हाल ही में पढ़ी किताब Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World

हाल ही में पढ़ी किताब 

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World 

         by Anthony Satin I enjoyed reading this very interesting book by Anthony Satin. 

It throws light on the alternative to the well-told narrative of human civilisation, it is a  compelling story of wanderers, of tribes who lived beyond the  borders  of European empires  and who created their own kingdoms and empires: Scythian, Xiongnu and Persian, Hun and Arab, Mongul, Mughal, Ottoman and others.

Humans have been on the move for most of history. Even after the great urban advancement lured people into the great cities of Uruk, Babylon, Rome and Chang'an, most of us continued to live lightly on the move and outside the pages of history. But recent discoveries have revealed another story . . .

In fact the wandering people built the first great stone monuments, such as the one at Göbekli Tepe, seven thousand years before the pyramids. They tamed the horse, fashioned the composite bow, fought with the Greeks and hastened the end of the Roman Empire. They had a love of poetry and storytelling, a fascination for artistry and science, and a respect for the natural world rooted in reliance and their belief. Embracing multiculturalism, tolerant of other religions, their need for free movement and open markets brought a glorious cultural flourishing to Eurasia, enabling the Renaissance and changing the human story.

This book talks about Nomads , traces the path of wanderers across twelve thousand years, from before Cain and Abel to the modern day. With both nomads and the natural world on which they rely facing extinction, it uncovers a string of their extraordinary and little-known stories and asks what we can learn from them and what we will lose without them. Reconnecting with our deepest mythology, our unrecorded antiquity and our natural environment, Nomads is the ground-breaking alternative history of civilisation, told through its outsiders. Sometime around 513BC, the Persian emperor Darius invaded Scythia, a nomadic empire that spanned central Asia and eastern Europe. According to Herodotus,

the Persians had an army of 700,000 seasoned soldiers. Size, however, didn’t matter, because the Scythian king Idanthyrsus simply refused to fight.

Darius’s  patience exhausted, he sent a message to Idanthyrsus. Stand and fight, he commanded, or accept me as your master. The Scythian replied that he feared no man. He was, he explained, not interested in doing battle. “We have no cities — nothing that we need worry you might capture. We have no crops — nothing that we need worry you might destroy.”

The encounter encapsulates a clash of cultures — the nomadic versus the settled. “The Scythians understood the Persians,” Anthony Sattin writes, “but Darius seems not to have understood the nature of Scythian life.” That confusion echoes through the ages, up to the present. Those who define themselves by four walls find it difficult to comprehend the nomad who is always on the move, never weighed down by possessions.

That failure to understand leads inevitably to contempt. “The sight of a family on the move with their animals and all their belongings excites some of us,but it fills others with terror or

disgust or disdain,” Sattin writes.

A rather ethereal travel writer, he counts himself among the former group. He is hopelessly in love with nomads, with that “life shaped by . . . landscape”. He yearns for “a place where people do not need a clock and where lives are still measured... by the cycle of the moon and the seasons”.

That sort of adoration is not conducive to critical thought. Sattin describes nomadic culture

in prelapsarian terms — a quiet reminder of Eden in today’s world of greed and perfidy. He repeatedly insists that nomads exhibit a “sublime harmony . . . with the natural world”. Yet less doe-eyed scholars have discovered that nomads have not always been paragons of green virtue. Native American tribes, for instance, were frequently wasteful of nature’s bounty.

Sattin’s subjectivity is nevertheless endearing. As he admits, this book “is not a scholarly volume . . . nor is it a definitive history of nomads”. It is instead an unashamedly impressionistic paean to nomadic life, a bit of history interwoven with travelogue and memoir. His prose mirrors the nomadic life: it wanders across a land-scape of 12,000 years, occasionally stopping to graze, constantly changing direction. Dates and precise places are seldom provided because they are unimportant to those of no fixed abode. Where are we? It doesn’t matter. Sensation, not time or place, is what matters.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued that “nomads have no history; they only have a geography”. That’s astonishingly ignorant, given the impact of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. The Mongol Empire once stretched 4,500 miles, from the Caucasus to Korea. Deleuze’s claim, nevertheless, reveals that same myopia that Darius exhibited, that inability to understand a civilisation constantly on the

move, a transportable culture without cities, architecture, monuments or books.

History, Sattin argues, “only [tells] half the story of humankind . . . the story of the settled”. That’s not entirely true. There are plenty of excellent books about nomadic empires, such as those by Peter Frankopan. But Sattin is correct when he argues that an inability to understand the no- madic way of life has led to a tendency to discount its impact. He insists that nomads have, throughout history, travelled the

highways between settled cultures; they are “catalysts and creators, the prime agents of social renewal”. Move- ment, after all, is intrinsic to progress.

The relentless urge to move might be genetic. In 2008 researchers at North- western University found that a fifth of the Ariaal tribe in Kenya possessed a variant gene called DRD4-7R. Among the Ariaal who were living as nomads, those with this gene tended to be stronger and healthier alpha nomads. Yet those with the gene who lived in settled situations were less healthy and successful. The genetic characteristic manifests itself as restless energy or what in another context might be called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The nomad is like the shark that has to keep swimming to survive. Movement was embedded in the culture. Scythian children were taught to ride horses at a ridiculously young age, trained first on sheep. They were given miniature bows and encouraged to shoot birds and rats while on the move. “By adulthood,” Sattin writes, “they were killers on horseback, stringing scalps on their belts... as proof of their prowess.”

That capacity for violence has long been seen as the defining feature of nomadic 

cultures. Mongols and Huns were dismissed as barbarians. To a certain extent, the prejudice is justified. When Hulagu Khan sacked Baghdad in 1258, he boasted about executing 200,000 civilians and torching the city. In most instances, however, Mongol armies stopped short of such violence — their reputation for ruthlessness would usually persuade an enemy to surrender.

That reputation has obscured what Sattin calls their soft power. Mongols, like every nomad tribe, fostered open markets and capital exchange. Genghis recruited people of talent — scientists, artists, mathematicians, craftsmen — and spread their knowledge across the great Eurasian steppe. In the century after the sack of Baghdad, when Europe grew increasingly insular, the area flourished because of the open exchange of products and ideas. The east-west highway was designed to streamline cultural exchange. The Mongols bridged rivers, dug wells and built way stations where guides and interpreters could be hired. Taxes and tariffs were low.

The Mongol impact can be measured through one product. Persian pots were distinctive for their use of cobalt oxide pigment, called “Muhammadan blue”. These were carried by Mongol traders to China where they were copied, then sold back to the West. Eventually, Persian factories were copying Chinese copies, which were in turn mimicked by Turkish artisans, then by the Dutch. English Blue Willow china, a copy of endless copies, is still popular.

The Mongols had their century of glory and dominance, then faded away, as nomadic empires do. The 14th-century historian Ibn Khaldun discovered a distinct life cycle related to movement. Nomadic cultures are most vibrant when mobile and decline when the temptation to settle becomes irresistible. The lessons of struggle, of surviving on the hoof, are forgotten when possessions anchor them to place. Eventually, they fall victim to newer, more mobile, nomadic tribes.

“The settled needed nomads and nomads needed the settled,” Sattin insists. “When they co-operated, when borders and markets and minds were open, the world was a better place.” That’s a bit romantic, but essentially true. There’s no progress without movement. In a book of sensitivity and grace, Sattin does not just describe the nomadic way of life, but also evokes it. This is a book of beauty and beguiling rhythm that offers unsettling lessons about our present-day world of borders. “Thoughts and ideas,” Sattin believes, “should always wander like sheep and goats, this way and that, now together, now apart.