12-3. The Origins of the Nomadic Tribes

With the varied dangers of irrigation systems it is impossible to decide in the case of each group of ruins what causes have produced them; it js therefore doubtful whether we can place in the foreground the secular changes of climate. It is not even true that the cultivation of the oases throve better in the damper and cooler periods than in the arid and hot ones. Thus the oases of Turfan in Chinese Turkestan, which is so extremely arid and so unendurably hot in summer, are exceptionally fertile. We may therefore conclude that the cultivation of the oases was considerably more extended in the damper and cooler periods, but considerably less productive than in the arid and hot ones of today. Changes in the volume of water of single rivers and lakes are clearly apparent within short periods, and these lead to frequent local migrations of the peasant population and to new constructions as well as to the abandonment of irrigation canals. Thus there is here a continual local fluctuation in the settlements, but history knows nothing of regular migrations of agriculturists.

Still less is an unfavourable climatic change the cause of the nomad invasions of Europe. The nomad does not remain at all during the summer in the parched steppe and desert; and in the periods of increasing aridity and summer heat South Siberia was warmer and the mountain glaciers retreated, and hence the pastures in both these directions were extended. The only consequence of this was that the distance between summer and winter pastures increased and the nomad had to wander further and quicker. The computation is correct in itself, that the number of animals that can be reared to the square mile depends on and varies with the annual rainfall; but the nomad is not hampered by square miles; the poorer or richer the growth of grass the shorter or longer time he remains, and he is accustomed from year to year to fluctuations in the abundance of his flocks. Moreover a shifting of the winter pastures is not impossible, for their autumn and spring vegetation is not destroyed by a progressive aridity, and if the water current changes its bed, the nomad simply follows it. Further, the effect of a secular progressive aridity is spread over so many generations that it is not catastrophic for any one of them.

The nomad invasions of China and Europe must therefore have had other causes; and we know something about the invasions of several nomad hordes — of the Avars, Osman Turks, and Cumans, for example. Since the second half of the fifth century A.D. — that is, the time to which Huntington assigns the greatest aridity — there had existed in the Oxus basin the powerful empire of the Ephthalite horde, on the ruins of which the empire of the West Turks was founded in the middle of the sixth century. Had Central Asia been at that time so arid and therefore poor in pasture, the then victorious horde would have driven out the other hordes in order to secure for themselves more pasture land. Yet exactly the opposite took place; the Turks enslaved the other hordes, and when the Avars fled to Europe, the Turkish Khagan claimed them back at the Byzantine Court. In like manner the Turks fled from the sword of the Mongols in 1225 from Khorasan to Armenia, and in 1235 the Cumans fled to Hungary.

The violence of the Mongols is strikingly described by Gibbon: “from the Caspian to the Indus they ruined a tract of many hundred miles which was adorned with the habitations and labours of mankind, and five centuries have not been sufficient to repair the ravages of four years.” Therefore the main cause of the nomad invasions of Europe is not increasing aridity but political changes.

There remains the question: How did the nomads originate? On the theory of a progressive desiccation it is assumed that the Aryan peasantry of Turkestan were compelled to take to a nomad life through the degeneration of their fields to steppes and wastes. But the peasant bound to the soil is incapable of a mode of life so unsettled, and requiring of him much new experience. Robbed of his cornfields and reduced to beggary, could he be at the same time so rich as to procure himself the herds of cattle necessary to his existence, and so gifted with divination as suddenly to wander with them in search of pasture over immeasurable distances? A decrease of cultivable soil would bring about only a continual decrease in the number of inhabitants.

The peasant as such disappeared, emigrated, or perished, and his home became a desert, and was occupied by another people who knew from experience how to make use of it in its changed state, i.e as winter grazing-ground. This new people must have been already nomadic, and have made their way from the pastures of the North and therefore they must have belonged to the Altaian race.

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