Eurasian Steppe

• 1. Introduction

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  The Eurasian Steppe, known also as the Great Steppe or simply the Steppe, is a belt of grassland about 8000 kilometres long, or roughly 5000 miles. It begins in Manchuria and runs west across Mongolia, Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria, ending in Hungary.

  Since the Paleolithic age, this ribbon of grass has been the chief overland link between Eastern Europe, North Asia, Central Asia and East Asia. Goods, ideas and armies all travelled it. A long roll of peoples made it home, among them the Xiongnu, the Scythians, the Cimmerians, the Sarmatians, the Huns, the Sogdians, the Xianbei, the Mongols, the Magyars and the Göktürks.

  So why did one open plain hold so many rival powers? How did riders keep out of reach of the great armies of settled kingdoms? And what did these wanderers leave in the speech, the beliefs and even the songs of the people who lived beside them? The answers begin with the land itself.

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• 2. Stretches of Grass

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  Some 2,500 miles of unbroken grassland run from the mouth of the Danube in Romania to the Altai Mountains on the China-Russia border. That stretch forms the middle of a three-part division, flanked by the Carpathian Basin and the Mongolian Plateau.

  The far western piece is the Pannonian Steppe, also called the Peri-Carpathian Steppe. The Carpathian Mountains cut it off from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. It covers most of Hungary and reaches into southern Slovakia, western Romania, northern Bulgaria, northern Serbia and eastern Austria.

  The Pontic-Caspian Steppe forms the main European end of the whole system. It starts near the Danube mouth, sweeps northeast almost to Kazan, then turns southeast toward the southern tip of the Ural Mountains. Its northern edge was once a broad band of forest steppe, now wiped out by farming.

  On the Black Sea coast, the Crimean Peninsula has some interior steppe. Ports on its south coast tied the grassland to the civilizations of the Mediterranean basin.

  About 650 km, or 400 miles, northeast of the Caspian Sea, the grass pinches together around the southern end of the Urals. This neck, called the Ural-Caspian Narrowing, joins the European steppe to the Kazakh Steppe of Central Asia.

  The Kazakh Steppe makes up most of the Central Asian grassland and runs from the Urals to Dzungaria. To its south the grass fades into semi-desert and desert. Two great rivers, the Amu Darya, also called the Oxus, and the Syr Darya, called the Jaxartes, cross that dry land and flow northwest into the Aral Sea. Their water irrigates fields.

  Farther south and east lie the crowded Fergana Valley and the oasis cities of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara, strung along the Zeravshan River. The steppe has no sharp southern border in Asia, since the land grows steadily drier until the Kyzylkum and Gobi deserts take over. Northward the climate turns damper and the grass gives way to forest.

  Mountain ranges cross the steppe in many places, yet they did not slow the nomads. The northern Kazakh Steppe itself stayed relatively isolated from the main currents of written history.

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• 3. Gates and Islands

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  Along the former Sino-Soviet border, mountains climb north almost to the Siberian forest and leave only a limited strip of grass in Dzungaria. This narrow gap links the great steppes of Central Asia to those of East Asia.

  The Tian Shan range runs east to west and splits the land into Dzungaria in the north and the Tarim Basin in the south. The Tarbagatai Mountains bound Dzungaria on the west and the Mongolian Altai on the east. Neither range is a serious barrier. Dzungaria has good pasture around its rim and a desert at its centre, and it often acted as a western extension of Mongolia.

  The Tarim Basin is an oval about twice the size of Dzungaria. Its dry climate cannot feed a nomadic population. Yet rivers run down from the surrounding mountains, and along its edge they watered a ring of cities that lived by irrigated farming and east-west trade. The basin was an island of near civilization in the middle of the steppe.

  The Northern Silk Road passed along both the north and south sides of the basin, then crossed the mountains westward to the Fergana Valley. At the basin's western end the Pamir Mountains tie the Tian Shan to the Himalayas. In the south, the Kunlun Mountains divide the basin from the thinly peopled Tibetan Plateau.

  The Mongolian-Manchurian Steppe is the main eastern block, covering large parts of Mongolia and the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. A dry belt marked by the Gobi Desert separates those two. Along the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau runs the Gansu or Hexi Corridor, a moderately populated belt linking China proper to the Tarim Basin. This corridor carried the main line of the Silk Road. In the southeast, the road crossed hills to the Wei River valley, which opened onto the North China Plain.

  East of there, between the Khingan Mountains and the Taihang Mountains, the grass pushes into Manchuria as the Liao Xi steppe. Then it thins into forest and mountains without ever reaching the Pacific. The forest-steppe at its centre held pastoral and farming peoples, while hunting tribes of the Siberian type lived thinly to the north and east.

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• 4. Wolves and Feather Grass

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  Przewalski's horse, the saiga antelope, the Mongolian gazelle, the goitered gazelle, the wild Bactrian camel and the onager were the big grazers of the steppe. Hunting among them were the gray wolf, the corsac fox and Pallas's cat, with the brown bear wandering in on occasion. Smaller residents include the Mongolian gerbil, the little souslik and the bobak marmot.

  Birds are plentiful. The imperial eagle, the lesser kestrel, the great bustard, the pale-back pigeon and the white-throated bushchat all live there, and all are threatened.

  Shrubs and grasses dominate the plant life, with very few trees. The grasses fall into two photosynthetic types, called C3 and C4, and the common genera are Stipa and Festuca. Stipa species include needlegrass, known as Stipa krylovii, along with Stipa korshinskyi and lessing feather grass, Stipa lessingiana. Two kinds of sagebrush or wormwood, Artemisia austriaca and Artemisia nitrosa, grow widely across the steppe.

  In the Black Sea-Kazakhstan steppe, the Tibetan Plateau steppe and the Central Asian steppe, the plant community is shifting. Shrubs are slowly spreading and crowding out the grasses, a change called woody plant encroachment.

  The World Wide Fund for Nature splits the temperate grasslands, savannas and shrublands into well over a dozen ecoregions, each set apart by elevation, climate and rainfall. They include the Baraba steppe in Russia and the Emin Valley steppe, which China and Kazakhstan share.

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• 5. Horse and Raid

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  Sheep and goats were the main livestock of the steppe, with fewer cattle than many would expect. Camels carried loads in the drier country as far west as Astrakhan, and a few yaks grazed along the edge of Tibet. The horse served for travel and for war.

  Horses were first domesticated on the Pontic-Caspian or Kazakh steppe sometime before 3000 BC. Mounted archery took a long time to appear, and the way it developed is not fully understood. The stirrup apparently was not fully developed until about 300 AD.

  Raiding between tribes ran through the whole history of the region. A defeated enemy's flocks and herds are easy to drive off, which made stealing them pay. Against farming societies the horse gave the nomads a decisive edge in speed. Riders could hit a village and vanish with the loot before an infantry army was even gathered.

  When infantry came in strength, the horsemen simply rode away and regrouped. Outside Europe and parts of the Middle East, agrarian states struggled to breed enough war horses, so they often hired cavalry from their nomadic enemies.

  The steppe also defended itself. It could not easily feed an army on foot, so pursuit was hard. If a Chinese army marched into Mongolia, the nomads retreated and returned once the invaders ran short of supplies.

  But the nomads had limits of their own. They were relatively few, and their rulers found it hard to hold enough clans together to raise a large army. When they conquered farmland, they often lacked the skills to govern it. Those who tried to keep it gradually absorbed their subjects' civilization and lost their nomadic skills. In the end they were assimilated or driven out.

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• 6. Rob, Tax or Guard

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  The Silk Road began in the Guanzhong region of China, but the steppe route had been carrying traffic long before it. Europe, the Middle East, India and China, the great centres of population and high culture in Eurasia, were all joined directly or indirectly by the steppe. Later the Silk Road ran west from Guanzhong to the Tarim Basin. From there it went southwest to Greater Iran, then southeast to India or west to the Middle East and Europe. A minor branch ran northwest along the great rivers and north of the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea.

  A rich caravan crossing the grass faced three possible fates at the hands of the nomads. They could rob it, tax it, or hire themselves out as its guards. Economically, the source treats these three as amounting to the same thing.

  Trade flowed best when one strong empire controlled the steppe and thinned out the petty chieftains who preyed on merchants. The Silk Road first became significant, and Chinese silk began to reach the Roman Empire, at about the time the Han emperor pushed Chinese power west to the Tarim Basin.

  Farming was rare on the steppe, but nomads sometimes tolerated colonies of peasants where it was possible. These were often captives who raised grain for their nomadic masters. Along the margins, some land could serve as plowland or pasture, and it swung between the two depending on the relative strength of the nomads and the farming heartlands.

  In recent centuries the Russian steppe and much of Inner Mongolia have been put under the plow. Because most of the Russian steppe is not irrigated, the land may have stayed grass only because nomad military strength kept the farmers out.

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• 7. Tongues and Faiths

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  The Kurgan hypothesis, the most widely held account of where the Indo-European languages began, places their common ancestor on the Pontic-Caspian steppe. The Tocharians were an early Indo-European branch that settled in the Tarim Basin.

  At the start of written history, everyone on the steppe west of Dzungaria spoke Iranian languages. From about 500 AD, Turkic languages replaced them, first on the steppe and later in the oases north of Iran.

  The Hungarian speakers, who belong to the Uralic language family, once lived on the steppe in what is now southern Russia. In the year 895 they settled in the Carpathian basin. Mongolic languages hold Mongolia today, and in Manchuria one finds Tungusic languages and a few others.

  Tengrism was brought to the region by the Turko-Mongol nomads. Nestorianism and Manichaeism travelled to the Tarim Basin and into China, but neither ever became a majority religion there. Buddhism came from the east of India to the Tarim Basin and found a new home in China.

  By about 1400 AD, the entire steppe west of Dzungaria had adopted Islam. By about 1600 AD, Islam had taken hold in the Tarim Basin, while Dzungaria and Mongolia had turned to Tibetan Buddhism.

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• 8. Neighbours and Inheritance

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  From about 1240 to 1480, Russia paid tribute to the Golden Horde. Along the northern edge of the steppe, the nomads also collected tribute from the forest tribes and blended with them, as seen in the Khanate of Sibir and among the Buryats.

  South of the Kazakh Steppe, the Turkic migrations of the 6th to 11th centuries brought Turks into the oasis towns of the Iranian population. The two mixed and created a blend of Persian and Turkic cultural traditions in Central Asia.

  The border between Mongolia and China marked a sharp cultural divide and a nearly constant state of conflict. Nomads occasionally took tribute from the Chinese and even founded dynasties in China. At other times the balance flipped, and Chinese dynasties subjugated the nomads. The Manchu combined farming with herding, which helped them rule both the Mongols and the settled Han Chinese.

  In Russia, steppe culture was shaped by contact with Slavic, Tatar-Turkic, Mongolian and Iranian peoples. Rulers of the Rus' sealed alliances through marriage with fellow steppe peoples. The domra, the kaftan, Cossack culture and even tea drinking all show strong influence from Asian nomads. The steppes run through Slavic and Russian folk songs and hold a major place in Eastern European history.

  The roll of peoples tied to this land starts with the Thracians in the 15th century BC and passes through the Scythians, the Huns, the Khazars, the Mongol Empire and the Cossacks. It ends with the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. One name on that roll carries no end date at all: the Bashkirs, whose presence on the steppe begins in the 10th century and continues to the present day.

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