Anatomy of Restlessness (11 page)

The nomads selected their animals to make the best use of all types of pasture. Horses and cattle cannot graze where sheep and goats have already cropped; herdsmen must move to keep their animals from starving. Heavy oxcarts are known from the steppe from the third millennium BC, the progenitors of the Scythian wagons, ‘the smallest with four wheels, the largest with six, all covered over with felt'.
⁷
But equitation, adopted some thousand years later, so increased the nomads' range that they could abandon their unprofitable agriculture completely. All known species of horse can hybridise with one another; there are two distinct species involved in domestication: the one the steppe ponies of Tarpan and Przevalski's type, the other the ‘coldblooded' European forest horse. When riding horses first appear in graves near the Danube they resemble Przevalski's horse, a species confined in the wild to Mongolia. Central Asia bred the finest horses, the ‘Celestial Horses' of Ferghana that fed on fields of blue alfalfa, or the ‘hoar-frost' coloured chargers of the Alans. The Emperor Hadrian had an Alanic horse that ‘flew' and he named it Caesar. The steppe came to resemble a vast exercise ground with squadrons of cavalry moving up and down it.

The nomad had a tactical advantage over the farmer. He could descend and pasture his horses on the irrigated fields. After the Great Wall of China was built, the Hsiung-nu ‘no longer ventured to come south to pasture their horses'. But if the defences were unmanned, they demanded tribute or threatened: ‘When autumn comes we will take our horses and trample your crops.'
⁸
The same problem faced the Romans on the Rhine and Danube limes. Nomad and citizen belonged to exclusive systems and both knew it.

But a pastoralist is a poor man. He could not always resist the temptations of trade or plunder that brought the luxuries of civilisation. The steppe is brilliant with spring flowers in May. At other seasons the featureless landscape is dry and dusty or leaden with frost and snow. The nomad craves colour. He is also traditionally drawn to the reassuring brilliance of gold. ‘The Huns burned with an insatiable lust for gold,' wrote Ammianus Marcellinus.
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He spoke of their ‘hideous clothes', and Apollinaris Sidonius was overcome by the garish outfits of the young Frankish prince Sigismer, ‘a flame red mantle with much glint of ruddy gold ... feet laced in bristly hide ... and green cloaks with crimson borders'.
¹⁰

Luxury hampers mobility. The nomad leaders knew that overindulgence threatened their system. Civilised ways were insidious. Attila drank from a wooden cup and Chingis Khan lived in a yurt to the end of his days. Like so many colonists, the Greeks brought drink to the lands they colonised. Herodotus tells the sad tale of the Scythian king, Scyles. Discovering the delights of Bacchus, he was ‘maddened' by the god. The Scythians, however, were intolerant of such innovations and demanded conformity. They beheaded their king. They also shot Anacharsis, a Scythian divine healer or shaman, who wandered through Greece ‘carrying a small drum and hanging himself about with images'.
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At Cyzicus he worshipped the Great Goddess, and the Greeks admired him for his spirituality. ‘And now,' says Herodotus, ‘the Scythians say they have no knowledge about him; this is because he left his country and followed the customs of strangers.'

There were, however, obvious attractions for the city dweller in a society where ‘all are born noble' and where there was less slavery (for it was too troublesome). In times of despair the ‘Nomadic Alternative' was too tempting to resist. A Han counsellor, Yin Shan, was appalled at the prospect of a proposed abandonment of the Great Wall. ‘The frontier posts of China are as much needed to keep the Chinese traitors out of the Tartar's land as keeping the Tartars out of China.'
¹²
The eunuch Chunghsing-sho, a defector to the Hsiung-nu, decried the complications of city life, its useless silks, elaborate food, ornate houses and tiresome social obligations; he contrasted them with the simplicity of felt and leather clothing, comradeship, cheese and plain meat. Similarly a Greek, once married to a rich woman, ran away to the Huns. With tears in his eyes he admitted that the Roman constitution was the best in the world but claimed that the complacency of its rulers, the tyranny of its generals, the inequity of its legal expenses and the unpredictable burdens of its taxation had ruined it. Nomads rarely, if ever, destroyed a civilisation. They merely took advantage of a disintegrating situation. In this they were encouraged by defectors or uncommitted nomads, who were the disruptive factor in steppe politics.

The military tactics of the steppe horsemen and those of civilised states were incompatible. Once the steppe ponies passed into agricultural lands their short legs bogged down. Conversely it was only in times of national prosperity and outstanding leadership that any great power could countenance the hideous expense of mounted expedition against the ‘natural cavalry' of the steppe. ‘No profit comes to an army that has to fight a thousand miles from home,' the Imperial Secretary lamented.
¹³
What was worse, the nomads ran away. The Celts taunted their foes and rushed into battle. The Scythians or the Huns did nothing so inept. ‘They do not consider it a disgrace to run away. Their only concern is self-advantage, and they know nothing of propriety or righteousness,'
¹⁴
the assumption, so recurrent in our time, that the enemy is obliged to show its face.

Part of Herodotus' Book iv reads like a manual for guerilla warfare. ‘They [the Scythians] have devised that none who attack them can escape, and none catch them if they desire not to be found. For when men have no stabilised cities or fortresses, but are all house-bearers and mounted archers, living not by tilling the soil but by raising cattle and carrying their dwellings on wagons, how should they not be invincible and unapproachable.'
¹⁵
Darius invaded Scythia in 516 BC with a conventional army. He chased around Russia, probably as far north as Kazan on the Volga, the Scythians always retreating before him. In exasperation he sent a message to their king. ‘Why do you always run away? Why don't you stand and fight or else submit?' The reply, ‘I have never fled for fear of any man, nor do I now flee from you. If you really want a fight, find the graves of our fathers, and then you'll see whether we'll fight. As for your boast that you are my master, go and cry.'
¹⁶
The retreat of Darius resembled the retreat of Napoleon; he only just escaped. Compare the tactics of Mao Tse-Tung.

The steppe nomads moved in summer. The northern tribes of the taiga and tundra stayed put. Swamps and swollen rivers impeded all movement, except, perhaps, when escape from the clouds of mosquitoes that make the short Arctic summer so uncomfortable was imperative. They awaited the great migrations of wild-fowl, swans, ducks and geese, clubbing them to death in moult. In some rivers the teeming runs of salmon and sturgeon provided food close to their settlements. The winter was the season for mobility, when the rivers and bogs froze, and since the Arctic Stone Age these peoples had known the use of dog – and deer-drawn sledges and skis; Ptolemy refers to the Skrithifinnoi or Skiing Finns. It was also the trapping season, for sables, marten, mink, lemming, ermine and Arctic fox. Fur was, and still is, the staple of the Siberian tribes. The heroes of the Nibelungenlied wallowed in their sables; Kubilai Khan had a tent lined with ermine and sable, and the Cossack colonists of Boris Goudonov greeted the Kirghiz with cries of ‘Sables or Death!'

Following their passion for human urine, reindeer were attracted to human settlement. They were easily tamed, could be ridden and harnessed. They provided meat, milk and hides. The elk was also ridden, and it was once claimed that reindeer – and elk-riding preceded equitation. The poet of the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, was quite unable to decide if the hero Väinämöinen fell from his ‘blue elk' or his ‘dun-coloured courser';
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this seems to be reflected in the Pazyryk burials where horses of the finest central Asiatic breed were fitted with reindeer masks. The Mongols themselves were one of the forest tribes who broke out onto the horse-riding steppe.

The condition of north Asian hunters remained virtually unchanged from prehistoric times until the nineteenth century. Their tangible remains, when recovered, testify to this tenacious conservatism. Metal-working came late to the north, and though wood, leather and bone preserve well in bog conditions, their survival is less favoured than is that of the debris of civilised communities. Consequently, assessments of the Animal Style art of northern Europe and Asia may lay undue stress on influences emanating from the south. Influences there certainly were; many individual motifs can be traced back to their southern sources. But, from the Upper Palaeolithic era, the North had its own Animal Style, conserving its own peculiar conventions. These Arctic Stone Age finds include the wooden bird and animal figures from the Gorbunovo bog in the Urals, slate maces from Sweden and Finland, the bone carvings from the graves on the middle Yenisei River in Siberia, the rock carvings of animals stretching from central Siberia to Norway. Three wooden ladles from southern Finland were carved from a pine (
pinus cembra
) that grew in the Urals a thousand miles away. Those sledges certainly travelled.

 

To the Greeks, northern and central Asia was a Land of Darkness, a land of abominable monstrosities. Their main source of information came from an epic poem, now lost, the
Arismaspeia
by Aristeas of Proconnessus.
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This traveller seems to have made a journey into Scythia and far beyond during the seventh century BC, in advance of the first Greek settlements on the northern coast of the Black Sea. Some say his was a journey of the spirit, a ‘souljourney' like a shaman's, but his topography is too circumstantial. He knew of the promiscuous Agathyrsi ‘greatly given to wearing gold', the Cave of the Winds – probably the Dzungarian Gap in Western Mongolia – and the Rhipean Mountains, identified as the Altai – the ‘Mountain of Rhipe, aflower with forests, breast of the black night,' wrote the Spartan poet Alcman. Thereabouts beaked griffins guarded sacred gold from the one-eyed Arismaspeians, ‘the horsemen who live about Pluto's stream that flows with gold'.

Nearby, Aeschylus placed the home of the Phorcides, ‘aged swan-shaped maidens possessing one eye in common and one tooth', and the three winged Gorgons ‘with their snaky hair'. Long before, Hesiod knew of the Dog-Men and Herodotus of he Neuri, ‘one of whom is turned into a wolf for a few days each year'. Simias in the third century BC tells of ‘islands dark green with firs, overgrown with lofty reeds ... and a monstrous race of men, half dogs upon whose supple necks is set a canine head armed with powerful jaws. They bark like dogs but comprehend the speech of men.' There was a Land of Feathers; there were headless people with faces on their shoulders, the Ox-Feet, the Goat-Feet, the Web-Feet, the Parasol-Feet, and, in the Himalayas, ‘hairy men swift of foot with their feet turned backwards'.
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The Abominable Snowman is the one monstrosity that has resolutely refused to die.

The monstrosities of Asia are difficult to explain away. Some dismiss them as mythical nonsense in the same class as the ‘Pobble-with-no-toes'. Others resolve them in purely ethnographical terms. The Web-Feet are wearing snow-shoes, the headless humpty-dumpties anoraks, and so on. But they are persistent. Sober Chinese annalists and the first European travellers to Central Asia in the thirteenth century report them too. The Dog Jung were nomads with whom the Chinese actually fought. ‘The appearance of these people is like dogs.' There were the Kuei. ‘These people have the faces of men but only one eye'; and there ‘were wild men with hairy bodies and pendulous breasts'.
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‘These are the Things from the North-East Comer to the North-West Corner,' wrote the author of the
Shan-Hai-Ching,
no later than the end of the first century BC, ‘the Shankless, ... the Long-Legs, ... the One-Eyes – these people have only one eye set in the middle of their forehead', and ‘the Jou-Li – these people have one hand and one foot.'
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Other sources report the ‘Tip-Toes' and the ‘No-Bellies'. The Annals of the Bamboo Books speak of King Mu (of the Chou Dynasty) pushing westwards over the Moving Sands (the Gobi) and the ‘Country of the Heaps of Feathers'.
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Some two thousand years later Bishop Ivo of Narbonne wrote in a panic-stricken letter that, on his invasion of Hungary, the Mongol Batu was accompanied by Dog-Headed Warriors.
²³

Civilised men attributed animal properties to the nomads. Ammianus Marcellinus spoke of the bestial cunning of the Huns – ‘one might take them for two-legged beasts, or for stumps rough hewn into images'.
²⁴
In his
Gothic History
, Jordanes wrote, ‘They had a sort of lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes ... though they live in the form of men they have the cruelty of wild beasts.'
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The Han Imperial Secretary said of the Hsiung-nu ‘in their breasts beat the heart of beasts ... from the most ancient times they have never been regarded as a part of humanity'.
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In the year I BC their ruler paid a state visit to the Chinese capital. His hosts lodged him in the Zoological Gardens.
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In Central Asian folklore supernatural beings put their bird and animal forms on and off at will. The Lady Ala Mangnyk ‘puts on her golden swan clothing'; Jelbagan's wife was a ‘leaden-eyed, copper-nosed witch'; there were ‘swan maidens living in the dark with leaden eyes, hempen plaits, hands with yellow nails and murderous',
²⁸
and royal emissaries in the form of hounds or eagles. Some shaman costumes are hung with ribbons that represent snakes; in the Yakut and other traditions, snakes have the same magico-religious significance as hair does. Herodotus reports a plague of snakes that drove the Neuri, the wolf tribe, from their lands; ‘maybe they were sorcerers', he says.
²⁹
Other costumes are hung with mirrors that represent little ‘eyes' and little images of human organs. Tales of such curiosities may have given birth to the monsters that puzzled the Greeks; the Gorgons with their snaky hair, the swan-shaped Phorcides, griffins and Dog-Men.