and valley, river and swamp, and that goods and chattels, together with the disjoinable dwellings, can only be carried on the backs of beasts of burden.

Setting aside the Glacial Period and the small Bruckner cycle of 35 years or so, the climatic changes of Central Asia, according to Huntington, fall into cycles of several hundred years duration within which the aridity rises and sinks considerably. All Central Asia has undergone a series of climatic pulsations during historic times. There seems to be strong evidence that at the time of Christ or earlier the climate was much moister and more propitious than it now is. Then during the first few centuries of the Christian era there appears to have been an epoch of increasing aridity. It culminated about A.D. 500, at which time the climate appears to have been drier than at present. Next came an epoch of more propitious climate which reached its acme about A.D. 900, There is a little evidence of a second epoch of aridity which was especially marked in the twelfth century.

Finally, in the later Middle Ages, a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea and the condition of certain ruins render it probable that climatic conditions once again became somewhat favorable, only to give place ere long to the present aridity. But Central Asia has not been, since the beginning of historic records, in a state of desiccation. The process of geological desiccation was already ended in prehistoric times, and even the oldest historic accounts testify to the same climatic conditions as those of today. The earliest Babylonian kings maintained irrigation works, and Hammurabi (23rd cent. B.C.) had canals made through the land, one of which bore his name. Thus, as at present, without artificial irrigation agriculture was not possible there 4,200 years ago. Palestine's climate too has not changed in the least since Biblical time; its present waste condition is the result of Turkish mismanagement, and Biot has proved from the cultivated plants grown in the earliest times that the temperature of China has remained the same for 3300 years. Curtius Rufus and Arrian give similar accounts of Bactria.

Amid the enormous wastes there are countless sand-buried ruins of populous cities, monasteries, and villages and choked-up canals standing on ground won from the waste by systematic canalisation; where the system of irrigation was destroyed, the earlier natural state, the desert, returned. The causes of such destruction are manifold.

1. Earthquake.

2. Violent rain spouts after which the river does not find its former bed, and the canals receive no more water from it.

3. On the highest edge of the steppe, at the foot of the glacier, lie enormous flat heaps of debris, and here the canalisation begins. If one side of this heap rises higher than the other, the direction of the current is shifted, and the oases nurtured by the now forsaken stream become derelict. But the habitable ground simply migrates with the river. If, for example, a river altered its course four times in historic times, three series of ruins remain behind; but it is erroneous simply to add these ruins together, and to conclude from them that the whole once formed a flourishing land which has become waste, when in reality the three series of settlements did not flourish side by side but consecutively. This fallacy vitiates all accounts which assume a progressive or periodic desiccation as the chief cause of the abandonment of oases.

4. Continuous drought in consequence of which the rivers become so waterless that they cannot feed the canals of the lower river-basin, and thus the oases affected must become parched, and are not always re-settled in more favourable years.

5. Neglect of the extreme care demanded in the administration of the canal system. If irrigation is extended in the district next the mountain from which the water comes, just so much water is taken from the lower oases. But in this case too nothing is lost which cannot be replaced in another direction: vice versa if an oasis on the upper course of the river disappears through losing its canal system, the lower river course thus becomes well watered and makes possible the formation of a new oasis.

6. The most terrible mischief is the work of enemies. In order to make the whole oasis liable to tribute they need only seize the main canal; and the nomads often blindly plundered and destroyed everything. A single raid was enough to transform hundreds of oases into ashes and desert.

The nomads moreover not only ruined countless cities and villages of Central Asia, but they also denuded the steppe itself, and promoted drift sand by senseless uprooting of trees and bushes for the sake of firewood. But for them, according to Berg, there would be little drift sand in Central Asia, for, in his opinion, all sand formations must in time become firm. All the sand deserts which he observed on the Aral Sea and in Semiryechensk were originally firm, and even now most of them are still kept firm by the vegetation.

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