Dan Snow's History Hit - A Short History of Nomads

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

The roots of the word ‘Nomad’ dates back to an extremely early Indo-European word, ‘nomos’. After towns and cities are built and more people settle, ‘Nomad’ comes to describe people who live without walls and beyond boundaries. Now, the word is used by settled people - for some with a sense of romantic nostalgia, and for others, it carries an implicit judgement that such people are wanderers of no fixed abode. Yet, often overlooked, Nomads have fostered and refreshed civilisation throughout our history.Anthony Sattin is a journalist, broadcaster and author. Anthony joins Dan to trace the transformative and often bloody relationship between settled and mobile societies, from the Neolithic revolution to the 21st century via the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the great nomadic empires of the Arabs and Mongols.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History, the world's best podcast, official. Super exciting to announce that. Great news. Thank you to everybody. Today we've got Anthony Satton. We're talking about nomads, talking about nomadic people. People who don't bring food to them, but go to the food. Makes sense. A lot less tiring, apparently. So Anthony Satton's been on this podcast many times before. He's a journalist, author, historian. He's a friend of the pod. It's great to have him back talking about his new book, his new project on nomads, the nomadic people on whom

the settled have depended for so much of history. It's fascinating stuff, challenging stuff, folks. You're going to love it. If you want to go and listen to previous podcasts, Anthony Satin, you probably will. Then go to History Hit TV. It's the only place you can listen to them. And you get to go there. No ads. It's all a beautiful thing. If you follow the link in the notes of this podcast, just click on that little link, you get sent straight there. Straight there through the interweb,

along the optical fiber all cables. You're going to love it. And then you can sign up. You can join the revolution. You can watch our Falklands 40 season. You can watch all sorts of other stuff. Hundreds of hours of history documentaries on there. Thousands of podcasts. You're going to love it. Head over there and join the revolution. But in the meantime, here is Anthony Satin.

Anthony, thanks so much for coming back on the podcast. Thank you very much for having me back. What a joy. What is a nomad? How are we defining nomads these days? It changes over time. A nomad a long, long time ago was somebody who had a herd and went looking for pasture. And everything in their lives was dictated by this need for grass or for some sort of fodder for their animals. We live in an age of digital nomads and all sorts of other people, but most of my book deals with the other sort. You say looking for grass, that's because it's easier to take your cattle to fresh grass than it is to chop all that grass and bring it to the cattle. That's right. Yes, most herders

throughout history and around the world have always moved their herds rather than brought the fodder to them. And we do that here in the UK a lot of the time as well, move the cattle from one or sheep from one field to another. I mean, the word nomad itself, it's a very, very, very old Indo-European word, and it has its roots in looking for pasture. This thorny question we talk about so much on this podcast, but when and how do nomads become separate from town dwellers, city dwellers, static people? Well, my book starts 9,500 BC, which is when a group of hunter-gatherers, because they're not properly nomads at that point because they haven't domesticated animals, but a group of hunter-gatherers settle in a place in southwest Turkey called Gobekli Tepe. And they build what

we know of so far as the world's oldest stone monuments, you know, properly cut limestone pillars, which they put up. And from there on, you have a sort of divide between those who stay in one place and those who carry on moving. And the problem, presumably, Anthony, is that the people who stay in one place also develop things like writing and archives and books and things and stone tablets. So I always think when you look at a map of the world, most people are moving around in hunter-gatherer nomadic societies, but 99% of our energy goes into talking about and remembering and celebrating and studying these settled societies that were presumably not the norm for much of those thousands of years.

No, not at all. I mean, our history books are completely skewed towards the settled because they're written by people who live within walls. And, you know, they're words that are captured on paper and then eventually put between covers. And one of the problems for nomadic peoples is that they didn't record very often. They didn't capture on paper. They told stories. There was a huge oral tradition, and there still is. I remember that our Western tradition was originally an oral one as well. Things like Homer, for instance, or the Quran or whatever else. These huge, long texts were not originally written down.

They were passed from generation to generation out of memory. We've lost that ability amongst ourselves, but most nomadic people still retain this oral tradition. And it's great for them, but it's not so great for them in a world where we place so much value on writing. And the settled people tend to be absolutely terrified of these highly mobile nomadic people. So we've got a pretty negative view of them. Well, we do if we look at the way that nomads appear in our histories, because generally, most chroniclers, certainly, you know, in ancient and middle times and medieval times, when they wrote about nomads, they were tending to write about times of conflict. But for most of human history, and this is the point of my book, I mean, there was a sort of mutual dependence. Nomads needed

the settled and the settled needed nomads. They traded with each other. I mean, there's some wonderful texts from ancient Sumer, Mesopotamia, where you have farmers longing for the nomads to come because they're going to graze the stubble after the harvest. And their animals are going to fertilize the fields with their droppings. And then they go away. And of course, there's always this tension of, well, how long will the nomads stay? Will they come at the right time or will they leave at the right time? But there was a mutual dependence because at the same time, nomads had time-sensitive stock. They had meat they wanted to sell, and there were things they needed to buy to get through the winters, for instance. So there was most of history. There was a very happy

mutual interdependence. But that's not what you get when you read the history books. Because as I said, chroniclers tend to write about conflict. And that's very interesting. So nomads were an important source of animals, food, trap, furs, all sorts of things like that throughout much of history. Yeah, exactly. And leather and all sorts of things. Yeah. And also they carried, because they were mobile, they carried things from one community to another. I raised the possibility about an empire of nomads that stretches the whole way from the borders of the Roman Empire, the Danube or whatever, to the Great Wall of China, the borders of the Han Chinese Empire. This is maybe 500, 400, 300, 200 BC. There was certainly a confederation of

nomad tribes, this is the whole way across Central Asia, that may well have been an empire, but we wouldn't recognize them as an empire because they didn't have a capital. So they were perhaps more of an alliance, but certainly these people controlled vast terrain and they moved things from one side to the other. And we know they did because in their burials over near China, they have things from the Roman world and from Persia. And in their burials near the Roman borders, they have things from China. They have silks and things that are buried with silks and Chinese ceramics and glass, for instance. So when we're talking about the silk routes, the silk roads, we may be talking about these peoples.

They're doing all this cultural exchange that we keep talking about nowadays. That's right. These are the people who champion open borders. And by the time we get to the Mongols, for instance, we're talking about freedom of conscience as well and freedom of trade. And that's what their entire world was based on. We were talking about the problem of documentation. I mean, these people who I mentioned as Scythians, we don't know what they called themselves. We call them Scythians.

We have no idea what they called themselves. And their counterparts in the East by the Chinese, the Chinese called them the Xiongnu. But that's certainly not what they called themselves, because it's a Chinese phrase that means illegitimate offspring of slaves. And I'm sure they didn't call themselves that. But these were kingdoms. These were important political and cultural entities. And they did a huge amount of cross-fertilization between the Chinese and the Roman world. It must be so difficult for you when you're writing this book, because you talk about kingdoms. They're quite unrecognizable today, are they? Because they don't have the kind of things

that we've all been trained to look for in kingdoms, which is capitals and castles and bureaucracies that sustain one place and great public works. You get to get into a different mindset when you talk about these empires. Well, that's right. And it's quite hard to know exactly how their social structures worked as well. But there certainly was a kingship. I mean, we know much more if we jump forward 1,000, 1,500 years towards the Mongol empires, for instance, Genghis Khan and Timur and the people between them.

So that's sort of 11, 12, up to 1500 in our time. And we know, again, most of the time they didn't build. And when they did build, they didn't necessarily build for the buildings to have the functions that we would understand of a capital. There are lots and lots of examples. For instance, Karakorum, which was the great Mongol capital. It started out as a city of tents, but it did eventually get built as a proper city. But the great Khan only went there on his way to and from his winter or summer grazing. I mean, he passed through for a month or so. were given, and the next phase, the next season or whatever, the policy, where we're going to fight, where we're going to make treaties, how we're going to maintain ourselves was discussed. And it was the same, for instance, in ancient Persia, jumping back a little bit. Persepolis,

which is what we can recognize as a great city, was never a city in the sense that we understood it in the way that Rome was a city. It was only ever properly used once a year for the Nowruz, for the spring festival. And then you would have all the tribes that made up the Persian Empire and all the tributaries would come and the great emperor or king would be there and would be acknowledged as a ruler. But he didn't live there. Listen to Dan Snow's history. we're talking about nomads more coming up

ancient history fans this is our moment over on the ancients podcast twice every week we release new episodes covering topics dedicated to our distant past check out the ancients

on history hit wherever you get your podcasts. P.S. Russell Crowe, we're still interested. groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I was very struck in your book you talk about in the 18th century about Ben Franklin there's this really interesting strain in North American, Canadian and US thought in the 18th century about the pull of the nomadic lifestyle compared to the settled agricultural lifestyle

and there's this old saying isn't it that young men and women young men in particular would if they were taken captive by indigenous tribes in the americas they never wanted to go back it was always kind of one-way traffic the the young so-called indian children would escape from their schools and go back to being you know live with the Indian tribes. And also in the same way that white European settlers would, when given that choice, would also opt to be with the, it gnawed away at the confidence of these colonial settlements, didn't it? Was there something about the indigenous way of life that was better than their way of life? Yes, I mean, and Benjamin Franklin worries about this the whole way through. Here is one of the sort of founders of America, of the United States. He's a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and of the

Constitution. And he, all his life, has been settled. He's worked hard. He's, in a way, sort of a very early example of the brilliance of the American dream, that you don't have to start out rich or whatever else. He makes a lot of money and he puts it to good use. He sets up a publishing house, for instance, but also creates the first hospital and a university, which turns into Penn State University. But he can't understand how there could be people in the world who are not attracted by what he sees as the advantages of settled society. And he has a debate with somebody who he calls a Transylvanian Tatar, so somebody from Asia, who has come to see what America will become. And this visitor to America is very struck by this problem that they have, that settlers are very happy to go off and do what this visitor calls the wandering life.

And Franklin is saying, all of the advantages we have in science and arts and whatever are not enough to keep them. And he recognizes that it's the problem of labor. And it's also a problem of agriculture. And it's a problem of agriculture through the whole of human history since 9,500 BC, when we have the beginning of the agricultural revolution, when we start domesticating crops. And that is, it takes a lot of work. And living life on the move, first as a hunter-gatherer

and then as a nomad, is a lot less manual labor. And there are various anthropologists, American in the 20th century, who did studies on this and worked out that you probably need to do about a quarter of the amount of labor as a nomad to support yourself, bed and board, than you do if you're working in a factory in the West. The attraction is obvious. I mean, you've got a lot of labor time or a lot of time to do other things. And also, you're living in nature. And so, coming back to this example of the Native Americans who the settlers were very happy to go back there, but when the settlers invited a whole lot of Native American children to come and study and learn, you know, all the great advantages of the West, the elders say,

I think this is Iroquois, say, well, we tried that once before, but when our kids came back, they were good for absolutely nothing. They didn't know how to hunt. They didn't know how to read the trees. They didn't know the properties of the plants. Why would we want to do that again? As we talk about mental health today, the gigantic crisis of mental health and urbanised world and physical health, what do you think the nomads can teach us today? Well, one of the most glaringly obvious things that nomads know that we, particularly in cities, and remember that more than half of all humans now live in an urban environment, it's very easy to forget that

we are all completely dependent on everything in the natural world, on our planet. We're in a biosphere. And until very recently, it hadn't been proven, but it has now been proven that if something happens on one side of the planet, we lose a species that is important. We're going to suffer, all of us. But when you live in the natural world, and nomads certainly know this, that you are dependent, you are just an equal. You don't live in dominion over nature, you live as part of it. It's something that certainly in the West has been going on since, I mean, I write about Francis Bacon, the 16th, 17th century philosopher, who talks about the need to dominate nature, to try and

fight our way back into Eden. And we're going to do it by studying everything, learning everything, understanding the property of everything so we can dominate it. And that begins a sequence of events that leads us to where we are today, where we clearly can't undo some of the damage that we've done. In spite of all the wonderful advances in technology, we can't undo that. And that's something that nomads are very, very aware of, because they are the first to suffer the consequences, for instance, of a warming climate. And a lot of the big movements of nomads, for instance, when they start moving into the Roman Empire, that bring about the fall of the Roman Empire when the Huns come, and the Goths, is to do with warming climate. And these

nomads who have to come off the steps of Central Asia and push across the Danube into the Roman Empire because they need to feed their flocks. These are things that nomads know that we in the city find it very easy to forget. Why are there so few nomads around? Talk to me about the great historical processes by which were they forced to be settled? Were they lured into it? Were they threatening to people at the Russian Empire and the British? And was that a process of forcible settlement in many cases? I write quite a bit about the settlement of North America, because I think that's quite poignant in our time. And the Pilgrim Fathers, 1600s, they start off negotiating with the native tribes. Very soon start, well, within 100 years, start pushing back very hard against them.

And by the 19th century, are passing laws in the US Senate against people who are not their subjects. Effectively, laws are passed that announce that the whole of the North American continent is for the settlers. And bit by bit, the Native Americans are squeezed into reservations. And out of that comes nothing very happy for the Native Americans. The governor of California recently described as genocide what was done to the Native Americans of California by settlers. That's a very loaded term, particularly in our times and particularly in the United States, because it carries legal consequences, which

therefore carry financial consequences in terms of reparations and things like that. But that's a process that has happened throughout the world. There are obviously some places where nomads continue to thrive. For instance, nomads in Iran, simply the landscape in Iran is so harsh. Most of it, it's upland, a lot of it is desert, and if it's not desert, it's mountain. It's simply not good for farming. In Europe, by contrast, we have massive industrialized farms because the land is very good for that. But so in Iran, there is still a ministry of nomadic affairs. The nomads in Iran produce, I think, something like a third of the country's meat. They are still a significant player. And the

government is still trying to settle them because you can't tax people. It's quite difficult to control people if they're not in one place. I mean, that's, again, this sort of age-old thing, the problem that nomads can understand the settled, but the settled seem to struggle understanding nomadic needs. And so the Iranian government, even though they need the nomads, are still encouraging them to settle. There's a sort of conflicting policy. And so they encourage them, as I've seen encouraged in Egypt and elsewhere, in places that I know very well. The government will encourage nomads with healthcare. You know, your elderly need looking after, but you need to be in one place for us to do this. And your children need an education. So it's settled down and we'll provide this.

But there are consequences to that because with that comes the end of a way of life that stretches back to the dawn of time and is older, a lot older than the habit of being settled. And some of us, there's been some fascinating research done in the United States in Northwestern University that have identified what some people, not the academics involved, have described as a nomadic gene. And these researchers did genetic research into successful nomads in East Africa. They found a variant gene in the successful nomads that the less successful nomads didn't have. They found that same gene in children in the United States who are suffering from what is described as attention deficit disorder. The suggestion behind this is that these children don't have a problem. They're

just in the wrong place or they're being asked the wrong question. The idea behind this is that these children don't have a problem. They're just in the wrong place or they're being asked the wrong question. The idea behind that is what they're being asked is, what's one plus one? It's two. But for them, it might also be four halves or eight quarters. What we in settled, particularly urban societies, are encouraged to do is to think in the box, to think along a straight line. Our educational systems are not designed for creative thinking. And yet when you're a nomad, to be a successful nomad, you have to constantly come up with a variety of solutions for every situation because you don't know what's going to happen next. And that's nomadic thinking.

Be more nomad, folks. Be more nomad. Thank you very much indeed for coming on. What's the book called? The book is called Nomads, the Wanderers Who Shaped Our World, and they did shape our world. Read it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake. Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end.

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