Posted by Anthony Sattin on May 25th, 2022

In 612BCE, a group of people described as Scythians fought alongside the Babylonians to capture Nineveh and bring down the Assyrian Empire. We don’t know much about the Scythians beyond the fact that they were nomads, not even what they called themselves, but for the next four or five hundred years they helped shape the world.

A hundred years after the fall of Nineveh, Scythians defeated the great Persian army and killed their emperor, Cyrus the Great. A few decades later, another Persian, Darius 1, ruler of the greatest empire the world had seen, chased Scythians north of the Black Sea, across what is now Ukraine and Russia. Tiring from the chase, Darius sent a message asking why the Scythians would not stand and fight. The answer… why fight? ‘We have no cities,’ the Scythian king explained, ‘nothing that we need worry you might capture. We have no crops – nothing that we need worry you might destroy.’ The Persians gave up the chase and left the nomads to rule the steppes.

Jump forward a couple of centuries and the Han Chinese were complaining of similar nomad problems on their borders. The Chinese called these mobile people Xiongnu, which is certainly not what they called themselves because it means ‘illegitimate offspring of slaves.’ The Xiongnu, whose power base was in Mongolia, became so troublesome that the Chinese began building the Great Wall to keep them out and when that failed to stop them, they agreed to send an annual tribute to pacify their nomadic neighbours.

The Scythians and Xiongnu shared much in common, not least their way of living on the move and traditions for dealing with death. As they did not build monuments beyond their impressive burial mounds, and as they left no written records, it is impossible to know for sure, but they seem to have been part of a nomad alliance that controlled a vast swathe of Asia between the Black Sea and the Great Wall. A nomad empire, we might call it, larger than either the Roman or the Chinese.

We are living through a golden age of history writing and bookshops are full of wonderful volumes, but very few make mention nomads, even though nomads have been half the human story for most of the past 12,000 years. Why is that? In part because many historians share Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s view that history is a path picked through ruins. As most nomads have neither built monuments nor kept their own records, the only role they can play in this settled history is as people who destroy, as creators of ruins. The nomads who do appear in our histories, the ones you can name-check – Atilla the Hun, Genghis Khan, Timur – are presented as mass murderers and destroyers of cities. But this in no way reflects the reality that for most of the past 12,000 years, since the time when we all lived on the move, nomads and settled people have lived alongside each other in mutual dependence. What’s more, many of the advances and achievements we think of as coming from the settled world were made possible, or seeded, or originally created by nomadic people, who were early adopters of the principles of freedom of movement and conscience, whose world shone brightly when western Europe was in what has been called the Dark Ages and whose “renascence” preceded and in some ways made possible the European Renaissance.

Part of my inspiration for writing Nomads was to trace an arc of the shifting relations between mobile and settled over the past 12,000 years and to let some light in on the nomadic half of our human story. In this fast-changing world of fallen statues and lost ideals, we need new ways of seeing more than ever. Perhaps these stories of nomads might suggest some possibilities. Or as the poet CP Cavafy put it, perhaps nomads with their different ways of thinking and of living – lightly in the natural world and uncluttered by possessions – might help inspire some kind of solution.