Empires of the Steppes – the nomadic tribes who shaped civilisation
By Kenneth W Harl, Bloomsbury, £30

LIKE many other readers, I imagine, the history I learned at school was almost exclusively modern European, with its birthplace in Greek and Roman antiquity. In recent times historians have been moving away from such western eurocentrism. 

Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads offered us a very different perspective on our civilisation with the centre of gravity shifted to China and the Far East. Harl’s fascinating history takes us further back in time to demonstrate that our modern world has been very much shaped by the nomadic peoples of the great steppe lands of the east in ways few of us are aware of. It was they who facilitated the emergence of the Silk Road as a vital trading and communications conduit between Asia and western Europe.

The nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes dominated human development in the Near and Far East as well as much of Europe for around 45 centuries. From the first steppe nomads who domesticated the horse and learned how to exploit the vast grasslands of Eurasia, they helped create the peoples and languages of Europe and the Far East we are familiar with today. 

Over those centuries, there was a whole number of leaders of the many diverse peoples who inhabited this vast region, few of whom had momentous impact on the course of history. 

Three key figures who did, though, were Attila the Hun (406–453), Genghis Khan (1162–1227) and Tamerlane (1370-1405). They and their armies, invariably caricatured as “barbarian hordes,” symbolise the role played by those nomadic peoples. Attila the Hun invaded the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire, before turning his attention to the west. During his reign, he was one of the most feared enemies of Rome, invading Italy in 452, and devastating its northern provinces.

Over half a millennium later, the Mongol leader Genghis Khan created a huge empire that covered much of Asia and eastern Europe. It became the largest contiguous empire in history. He gained complete control over the eastern section of the Silk Road, the key trade route between western Europe and the east. 

He was followed a century later by Tamerlane who also built up a great empire based on the superiority of his horse-mounted archers. In less than two generations after his death, firearms would usher in a military revolution that ended the domination of the nomadic peoples, to shift the balance of power firmly in a western direction and that led to the exploration of the new world.

One drawback Harl’s book, however, is that if you are not familiar with this period, you are likely to get lost in the plethora of different peoples, tribes and languages he writes about. He does not make it easy to follow the narrative thread.

Almost all Indo-European peoples and languages have their origins in those nomadic tribes who, from the middle to late bronze ages (1,800-1,000BC) onwards, wandered back and forth over the vast grasslands of Eurasia, warring, trading, mixing languages and genes. They were supreme military strategists, even if history has labelled them “barbarians,” they were tolerant of religious plurality and played a crucial role in the transmission of knowledge, religions, goods and technology across Eurasia.

Harl’s book certainly makes the reader rethink history and question our origins, as well as the artificial concept of national identities.