2

Surviving on the Eurasian Steppes

In 1246, the Franciscan friar Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, envoy of Pope Innocent IV, was amazed by the size and numbers of ox-drawn carts with gigantic solid disc wheels (gers) conveying the mobile homes of the Mongols as he crossed three thousand miles of Eurasian steppes from Saray, on the Volga, to the Great Khan’s capital at Karakorum in the heart of Mongolia.1 The Greek historian Herodotus (490–425 BC) describes similar lumbering trains of carts conveying felt tents of the Scythians, the nomads of his day.2 The wives drove great carts, while the men rode ahead marking the way and finding water and pastures for their herds and flocks. The wagon train conveyed round felt tents and their supporting poles that could be quickly assembled and dismantled.3 Construction varied over the centuries, and from tribe to tribe, but a wagon and felt tent remained the center of a nomadic family, the yurt in Turkish. With such vehicles, nomads could move across the steppes swiftly in search of food, water, and pastures in a daily struggle for survival.

These grasslands extend over six thousand miles and cover over three million square miles, stretching from the lower Danube in the west across Russia and Siberia to the upper Amur River and the Greater Khingan Mountains, which mark the western boundary of Manchuria. The climate and terrain are harsh, and nomads could afford no mistakes. On the open steppes, nomads are compelled to lay in stores and settle into shelters during frigid Arctic winters. Ahmad ibn Fadlan, ambassador of the Abbasid Caliph, set out across the central steppes for the lower Volga valley in the bitter winter of 921/2.4 He later recollected how his survival depended on Turkic families, huddled in their gers, who received his party. Within the winter tent, privacy was impossible as each family member saw to his or her daily bodily needs. Yet his hosts graciously shared the warmth of their fire, and precious food and drink. Ibn Fadlan appreciated both the hospitality and probity of his hosts. His guides negotiated with each host the customary terms to borrow fresh horses vital for a winter crossing. Likewise, the missionary William of Rubruck reports how his guide insisted that the friar and his company don the warm clothing of the steppes—woolen kaftan, trousers, felt cap, and fur-lined coat and boots—before attempting a crossing in January 1246.5 Should the Christians lag behind, the guide sternly warned, they would be on their own, because any attempt to rescue stragglers might endanger the group. Under the scorching summer sun, nomads were forever on the move, seeking water and pastures. Often the only shade from the unrelenting summer sun was found beneath the parked gers during brief breaks to take meals. Only the hardiest of humans and animals can survive these conditions.

At any time in Antiquity or in the Middle Ages, a nomadic yurt or tightly knit extended family wishing to cross the entire steppes would have been awed by the great distances, varied landscapes, and endless horizons as they migrated from west to east. These nomads would have trekked along a great land corridor with inland seas, lakes, and deserts to the south, and the dense coniferous forests of the taiga to the north. At the western end, they would have started their journey on the western edge of the South Russian or Pontic-Caspian steppes that stretch from the Carpathian Mountains and mouth of the Danube River, east to the lower Volga, and southeast to the northern slopes of the Caucasus.6 They could have chosen to go in one of four directions. West, they had to cross the Carpathian Mountains into Central Europe; to the south, they had to cross the Danube’s delta into the Balkans; to the southeast, they faced the even more formidable Caucasus with only two passes: the Dariel or Derbent that led them into the Middle East. In all cases, they would leave the steppes for alien lands. Trekking directly east of the Volga River, they would find the familiar pastures of the Central Eurasian steppes to the Altai Mountains. Today these steppes constitute Kazakhstan, home to descendants of Turkish-speaking nomads and in an area equivalent in size to Europe. To the south, between the Caspian and Aral Seas, they would avoid venturing into the forbidding Karakum (Black Desert). Traveling east from the Volga, they would arrive at Lake Balkhash and its tributary the Ili River that waters rich pastures. From here, they could travel south across the Jaxartes River (Syr Darya) into Transoxiana or, in Arabic, Mawarannahr (today the Republic of Uzbekistan). They would have found this region between the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) and Oxus River (Amu Darya) both familiar and unfamiliar. Between the lower (northern) courses of the two rivers that empty in the Aral Sea stretches the forbidding Kizil Kum (Red Desert). The Aral Sea, once a life-giving inland sea teeming with fish and fowl, has today been drained dry in an ill-conceived and ecologically destructive Soviet project to irrigate cotton fields.7

Where once cattle and sheep grazed on the grasslands of the Jaxartes’s delta, the ancient land of the Khwarazm is now a vast poisoned salt depression. Along the middle and lower courses of the Oxus River and its tributary the Zeravshan, the land offered ample pastures and water for their animals, but it also sustained irrigated fields and the caravan cities of the Silk Road. Invariably, any nomads arriving in this region would need to come to terms with the indigenous population. Once across the Jaxartes, our nomads could turn east into Ferghana (today Tajikistan), with ideal grazing lands, and then cross over the Pamirs into the Tarim Basin (today Xinjiang), an arid plateau and desert between the Tien Shan to the north and Tibetan highlands to the south. If they settled in the Tarim Basin, they would have given up their ancestral ways for a sedentary life. The Tarim River and its tributaries cut fertile valleys through the Taklamakan Desert that sustained agriculture and the caravan cities of the Silk Road. They would have found two narrow corridors, skirting the desert to the north and south, and each with successive oasis cities that led east through the narrow grasslands of Gansu to the Yumen Pass, the fabled Jade Gate, and so the entrance into China. If, instead, our nomads chose to press east rather than south from Lake Balkhash, they would cross another formidable mountain range, the Altai, and so arrive on the Eastern Steppes of Outer Mongolia. To the south was the inhospitable Gobi of Inner Mongolia, and beyond the Huang He (Yellow River), and China. No nomads ever recorded in writing their experiences of traversing the steppes. Yet every nomadic family covered at least a significant stretch of these steppes during their lifetimes. The earliest nomads, speakers of Indo-European languages, would have made such journeys from west to east, but in the Middle Ages, first the Xiongnu and then Turkish tribes traversed these distances from east to west.

If our nomad families did not venture upon a trek in search of a new home, they still frequently traveled over a wide area to graze and water their horses and livestock. The wealth of any yurt was counted in horses, cattle, and sheep.8 Frequently, unrelated families, clans, or tribes shared the same steppes according to customary arrangements. Nomads evolved rules of hospitality so vital for the survival of all. Hosts granted permission to neighbors or newcomers the right of passage over ancestral grasslands. They sealed these deals with feasts, exchanges of gifts, and marriages. All nomads negotiated such small-scale deals in which both hosts and guests profited. The arrangements often endured from generation to generation. It was impossible to draw maps designating specific areas as owned by any particular group, because land was merely a means to sustain horses and livestock rather than a capital asset of any group or private property. Each tribe ranged over a wide swath of the steppes that they had to share with others. In the early Middle Ages, between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, Iranian-speaking nomads who had dwelled on the central and western steppes for centuries forged many such small-scale arrangements with newcomers from farther east who spoke agglutinative, Altaic languages. Hence, many Iranian-speaking tribes might have easily accepted as their overlord Kaghan Bumin of the Gök Turks, because they had long contact with Turkish-speaking tribes over grazing rights.9 Large-scale military operations, however, violently disrupted centuries-old patterns of seasonal herding and put the survival of all at risk. Mongol conquerors ordered vast stretches of the steppes cleared of all humans and livestock so that their warriors, and their strings of mounts, had ample water and pastures, and thus they could traverse great distances quickly. So ordered Genghis Khan when he marched against Khwarazm, or Batu, when he waged his western campaign, or Tamerlane, when he invaded the Golden Horde.10 Empire building on the steppes always came at a high price, bringing famine and death to many, and sending others fleeing.

Therefore, survival on the steppes always depended on movement. Nomads, even when traversing familiar grasslands, surveyed the land and remained alert. They had to possess keen eyesight and hearing and an acute sense of smell if they were to forecast sudden changes in weather, to hunt game, or to espy foes on cattle raids.11 Even today, many nomads size up strangers as friend or foe by their sense of smell. Men and women both had to calculate precisely the yurt’s daily needs of meat and dairy foods. Meats were often dried, salted, or boiled for preservation. The Huns, according to the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, packed dried or salted meat under their saddles so that they could eat while mounted and ride into the night before halting to take a light supper.12 Turks and Mongols fermented mare’s milk into the strong alcoholic beverage called qumis (or kumis in Western Turkish languages). The Mongol khan Batu, according to the missionary William of Rubruck, described the process of fermenting the heady beverage. He also notes that Mongol Khan Batu reportedly kept a herd of three thousand white mares, milked daily, so that he could ply his warriors and foreign envoys with ample quantities of qumis for toasts at the banquets held in his tent.13 Yet the staples of meat and dairy products alone were insufficient to sustain a healthy life. Those nomads bordering on the forests of Siberia supplemented their food supply by fishing, hunting, and gathering berries, acorns, and nettles. Friar Giovanni da Pian del Carpine was astonished, and disgusted, by the variety of rodents and fowl eaten by Mongol tribes in the thirteenth century.14 Temujin, the future Genghis Khan, barely sustained himself and his family on such a meager diet when they lived as exiles in the forests.15 All nomadic peoples had to trade with sedentary peoples for grains, fruits, vegetables, and manufactured goods. Even on the steppes, some inhabitants lived in villages and cultivated the land. Early inhabitants of the river valleys of the Pontic-Caspian steppes cultivated barley, vegetables, and fruits that they bartered with the nomads of the Yamnaya culture. On these same steppes centuries later, the Greek historian Herodotus reports how the high king of the Scythian nomads exacted tribute in grain from those of his subjects engaged in farming. Yet most nomadic peoples acquired much-needed foodstuffs, finely crafted goods, and luxuries in the market towns of literate urban civilizations along the rim of their world. The Scythians of Herodotus’s day frequented Greek colonies of the Tauric Chersonesus (Crimea), where they traded salted meat, dairy goods, woolens, and horses for wine, olive oil, dried fruits and vegetables, and finely crafted goods.16 Along the Great Wall, Turkish or Mongol nomads traded for necessities and luxuries in the markets regulated and protected by the emperor of China. Bilğe, Kaghan of the Gök Turks (717–734), boasted on his monumental inscription in the Orkhon valley how he had courted and protected Chinese merchants who arrived bringing millet, rice, silk, and precious objects to the prosperity of his subjects.17 When they were unable to trade, nomads would then raid. Hence, they were forever condemned in the writings of historians of the urban literate civilizations as rapacious barbarians, ignorant of agriculture and prone to violence. The stereotype has persisted to this day, but often nomads had little choice but to raid if they were to survive.

The chances of survival, and even prosperity, for the peoples of the Eurasian steppes increased significantly when merchants of imperial China and Rome regularly conducted long-distance trade across the Eurasian continent.18 The commerce of the so-called Silk Road altered the lives of so many nomadic peoples from the third century BC on. In the first century AD, the four empires of Rome, Parthia, the Kushans, and Han China imposed a general peace that made such trade in luxuries predictable and profitable.19 The commerce continued long after all four of these empires had collapsed and were replaced by new imperial regimes, the Caliphate and Tang China, just as eager to promote the lucrative trade.

In the first century AD, a caravan sponsored by a consortium of Aramaic-speaking merchants of Palmyra would have traversed a well-known route from this oasis city in the Syrian desert on Rome’s eastern frontier.20 The caravan would have skirted the Arabian desert to reach the middle course of the Euphrates River, then turned southeast, following the river to the twin capitals of the Parthian Empire, Seleucia ad Tigrim and Ctesiphon.21 There the Palmyrene merchants conducted their first major transactions, with the assistance of resident kinsmen who acted as sureties before Parthian market wardens. From Ctesiphon, the caravan crossed the Zagros Mountains, and traveled east across northern Iran from Ecbatana (today Hamadan) to Margiane (Merv), and thence northeast, where it would have crossed the middle Oxus River, and then made for the oasis cities most famous under their Medieval names of Bukhara and Samarkand. At each major city, the Palmyrenes were greeted by fellow countrymen, who were respected residents of the city and so could represent their guests before local authorities. New camels could be purchased; supplies secured; guides and escorts hired. Every stop included haggling in the market, and sampling of the local delights and vices. At Samarkand (called Maracanda in Classical sources), the Palmyrenes had reached their final destination. There they purchased Chinese silks from native Sogdian merchants, who, in turn, bought the luxury goods the Palmyrenes had conveyed from the Roman world or acquired along the way. Sogdian merchants controlled the eastern extension of the Silk Road.22 From Samarkand, their caravans, loaded with the goods of the Mediterranean world and Transoxiana, ascended the Pamirs to reach Kashgar, at the western end of the Tarim Basin. A Sogdian caravan could choose to follow the route along the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert, or the southern route via Khotan. Both routes took the caravan to the celebrated Jade Gate, and beyond into China. As they passed from city to city, the Sogdian merchants on this caravan too operated with the assistance of resident kinsmen. They acquired en route jade, textiles, and slaves for the Chinese markets. Their ultimate goal was either Luoyang or Chang’an, capitals of the Han emperor, where they acquired the silk that sustained the entire trade.23 Already in the first century AD, merchants operated along extensions of this prime route. Caravans from Margiane (Merv) followed the lower Oxus River to Bactra (Balkh), then crossed the Hindu Kush, and so reached Taxila (Takshashila in Sanskrit) in Gandhara.24 From Taxila, the caravan might continue east to the sacred cities of the Ganges valley or press south, making for the port Barbaricum (near Karachi today), where merchants arriving by sea either from Charax on the Persian Gulf or Alexandria exchanged goods from the Roman world for Chinese silks.25 From Bukhara, other caravans trekked down the Oxus River, skirted the southern and western shores of the Aral Sea, and then traversed the central Eurasian steppes to the Greek ports on the northern shores of the Black Sea. The routes persisted, and expanded, as new peoples succeeded to the commerce. Arab merchants of the Caliphate replaced the Aramaeans of the Roman age, and they vastly expanded the scale of the trade in Turkish slaves.26 Baghdad and Damascus replaced, respectively, Ctesiphon and Palmyra as the international markets for silks, spices, and slaves. Sogdian merchants, however, maintained their monopoly over the eastern routes, despite the rise and fall of successive Chinese dynasties and Turkic kaghanates. Only in the eleventh century did Sogdian give way to Turkish as the language of commerce.

For the nomadic peoples, caravans of the Silk Road provided opportunities for enrichment, and survival. Nomads sold to caravans camels and horses in great numbers. The camel, either the Arabian dromedary or two-humped Bactrian one, was the preferred beast of burden over the mule. In the tenth century AD, the Oghuz Turks bred for the caravan trade a superior hybrid camel with greater endurance in the colder climate of the steppes that quickly replaced the Bactrian one.27 A camel can convey a load 50 percent heavier than a mule. Camels conserve water, live four times longer than mules, and are far more resilient, capable of attaining twenty-five miles per day. Horses, especially the prized steeds of Ferghana, were also needed in great numbers for armed escorts and scouts. Local leaders of nomadic tribes negotiated lucrative deals with the merchant princes of caravans, providing supplies, fodder, rights of passage over grasslands, and use of water sources. They also hired out their warriors as guards and guides. Merchants stocked up on many ordinary wares, dubbed tag items by economic historians, which they could barter, sell, or hand out to nomads along the route. Every Turkic or Mongol kaghan appreciated caravans for providing life-giving goods and foodstuffs for his people, and the fancy prestige items that he could bestow on his faithful warriors. Starting with Modu Chanyu, the indomitable ruler of the Xiongnu in the second century BC, every conqueror who forged a tribal confederacy on the Eurasian steppes aimed to control at least part of the Silk Road. They learned from the merchants the power of writing for record keeping, and so nomadic rulers, starting with Modu Chanyu (209–174 BC), employed literate scribes who could adapt existing scripts or devise new ones to keep records in the speech of the nomadic peoples.28

Given a lifetime of movement and trade, nomads had to adapt and learn different languages if they were to communicate effectively with fellow nomads, caravan merchants, or vendors in the urban markets of sedentary civilizations. Migration across the steppes inevitably resulted in linguistic change. But linguistic change was far more complex than the displacement of one race by another—the model followed by so many nationalistic historians or ideologues since the late nineteenth century. Invariably nomadic peoples on the move intermixed and assimilated with others en route to their new homes or in seasonal herding of their livestock. Hence, any identity of a people on the steppes was more a matter of common language, culture, and shared historical experiences rather than racial descent. Anthropologists have theorized how speakers of one language, who might have constituted a minority, could assimilate a larger body of speakers of another language. Steppe nomadic peoples on the move in search of water and pastures adopted what is called a “distributed” strategy for survival.29 They were inclined to modify, simplify, and adapt their own language as well as learn other languages as part of a strategy of survival. Hence, every steppe language was replete with loan words and phrases, expressing unfamiliar objects and concepts learned from other peoples. Often, tribes or smaller communities on the Eurasian steppes were inclined to adopt new languages to facilitate trade or to gain status. In the sixth and seventh centuries, many speakers of eastern Iranian dialects adopted Turkish to improve their standing in the eyes of their overlord, the kaghan of the Gök Turks. Yet nomads often resisted renouncing their ancestral tongue for that of the settled, prosperous populations with whom they regularly traded. As a matter of practicality, nomads learned a dominant language such as Chinese, Tocharian, Sogdian, or Arabic. They often employed as translators bilingual captives, political exiles, or craftsmen resident among them. Yet nomads, when they were not trading and raiding, spent most of the year among themselves, herding their animals, searching for pastures and water, or settling vendettas with ancestral foes. These small groups spoke their language among themselves, and perfected vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Without writing, they prized recitation and memory. The two earliest written documents of the Turkish and Mongol languages, the Orkhon inscriptions of the eighth century and The Secret History of the Mongols of the thirteenth century, reveal that each language has changed little over the centuries, and each is still intelligible to modern speakers. During the long nights of winter months, bards entertained their hosts huddled in their winter tents by reciting formulaic lists of ancestors back many generations. Among Turks and Mongols, descent from the superior clans of white bones took precedence over those of the black bones.30 In reciting such genealogies, poets inserted and expanded on the great deeds of ancestors. Among the Turks and Mongols, fabulous progenitors included the wolf and doe, sacred animals of Tengri, the lord of the eternal blue sky.31 Genghis Khan could recite in verse his ancestors back five generations. Yelü Dashi, the founder of the Karakhitan Confederation, could count back nine generations.32 By means of oral poetry, nomads not only preserved the memory of ancestors but also perfected the language, so vital to their identity. Therefore, for all their contact with envoys, merchants, and holy ones from the urban civilizations, nomads retained their language and so their identity. For every language is more than a means of communication; it is also an interpretation of the world, as anyone who is in a bilingual marriage quickly learns.

In their daily struggle for survival, all steppe nomads also shared similar outlooks on the divine forces of nature that governed their lives. For all their differences in ritual and myths, Indo-European, Turkic, and Mongol nomads agreed on religious fundamentals born in response to their environment. They believed in the efficacy of sacrificing domesticated animals, especially horses and cattle, in beseeching the gods.33 As early as 5000 BC, inhabitants of the Pontic-Caspian steppes already practiced animal sacrifice.34 Among speakers of both language families, Indo-European and Altaic, sacred and legal languages were derived from the same root words, because prayer, whether individual or communal, took the legal form expressed in Latin, do ut des, i.e., “I, the worshipper, give in order that you, the divinity, may give in return.” Above, they looked to the endless blue sky that dominated their lives as the supreme lord of the universe, invoked by the PIE speakers as Dyēws, and Tengri by the later Turks and Mongols.

Due to the accidents of survival, scholars can reconstruct in broad outline several of the principal deities of the earliest Indo-European nomads based on cognates of the names of certain gods among the daughter languages. They also have compared common elements of myths shared by Indo-European speakers in historic times (notably Vedic, Hittite, Greek, Roman, and Norse myths). In contrast, far less can be surmised about divinities and myths of Turkic-and Mongol-speaking nomads because they modified their ancestral beliefs soon after they came into contact with missionaries and merchants of the Buddhist, Manichaean, or Muslim faiths.

The first nomads on the Pontic-Caspian steppes held in awe the two principal features of their physical world: the eternal blue sky above, and the grasslands rolling endlessly to the distant horizon. Hence, an all-powerful, all-seeing lord of the heavens ruled above, and his consort was the fertile earth. The PIE root words for the two divinities have been reconstructed as Dyēws pH2tér, “Sky Father,” and Dhég´hōm, “the broad one.”35 In historic times, this sky god was represented by Zeus among the Greeks, Jupiter among the Romans, and Tiwaz or Tyr in the Germanic and Norse pantheons. The divine name did not survive in the earliest religious texts of Indo-Iranians. Zoroaster, prophet and reformer in the seventh or sixth century BC, instituted a monotheistic creed, demoting many of the ancestral gods to demons.36 In India, thunder-wielding Indra reigned instead as king of the gods in the Rig-Vedas. The Hindu poets repeatedly invoked Indra and fire-breathing Agni, while they only mentioned in several hymns Father Sky, Dyáus Pitā, who had been demoted to a distant ancestor.37 Dyēws impregnated Mother Earth, likely called Dhég´hōm, with life-giving rains. From them sprang younger gods. Among them were divine twin brothers, later remembered as the equestrian Dioscuri (Castor and Polydeuctus) among the Greeks, and chariot-driving Asvins in Vedic hymns.38 The Dawn, PIE Hausōs, was either an ageless maiden or one of an endless succession of maidens who were born and died with each rising and setting of the sun. The sun was also conceived as a maiden, whereas the moon was a divine youth. The stars were merely ornaments in the firmament that brightened the night rather than divinities. Nomads much later invested spiritual powers in the stars after they encountered the astrologers of China or the Near East. Tamerlane, last of the conquerors from the Eurasian steppes, was reared as a devout Muslim, so he consulted astrologers rather than shamans. Tamerlane, however, never let the forecasts of his astrologers dictate his military operations. After his spectacular victory at Delhi in 1397, Tamerlane excoriated his astrologers who warned him against joining battle. The astrologers got the message. Their lord wanted confirmation, not predictions, and so they foretold a glorious victory before the Battle of Angora six years later.39

The Yamnaya people were ever pragmatic in appeasing the fickle gods who governed their harsh environment, so they readily accepted new divinities who demonstrated their power by answering supplications. Hence, the membership in the Indo-European pantheon steadily increased over time, and new gods learned from neighbors were duly enrolled. The personalities and rites to the gods too changed as material life changed. The divine brothers in later myths were mounted on powerful steeds, or rode chariots across the sky. These attributes dated after the domestication of the horse and the invention of the light chariot. Goddesses of fate, best remembered as the Greek Moirai or Norse Norns, spun the fates of mortals as weaving became a vital female task within the yurt. Hence, mortals constantly innovated on the attributes and powers of divinities as their own physical world changed. To be sure, poets versed in the stories of the gods and priests knowledgeable in sacrificial rituals inspired or led a conservative communal worship, but they lacked canon, creed, and even sanctuaries staffed by hereditary priests who could impose a conformity of worship. Yet the believers did agree on general points about the cosmos. Sky and earth formed a single flat reality, encircled by a great ocean. Humans sprang from primordial ancestors, invariably hermaphrodites, in a distant past. Distant lands in the far west were deemed abodes for the blessed few, while the dead crossed dark waters to enter a dismal netherworld guarded by a gigantic multiheaded hound, Cerberus in the Hellenic tradition or Sharvara, the spotted hound of the god Yama, in the Vedic.

For centuries, bards recited in alliterative verse myths about their gods and the mortal heroes who enjoyed divine favor. Virtually all of these myths were forgotten long ago as Indo-Europeans departed from their original home on the Pontic-Caspian steppes.40 One myth did persist, a primeval combat between the lord of the eternal blue sky and an enormous serpent, sprouting many ferocious heads and spewing venom.41 The poet Hesiod first records how Zeus slew the serpent monster Typhon, who led the Titans in an assault on Olympus when the giants piled Mount Pelion atop Mount Ossa so that they could scale the heavens.42 In the many later retellings of the myth about how to slay a dragon, the lord of winds and rains usurped the role of father sky. In the Rig-Vedas, Indra, mounted in his chariot, wields his lightning weapon varja against Vritra, an evil serpent who has brought drought to the earth by penting up the waters.43 Once Vritra is slain, the waters are released, and fertility returns to the world. In the Hittite epic, the storm god, under his Hurrian name Teshub, slays a similar many-headed serpent, Illuyanka.44 A relief from the palace of Mild (modern Malatya, Turkey) dating from the eleventh century BC depicts Teshub and his son Sharruma attacking Illuyanka. Displayed in Ankara’s Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, the relief is our earliest depiction of the cosmic combat between god and serpent. In the “Völuspá,” the first poem of the Poetic Edda, a prophetess or völva recites the origins and end of the world in the earliest Norse alliterative verse. At Ragnarök, in his final combat, fiery-haired Thor, lord of thunder, hurls his magical hammer, Mjölnir, to slay his arch enemy, the Midgard Serpent, who has arisen from the ocean. But Thor staggers backward to his death, suffocated by the venom spewed over him by the mortally wounded serpent.45 This myth of a cosmic battle between sky god and serpent endured because it symbolized the violent struggle at the dawn of creation.

Poets, operating in a world without writing, had many aids to recite myths of the gods and legends of heroes in alliterative verse. Drawing on phrases and epithets, well-documented in Homeric and Germanic epic verse, a poet, accompanying himself on a lyre, could improvise line after line of verse. Each recitation was thus an independent performance to thrill the listeners who knew well the stories.46 Hymns to the gods, however, permitted far less creativity. They were memorized and transmitted in archaic language, because they were sung at ritual sacrifices. Today Brahmans still recite faithfully Vedic hymns in an archaic Sanskrit unintelligible to most Indians. The hymns were perhaps first recorded on palm leaf paper in the seventh or sixth century BC when scribes adapted the Aramaic alphabet to Sanskrit. The Brahmans, who monopolized the rites and prayers to the gods in historic India, were the spiritual heirs to the poetic prophets who had sung the earliest hymns to the Indo-European gods. The hymns meticulously record the butchering of sacrificial victims and the distributing of the meat, and the positioning of the altar according to the points of the compass. Indra, lord of rains and thunder, and the fire god Agni received most of the veneration in the hymns, whereas Vishnu and Shiva, the lords of later Hinduism, are not mentioned. The hymns are set in a timeless past, composed after the Indo-Aryans had entered the Punjab, the “land of the seven rivers” in the Vedic verse.47 When the Brahmans composed the hymns, the Indo-Aryans had not yet settled in the Doab and valley of the Ganga, the later sacred land of Aryavarta. Nor do the poets of the Rig-Vedas betray any memory of the ancestral homeland on the Eurasian steppes, or even the trek of the Indo-Aryans across the Hindu Kush. Even so, the hymns of the Rig-Vedas, in purpose and form, descended from the first hymns offered in sacrifice to the ancestral gods common to all Indo-Europeans twenty-five centuries earlier. Likewise, the thirty-three Homeric hymns shared a similar descent. These hymns were written down, or perhaps dictated, in the seventh and sixth centuries BC.48 The anonymous poets composed these hymns about the myths and rituals of the Olympians in the archaic language of the Homeric epics rather than any of the vernacular dialects of Greece. The sacred language of Greek and Sanskrit hymns sprang from a conservative, even fearful, spiritual outlook of the Yamnaya nomads. Prayers offered to the gods, along with proper sacrifices, must never be altered lest the gods take offense of errors or changes in wording, and so visit retribution upon the community.

The Xiongnu, who welded the first confederation of Altaic-speaking nomads on the eastern Eurasian steppes, and later, Turks and Mongols, also venerated the lord of the eternal blue sky, Tengri. As early as the fourth century BC, the god’s name was rendered in Chinese ideograms as Chengli, the supreme god of the barbarian Xiongnu.49 In the Orkhon inscription in the eighth century AD, Bilğe Kaghan of the Gök Turks stresses how he ruled by favor of Tengri, and so Bilğe Kaghan claims a Mandate of Heaven in a fashion akin to that of the Tang emperors of China. In the same inscription, he also praises his judicious mother, who is like the earth goddess Umay.50 Turks and Mongols, just like earlier Indo-European nomads, revered the divine powers of earth and sky. They too often offered prayer individually to the gods, for no priestly caste ever emerged among Turkish and Mongol nomads. In the Secret History of the Mongols, Genghis Khan often gazes to the sacred Mount Burkhan Khaldun when he utters his prayers to Tengri or invokes the protective spirit of the mountain.51 In return, he received dreams and portents from Tengri as warnings or assurances of victory.

Turks and Mongols revered shamans who could read from the charred shoulder bones of sheep the will of Tengri. In drug-induced trances and astride a sacred horse, shamans ascended a world tree to the highest, fifth, level of the heavens, where they would supplicate spirits to intercede on their behalf before the supreme celestial lord of the universe.52 They inherited from their ancestors, who had once dwelled in the Siberian taiga, visions of a world tree and a reverence for the forest animals, wolves and bears, as guardians and progenitors. Kipchak Turkish villagers of Central Anatolia, whose families had been expelled from their homeland on the South Russian Steppes by the Tsarist regime in the nineteenth century, recount in their folklore what is likely an ancestral myth.53 Tengri, in the guise of a white goose, flies over a boundless ocean. Beneath the waters, the white mother goddess, Ak Ana, implores him to create and fill the lonely universe with life. But in his act of creation, Tengri engenders Er Kishi, who turns to evil and misleads mortals into darkness. Hence, Tengri sends down to earth sacred animals as moral guides. The myth, which shares a dualist outlook with Manichaean and Zoroastrian concepts of the eternal clash between good and evil, could easily be interpreted as a moral allegory of the tenets of monotheistic creeds.

Propitiating the gods dwelling in the skies above was just as much an act of survival as piety, because nomadic peoples would consider a new divinity if their shamans or holy ones could demonstrate their power. Between the second century BC and the seventh century AD, missionaries carried new faiths to the caravan cities along the Silk Road, and to the steppe nomads dwelling along and beyond the frontiers of imperial China and Iran. Iranian-and Turkic-speaking nomads proved receptive to teachings of Buddhism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, and Judaism, but they adapted rather than embraced the new faiths outright. When nomads visited the urban markets, they could only conclude that wealthy merchant princes enjoyed the favor of powerful divine protectors. Furthermore, merchant families poured their wealth into religious monuments as thank-offerings for prosperity. Many nomads embraced new faiths to secure the same divine favor, and they gained an additional advantage when they negotiated with merchants who were coreligionists.

The monks of Mahayana Buddhism scored spectacular success in converting Iranian-and Tocharian-speaking nomads, because they stressed the message rather than the sacred language of scriptures.54 Monks translated Buddhist texts from Sanskrit or Prakrit into the widely spoken vernaculars Saka, Sogdian, Tocharian, and Chinese. Hence, monks could preach to nomadic peoples in their own language. Enlightenment did not depend on the Vedic hierarchy of caste, but rather on each individual following his or her own dharma. Pious acts netted karma, and so the hope of a superior reincarnation on the road to nirvana and the end of the cycle of births. Nomads easily reconciled the myths about their ancestral gods as previous incarnations of the Buddha. Buddhist merchants proved even more convincing missionaries. They were prosperous, literate, and conversant in several languages. They built palatial residences in caravan cities frequented by nomads. Many such lavishly decorated and furnished homes have been excavated at the Sogdian settlement at Panjikent (today in Tajikistan).55 Panjikent, on the banks of the Zeravshan River, was the base for any caravan ascending or descending the routes across Pamirs to the Tarim Basin. Likewise, the frescoes of the Mogao Caves celebrating the life of the Buddha must have awed nomadic pilgrims, who would have visited after concluding their business at the Chinese outpost of Dunhuang. Furthermore, Buddhist merchants and monks traveled under the protection of great rulers, notably the Mauryan, Indo-Greek or Kushan emperors, all of whom were venerated as Dharmikasa or a follower of dharma.56

Few nomads dwelling on the Eurasian steppes embraced Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic creed reformed by the prophet Kartir, who doubled as spiritual adviser to the first two Sassanid Shahs.57 The dualist doctrine of a cosmic struggle between Ahura-Mazda, the lord of light, and his evil adversary, Ahirman, should have appealed to many nomads. But the faith, while universal in appeal, was culturally and linguistically Iranian, and so closely linked with the Sassanid court.58 Instead, another monotheistic faith, Manichaeism, which had arisen in the western borderlands of the Sassanid Empire, won many converts among Turkish nomads. Its prophet, Mani (215–273), too preached a dualism, but his doctrines transcended political and cultural barriers.59 His scheme of cosmic redemption might well have been influenced by Buddhism. The Manichees, just like Buddhists, comprised a community of the enlightened, the “Elect,” and the ordinary believers, “Hearers.” The Elect perceived the falsehood of the material world, and sought reunion with the celestial particles of light, whereas the Hearers dutifully performed their allotted tasks in this lifetime with the hopes of attaining enlightenment in the next. Manichaean missionaries adapted myths of many peoples, preached in vernacular tongues, and used picture books and visual props to awe converts. In 762, Bögü Khan, who ruled over the third of the Turkish kaghanates on the Mongolian steppes, embraced Manichaeism.60 His people, the Uyghurs, followed suit. Many Turkish-and Mongolian-speaking tribes of the eastern steppes still practiced Manichaeism in the time of Genghis Khan.

Nestorian Christians, condemned as heretics at the Third Ecumenical Council in 431, departed the Roman world for the caravan cities of Transoxiana and the Tarim Basin.61 Nestorian missionaries originally preached in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, which was widely spoken along the western half of the Silk Road, but they soon translated their scriptures into Sogdian, Turkish, and Chinese. They even devised a script for Turkish. Nestorian Christians assumed the mores and dress of Central Asia, including the practice of multiple wives. Christian holy men had a reputation for healing and performing miracles. In the sixth century AD, Turkish mothers tattooed crosses on the foreheads of their children as a protection against plague.62 Nestorian priests, who accompanied the exiled Sassanid Shah Kavad, who sought refuge among the Hephthalites in 496–498, converted a Turkish kaghan and his tribe when the priests ended a drought by summoning rains upon making the sign of the cross.63 In the late eighth century AD, the court and nobility of the Khazar kaghanate converted to Judaism.64 They too were impressed by wealthy and sophisticated Jewish merchants who had settled in the Khazars’ settlement Atil at the mouth of the Volga River. Furthermore, the Khazar kaghans preferred a monotheistic creed that was favored by neither of his two principal rivals, the Orthodox emperor Constantinople and the caliph of Baghdad. Ultimately, the future on the western and central steppes rested with Islam. In the tenth century, numerous Turkish nomads converted to Islam, which they viewed as a religion of both victory and prosperity. The caliphs of Baghdad reigned over a mighty empire that defeated the armies of Tang China.65 Under the caliphs’ protection, Muslim merchants and mystics long traded and preached among the Turkish tribes. To this day, the national identities of the Turkish peoples are defined by Islam. Yet even the Turkish nomads of the tenth and eleventh centuries, when they converted to Islam, did so on their own terms. Theirs was a folk Islam adapted to their ancestral ways and beliefs. Shamans and Sufi mystics were both revered as mentors or hocalar. The Turks, like all other nomadic peoples, were ever pragmatic about their religion. They embraced the new without discarding the old, and so assured divine favor from both that was so vital for surviving on the Eurasian steppes.

Finally, the Eurasian steppes bred the hardiest of hunters and warriors, who engaged in incessant blood feuds, cattle rustling, and abducting of wives as marks of bravery and honor.66 The horse was central to the lives of the nomads. The world’s vast majority of horses in 5000 BC roamed across the Pontic-Caspian steppes. The species had long disappeared in its original homeland in the New World, and few horses survived across most of Eurasia.67 The earliest Sumerian and Akkadian texts speak of horses as rare, wild ongars of Kur, impossible to tame or domesticate.68 The first nomads on the Pontic-Caspian steppes domesticated the horse as a source of winter meat and hides perhaps as early as 4500 BC, but later nomads only ate horseflesh as a last resort. Several centuries later, ancestors of the Yamnaya people were experimenting with riding horses bareback and guided by copper or bronze bits and bridles. A rider could herd far many more cattle or sheep than a pedestrian drover. Riders could scout the paths of the yurt on the move, and ran down prey on the grasslands. Horses never pulled the heavy mobile homes (gers) of nomads or, until the tenth century in Europe, the heavy plows of peasants. Over the course of centuries, nomads bred horses for endurance and a more docile nature. It was only by 2020 BC that the warrior nomads of the Sintashta culture on the lower Volga produced the modern horse, capable of pulling a light chariot with spoked wheels or carrying a rider atop a saddle and guiding his mount with bit and bridle. Recent DNA analysis indicates the new breed of horse displaced other species across the expanse of the Corded Ware culture.69 The Indo-Iranians soon after introduced the horse to the central and eastern steppes, Transoxiana, India, and the Near East. Nomads revered the animal, offering it in sacrifice to the gods and the honored dead. Herodotus first records such a sacrifice to the deceased high king of the Scythians. His kurgan, a burial chamber covered by an earthen mound, was flanked by horses, slaughtered, stuffed, and raised on poles.70 Riders too were sacrificed, stuffed, and attached by stakes to the beasts. The Mongols similarly honored their revered dead. This ancient steppe ritual of the horse sacrifices survived in many locales in historic times. Each year, the Rhodians in Classical times sacrificed to Helios a chariot drawn by four white horses and driven off the island’s cliffs into the Aegean Sea.71 In the fourth and fifth centuries AD, Gupta emperors of India revived the Vedic version of the ritual (ashvamedha) to announce their rule over Aryavarta, the sacred heartland of India.72 The designated horse was permitted to wander for a year, thereby staking out the emperor’s realm, before it was offered in sacrifice.

Foremost, steppe nomads turned the horse into a vehicle of war, and so initiated two military revolutions. By ca. 2000 BC, Indo-Iranian speakers had bred superior warhorses that, when harnessed in teams of four, were capable of pulling a light chariot with spoked wheels. Chariots offered platforms from which warriors armed with either javelins or composite bows could rain deadly fire upon enemy infantry.73 During the next four centuries, this military innovation had spread across Eurasia from Britain to China. The pharaohs of the Egyptian New Kingdom, the Great Kings of Hatti, and even the Mycenaean lords of Greece fielded armies of chariots in the Middle and Late Bronze Age. Chinese imperial armies depended on chariots rather than cavalry far longer because they lacked access to the sturdy horses of the Eurasian steppes. Then, at the dawn of the Iron Age, in ca. 1000 to 900 BC, the Scythians on the central Eurasian steppes abandoned chariots in favor of mounted horsemen armed with composite bows.74 Successive improvements gave nomadic horsemen superior saddles and, by the sixth century AD, metal stirrups. Henceforth, nomadic horse archers excelled in the tactics of skirmishing and ambush, and in strategic movement and speed. Riding, archery, and fighting were the skills of every freeman of a tribe. In the Orkhon valley, Bilğe Kaghan of the Eastern Turks spent a month in the year 732 carving into a monolith Turkish runes celebrating his deeds. He reports how he won honor and enriched his tribe with spoils taken in thirty-eight campaigns. He also reports the names and colors of his warhorses, and praises those that fell in battle.75 Kings, princes, and nobles across Eurasia learned to prize the warhorse from their nomadic foes. The Tang emperor Taizong, who preferred to be a warrior rather than a Confucian emperor, immortalized his six warhorses slain in battle with a monumental relief sculpture, accurate to the last detail, including the wounds each sustained in battle.76

Nomadic warriors, to the horror of their civilized neighbors, waged war violently. They were reared in the brutal conditions of the Eurasian steppes, and in tribal warfare, there were no prisoners. Ritual torturing of prisoners and head taking were lessons to the victors not to be defeated. Women often rode into battle with their men. Kurgans, burial monuments in Ukraine, include many Scythian warrior princesses, and Herodotus located the Amazons in the land of the Scythians.77 Khutulun, a Mongol warrior princess, could outride and outshoot men, and also offered wise counsel to her father, Khan Kaidu, an implacable enemy of Kublai Khan.78 Victory alone counted, and defeat meant death for all because victors could ill afford to feed large numbers of captives. Therefore, whenever nomadic armies burst into the civilized lands, they massacred on a colossal scale any populations that dared to resist. In part, they hoped to terrorize other foes into surrender, but they also were practicing the harsh rules of warfare on the steppes. Yet these warriors, when organized and inspired by a commander of genius, could win empires and decide the fate of civilizations.