A Kernel of Truth (2)

Image: While in transit…

Courtesy: http://www.journeymongolia.com/index.php/item?id=13

My new chapter takes a sincere look at the nomads, trying to access their contribution to the human culture as well as to understand why the pastoralist lifestyle was so hard to digest for the settled people. This extract poses an antithesis to the previous one where I picked up a choir of opinions of outsiders about the migrants. 

Unit IV is going to be the largest part of my book in terms of the number of chapters. The next extract will focus on the second fusion of the legend where Alexander as the guardian of civilization is opposed the ultimate enemy of Gog-Magog. 

Here is the extract from Chapter 4:

How come that the settled population still puts the pastoralists to shame for adhering to the “barbarian” lifestyle?  

These very people grazed their flocks on natural pasturelands of grassy plains and mountain slopes. Stock-herders turned their yurts into true homes that could be put up in the middle of nowhere and give shelter from the fury of the elements. The steppe nomads invented the wheel and perched their dwellings on carts to carry their possessions in wagon trains along beaten tracks. When in need of a reliable individual transport, these unbridled barbarians tamed the horse and adapted it for riding to engage in herding and hunting, trading and raiding. Their high-profile warriors learned how to use horse-drawn chariots as mobile archery platforms and shoot arrows from sigma-shaped compound bows while atop a steed. The migrants donned trousers and subsisted on curd cheese, the flesh of their livestock, and mare’s milk.

The nomadic diet struck the settled populace as bizarre as the steppe folk shunned consuming bread but had no scruples in devouring uncooked meat. Rabbi Petachia of Ratisbon who traveled from Prague to the Middle East in the latter half of the twelfth-century comments on the pastoral menu: “They eat no bread… but rice and millet, boiled in milk, as well as milk and cheese. They also put the pieces of flesh under the saddle of a horse… and, urging on the animal, cause it to sweat. The flesh getting warm, they eat it.” (1)

The European decision-makers and the literati would grasp the Caucasus as the frontier zone erected between the sown and the steppe. Beyond their lofty crags lay a vast belt of rolling plains hemmed by baking deserts and dense forests, pierced by steep mountains, and sliced by meandering rivers. This realm controlled by harsh continental climate, swept by incursions of piercing winds and blinding dust storms, and hammered with irregular blizzards and torrential rains, was covered by a carpet of lush grass in the warm season and a blanket of deep snow in winter. Its stubborn soil was too hard to produce grain but supplied sufficient pastures for nomadic livestock accustomed to tread down grasslands bereft of human settlements and fields.

Barbaria was a vast area with imprecise borders which sprawled across the Pontic and Caspian steppes. According to rumors, it stretched in width as far as the northern ocean and in length up to the mysterious dungeon from where the sun rises for its daily watch. Michael the Syrian, the twelfth-century patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church and the chronicler, defines the homeland of the Turks with unbounded generosity: "Their habitat extends from sunrise to the extreme north of the inhabited world." (2)

Responding to different names, this tough terrain hosted diverse tribes of mounted nomads who engaged non-stop in internecine feuds or preyed on the sedentary population. Sima Qian, the Chinese literati, denounces northern barbarians making devastating inroads on the Middle Kingdom across its frontier zone. He claims that “warfare is their business”. (3) What would the renowned historian have said about other favorite pastimes of steppe dwellers, like hunting trips and night drinking sessions, gambling and smoking weed?