Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin John Murray, 368 pages, £25
BRIDGEMAN
“There’s real life for you…The open road, the dusty highway…” Mr Toad’s encomium to a nomadic life finds a more seriousminded echo in Anthony Sattin’s new book, which reveals that there has been more to the history of civilisation than cities and the settled life. In it, he shows vividly how nomads connected with nature in ways that city-dwellers can never achieve. Nomadism, he demonstrates, takes many forms: vast armies on the move in the days of the Mongol empire; transhumant shepherds in remote corners of modern Iran; and refugees from war and persecution – even if their ultimate aim is to find a permanent home somewhere.
Sattin’s book reflects a recent surge of interest in the history of Eurasia, focusing on the great steppe lands stretching east from Hungary and Ukraine. Fascination with their ancient Scythian inhabitants goes back as far as Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC for an increasingly urbanised Greek audience. Skilled archers who lived on the trot, the Scythians forged a great realm north of the Black Sea and the Caspian. They were capable of humiliating the formidable Persian army, yet had no capital city. They were illiterate, but created wonderful golden jewellery on which a deer motif symbolised life in the open. Sattin also brings together the history of Attila’s Huns and the Xiongnu from whom perhaps the former sprang – one nomadic army aiming at the Roman empire, the other at the Chinese.
Of course, anyone discussing the vast open spaces of Eurasia is bound to concen- trate on the Mongols, who are much better documented and possess an even worse reputation for mass slaughter. Sattin acknowledges the Mongols’ wanton cruelty to those who refused to submit, such as the inhabitants of Baghdad in 1258. But he also emphasises that they were far more tolerant of religious diversity than their contemporaries in Europe, and brought peace to vast tracts of Eurasia across which merchant caravans could travel without fear. This enabled the creation of a network of routes along which silk, among other commodities, was carried west from China. Sattin here falls victim to the romantic idea of the Silk Road he is elsewhere careful to dispel. Beijing did not teem with Italian merchants, though they could find silk (albeit not the best) in their trading colonies in Crimea. Chinese porcelain mainly travelled by sea across the Indian Ocean, not overland. Nor is it clear that Europeans learned how to use compasses from the Chinese.