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- [00:00]
Rudyard Lynch
Bundle and safe.
- [00:01]
Eric Torrenberg
With Expedia you were made to follow your favorite band and from the front row we were made to quietly save you.
- [00:08]
Whatifalthist
More Expedia made to travel savings vary and subject to availability. Flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.
- [00:18]
Rudyard Lynch
Welcome to History102 where YouTube creator what if Alt hists Rudyard lynch and I dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.
- [00:32]
Whatifalthist
Hi everybody. Welcome to the new episode of History 102 that being on the history of the Eurasian Step with our contiguous co host Austin Pad.
- [00:43]
Eric Torrenberg
Hello.
- [00:45]
Whatifalthist
So this video is meant to be a parallel for the video I made on Eurasian Step. Society is on the main channel, where the main channel is at this point. One of my friends said it's using history as a foil for philosophy and I think that's. I'll take it. I don't think that's bad. I think that's what people really need. But when I look at the Civilization videos in the main channel, I'm looking at, and those are my favorite videos to make, by the way. I really want to make another few soon, but I have other responsibilities to take care of. And each of the Civilization videos requires reading like five to six books at least. And then they don't, they don't make that much money as views go. But I make the Civilization videos on the main channel and then history102 I see as the fact filling channel where when Ibn Khaldun wrote his history of the world, he was a medieval Islamic historian, he wrote the introduction and then he actually wrote the seven volume history of the world. So the main channel is sort of introduction where we talk about the broader themes and then this is actually filling the content. And so my goal is to have a comprehensive education between both of these. You're studying the source material and then looking at the underlying theme. So this is going to be a video on the history of the Step stretching from the Aryans until the Russian and Chinese conquest in the early modern period.
- [02:20]
Eric Torrenberg
And what kind of talking points involve filling the content in a way that gives you extra context that you wouldn't get in the video.
- [02:27]
Whatifalthist
So when you're watching at the video, I'm stripping apart thousands of years of history in a way so that you can understand the broader themes. What happens though is that lots of context gets lost and context is the nature of the human condition. I think that's one of modernity's great failings, that we totally ignore context. And so I think it's very Valuable where when you compare, let's say the Mexican history video on History 102 versus the Mesoamerica video on whatifalthist, the Mexican history video, it gives you the context of Mesoamerica within the broader trajectory of Mexican history. So you could look at, let's say, a building when you visit Mexico and think that was built by Porfirio Diaz. That's why it has the French architecture style. That's why it was built in this late 19th century style. Where when you don't have the context, you sort of lose understanding for what's actually going on. And it's too analytical. And I think you guys also, if you're just listening to the, to the philosophic extrapolations, you're sort of trusting me too much because you're looking at my extra. It's two levels of me extrapolating it. It's me looking at the data and then making an extrapolation on top of it. And then these videos are. You can feed off the data itself. And I think also it's just there's a richness to the human character. And I see history as sort of the universal humanity being tested under different contexts where there is a universal person of human nature. And then the simulation or God shoves us into these distinct contexts where we have to play with that dream and work with the limited variables. And I think there's something beautiful about studying the history itself which gets lost in the extrapolations.
- [04:33]
Eric Torrenberg
That's funny because I wrote down understanding history and that was exactly the point you got to. I hear, I see comments that joke about how much context we have over content. Like most channels are content. And people laugh about how it's all context because the whole point of the content is to figure out those independent variables. But the point of doing that is so you can play with them to actually figure stuff out. And that's the point of understanding history.
- [05:01]
Whatifalthist
I was reading some pre industrial authors lately. I've read Ibn Khaldun, I've read parts of Aristotle and Plato. And it struck me how my form of history writing is closer to a lot of those authors than modern authors. Although the vast majority of authors I pull from are modern. There's this myth that I only read books written after 1960, and that's just. I only read books written before 1960. And that's just a lie. The vast majority of the books I read are after 1960, but I read plenty of pre1960 work. And when you look at the Old pre industrial theory of history writing someone like Herodotus where he writes about, I mean, the Scythians who are going to come up later, he says this is their culture, these are the gods they revere, these are the strengths and weaknesses of this core culture, this is how they formed and how they are going. And so you can develop a mental model of the Scythians pulling from their history, using examples which sort of gets to the soul of them. And modern histories really have a struggle doing that because when you don't understand the context, first of all, you don't actually understand the inner nature of that society. You can't predict their actions. And on top of it, you're missing something where I read this really interesting book by this Russian scientist mystic called us Pensky and the thesis he says is that I don't know how true this is, I'm not a physics guy, I'm not a science guy, so I'm just throwing shit at the wall. But he says that the shift from the three dimensional to the four dimensional universe is. In the three dimensional universe everything is seen as materially in relation to others through things are dead. Materia crashing his proposition is that the fourth dimension should be the innate nature of things. So the fourth dimension is you have these three dimensional things that are smashing together. The fourth dimension is what they're materially made out of or their innate nature. Then the fifth dimension is time. And I don't know anything about those topics, I cannot speak to that if that's accurate. But I think modernity does have an intellectual issue of just seeing things as sort of dead blocks that are clacking together, not thinking about why they're doing it, what their purpose is, how the makeup of those different atom to atom interactions change. Because in physics there's been a lot of questioning of our particles making a choice where you can't predict atom to atom interaction, which you would think in a purely mechanist, materialist universe. Because at any given point, due to chaos theory, an atom can choose to go to one direction or another. That suggests there's a degree of free will and chaos built into the world from the structure of atoms or humans. And I think that's something modernity really lacks. When you're just going through the events, it's first of all going to be pretty boring. And because people find things interesting when they can extrapolate human motivations onto them. The difference between why no one studies the Middle Ages and why Game of Thrones was such a popular TV show is that medieval histories are written in an incredibly dry way, because modern historians can't really understand medievals. So we extrapolate them to the most, like, basic boring level. Well, in Game of Thrones, which is very close to an actual medieval society, it means that you can take something that's quite similar to the initial material, where for a few seasons of Game of Thrones and I stopped watching her in season five, I could predict what would happen next by comparing it to the wars of the Roses. So it's pretty close. But George R.R. martin writes game of Thrones or wrote Game of Thrones in a way where you could understand the human motivations of everyone involved in a dramatic way. But if we're going to write about the angevin household in 12th century England, they're going to write it in the driest way possible, where it's like, and then John Lackland did blank. Richard Lionheart did blank. But what you've removed is the utter humanity of all of these characters with their own motivations. And that's what I'm trying to avoid with history.
- [09:30]
Eric Torrenberg
It's funny how you describe the objects clashing together in the different dimensions, because that's exactly what they're missing, is they're missing the underlying layer which relates to values or psychology, and then they're missing the over time, how that impacts things over time. And then they're missing the longer, more powerful explanatory trends in favor of this battle happened and they zigged left instead of right and then this happened, etc.
- [10:03]
Whatifalthist
And it makes most people in history come across as schizophrenic to modern people. Because if you look at the ancients where they would revere gods or do hyper autistic sort of religious ceremonies, that comes across as mentally ill to us. But by any conceivable metric, those populations had significantly higher psychological stability than we do. Modernity is psychologically the one thing modernity does the worst is psychology and inner world. And so when we look at 99% of humanity, we cannot understand them at all. And funnily enough, there's very few historic records of schizophrenia before the Industrial Revolution. There's a handful, but it is both autism and schizophrenia. There's some records of them from the pre industrial world, but they've been exacerbated by industrialization to an enormous degree due to psychological incentives with modernity, not to mention Tylenol. And the thing with, the thing with all of this is because. So Ken Wilber, who I've read recently, he's Hometh's favorite writer talks about Tears of consciousness. He says that one of the elements of modernity is we crush everything. That's an internal state, where he has a chart between the individual and the collective and the internal and the external. And so the only thing that exists is the outside material world that we can measure. What that does is utterly remove meaning or purpose or happiness or theory of mind from the human world. And that backfires because it causes things like invading Iraq and thinking that the Muslims will glorify us as liberators, which of course they won't. Or stuff like the hello to More or the Great Leap Forward, where people are rationally projecting how their minds perceive the world onto a highly complex reality and they lack the ability to take a step back, actually fact check if the things they're saying are true. And that's a lot easier if you have theory of mind. But modernity destroys theory of mind. However, this is not the Eurasian step. I think this is a useful tangent, but let's actually get to the Eurasian step.
- [12:34]
Rudyard Lynch
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- [14:26]
Whatifalthist
So the Eurasian Steppe, it's. I talk a lot about the Big Four Eurasian civilizations, and those have been the ones that have carried human history. For a lot of human history, 90% of humans lived within the big four, that being Europe. The Middle east is Europe, Middle East, India, China, and there's a fifth which does and does not fit. And the fifth is the step where the steppe has affected the rest of human history as much as the Big Four. And in most maps or surveys of this, they have the Big Four hug the Eurasian water system with this huge dry area in the middle, and that's Eurasia. And so the other way to perceive this is that Eurasia is the central hub of the map in the Big Four. Circle around it. And this is one of the things we talked about in the Inner Asia video, where this is a different region of the world from Inner Asia. Inner Asia is the mountains and the deserts that form the spine of Asia. It's a mountain range that stretches from the Alps out to Vietnam, and the Eurasian steppe is the territory north of that. And they have had markedly different effects on history. The Eurasian Steppe is a grassland that stretches from Wallachia in Hungary, in Europe, out to the edges of Manchuria and out by Beijing and China. It's thousands of miles long. The Soviet Union or Russia made up like 12 time zones. This is a truly vast area, and it's distinct from Inner Asia because they have been irrigation peoples or mountain herders or those things where Inner Asia has existed as a historic buffer space, but it hasn't been a juggernaut. And the thing with the Eurasian steppe is that they've consistently had, before the industrial revolution, 100th the population of areas they conquered. The Central Asians and Afghans, I'm talking about their Inner Asians. But they're approximate to the grasslands where you had grassland tribes from Kazakhstan migrate to Uzbekistan, then to Afghanistan, then to India. This has happened like 15 times. And the Tehranian steppe land and Afghanistan had 100th India's population. Same thing as Mongolia, which Conquered China many times, had 100th China's population. And the Industrial revolution radically exacerbated these trends because nomadic peoples were not able to have the population boosts that agrarian peoples did with the Industrial revolution. And so you're looking at this place with 100th the population of the great Eurasian civilizations. And all four of them, except Islam had like 100 million people in 1600. And there was, let's say, I would guess, like several million people in the Eurasian steppe combined, where Europe had 100 million people, India had 100 million, China had 100 million. The entire Islamic world had like 50 million people in 1600, I think. And so the Eurasian steppe has been the central region, which has vastly lower populations than the neighboring civilizations. But it is affecting affected the course of human history in an equivalent way. And it even generates inventions and cultural transmission. So you shouldn't see the Eurasian step as like a vulgar form of barbarism. They are a form of highly advanced anti civilization which exists in polarity to civilization.
- [18:22]
Eric Torrenberg
So when you mentioned that they were a kind of central hub that things float out of and more consequential even though they get ignored, I thought of a water analogy with a spring. And it fit the rest of your filling up pools of water. And it fit the rest of your analogy because a spring has a lot less water, right? That fits the population point and it's pooling. The civilizations are the pools that result as a lack that results from the spring. And there's a lot more volume and they're steady, but the spring is still a generation generational force.
- [19:00]
Whatifalthist
Whoa, man. Let me tell you what the alchemical symbolism of water. So in alchemy or the Hermetica, water is a specific type of sort of symbolism where these ancient philosophies would take things symbolically. They're not talking literal water, they're talking about things that carry water like traits. And so water is chaotic, it's innovative, and it's also fluid. And that's a great way to look at the nomads. Because when people meditate upon water in various religious traditions, what they're trying to say is I want to be a liquid when it's useful, I want to be a solid when it's useful and a gas when it's useful. So water is the ultimately fluid substance and it can go wherever it needs to. And when you look at the nomadic peoples, they consistently had advantages because the reason that these great sedentary empires that bordered them were not able to conquer the steppe is that they could not really fight the nomads, because when the Russians, the Chinese or the Persians marched these huge armies onto the grassland, the nomads could just move out and they moved faster than the sedentary empire. So it was very difficult to capture nomadic forces because everyone was on horseback and they were riding faster than you. Where all of the sedentary civilizations use predominantly infantry armies. So the nomads had significantly more mobility. And when you look out on the Step, you find that it's a. There's this duality of chaos, chaotic anarchy and totalitarianism because the tribes spread around, they live their own lives, they have to travel around so that their herds don't overgraze a certain area. And so there's this enormous split. And the Eurasian steppe was unified by these broader clans and ethnic identities. But then a great leader emerges. He puts all of the people under his banner. They live as a single war band. They attack the neighboring civilizations, they get loot. The king, or the khan needs to maintain this loot to keep his men satisfied. Where a big issue with Eurasian steppe culture was that they were dependent on the civilized peoples for wheat, for a lot of tools and weaponry, for luxuries. So they would have. They didn't really offer that many things of use to the civilized peoples. So they would raid into them to take their stuff, to get leverage, to maintain their own states. So governance in the Step was based around cults of personality, the ability to raid neighboring states, and then it was fragile, where they'd have to keep doing it again and again to maintain their administrative power. And the key issue with this was it was very fragile. And you could see why the nomad confederacies would fall apart after a few generations. And often if the death of a single great leader like Attila or Alt Arslan with the Seljuk, Genghis Khan's empire collapsed a degeneration after his death. And so the great advantage of the Step peoples was their just immense fluidity and their ability to unify, move quickly and adapt to every circumstance. The weakness though was this was not a way of life that was scalable.
- [22:48]
Eric Torrenberg
It's kind of like having a naval dominance, but with no home base or home port to take out, because even the home base of the Mongols is movable and fluid.
- [23:00]
Whatifalthist
Yeah, the Vikings were very similar. Where the Vikings stem from Scandinavia, which was. It was a non urbanized, non really built out civilized land for most of the Viking age. And so the Viking would start in Scandinavia, but then they'd build out their own bases Across Europe, whether in Scotland or France or Russia or even Turkey. And so there was this centralized locus in Scandinavia that was constantly bubbling up. And then you had the, then you had the, the Vikings that would form colonies that were self replicative up to a certain point, but they did assimilate. And that's a good place to start where you have two generative cores in the Eurasian steppe which stretch from east to west. The first was around Ukraine and what's called the Pontic grassland. And the Pontic grassland stretches from the south of Romania was part of this. The north was part of Transylvania. So south of Romania across Ukraine out to the Caspian Sea. And this was where the Aryans or the first steppe people developed. And a lot of the earlier peoples of the greatest note, like the Scythians or the Sarmatians, whatever, were from the Pontic grassland. That was the first place that developed, AKA Rohan. Yeah, exactly. Rohan is based off the Ostrogoths, who are a Germanic people who moved to Ukraine. And then the other base once the step technologies crossed Eurasia was in Mongolia and the Altai Mountains. The Altai Mountains are to Asia what the Sund is to Europe. Where the Sund, the area around Denmark is where the Germanic peoples originated in 20 successful Germanic tribes. Tacitus called it the womb of nations. And Asia's womb of nations was in the Altai Mountains where the Turkic peoples emerged. It's where the Huns came out of. And beyond the Altai were Mongolia, where the Eurasian steppe from west to east gets from wetter and warmer to drier and colder. And because the steppe empire is built off the toughness of its men, where across the great Asian civilizations, civilization gradually domesticated the population. So earlier on, the great Asian civilizations were able to fight and push back the nomads. But as civilization went along, India, Islam and China became dependent on nomadic elites for most of the last thousand years. The thing though is the same process occurred inside the Eurasian steppe where in the beginning 4,000 years ago with the first Aryan invaders, they were concentrated in Ukraine and by the end they were concentrated in Mongolia in the east, because that was the colder, drier terrain which produced the hardest men. In Genghis Khan, who is the universal empire for steppe anti civilization, he was from the northeast of Mongolia in the mountains. So he is the end point of this trend where the greatest step conqueror came from the northeastern edge, which was the coldest, poorest and driest of any region on the steppe.
- [26:34]
Eric Torrenberg
And you said that the Ukrainian Pontic people spread out east and then went back or they ended up west. Okay, yeah.
- [26:44]
Rudyard Lynch
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- [27:54]
Whatifalthist
Eurasian step culture formed and this is the best book in this by far. History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia by David Christian. He's the big history guy. He's Bill Gates's favorite author. This is really good because it's a history of inner. It's history of the region mentioned from the perspective of macro history. So look at stuff like climate change or demographic shifts or archaeology, which gets beyond the sort of bare bones political narratives of a lot of history. And the halfway mark is the 13th century, which is a good between the two volumes, which is a good sign for histories. When histories put their halfway marker on the 19th century, you know they're going to be poorly written because it's all going to be about nationalist writers in the 19th and 20th centuries living in cafes doing nothing.
- [28:46]
Eric Torrenberg
And that's where the stereotype of you only reading authors pre1960 comes from. Because you're actually aware that it's important to do that. Yeah, all you do.
- [28:56]
Whatifalthist
The thing I hate about the Internet is it's just a slander machine and no one even checks that the slander is accurate. It's not constructive criticism. It's just children in the schoolyard saying you're fat. So the thing with David Christian is he talked to this really well where the steppe culture originated due to two populations mixing. You had the Neolithic farmer population who populated all of Europe. They're Ethnically closest to Mediterranean. So the builders of Stonehenge are genetically significantly closer to Italians than they are to the modern English Anatolian. Yes, that Neolithic Anatolian farmer ancestry moved north. And we can see the edge of their habitation in both southern Ukraine and also in the border between Iran and Turkmenistan, where in southern Ukraine, the farmer peoples butted heads with hunter gatherer populations and they mixed together to form the Aryans. So the Aryans, who later conquered the region stretching from Ireland to Bengal, becoming the languages for a majority of people on Earth. They were this mixture of these two distinct populations. And new cultures tend to come from a synthesis of multiple populations who form in a land. And so when you look at the early Aryans, they were hunter gatherer peoples who rejected the farmer ways. The chariot was invented by these peoples. By the way, in the ancient world, we attribute a lot of civilizational development to civilizations because we have a modernist bias that the people in the cities are going to be the ones who make new technology, because that's been the case in modernity. But for a lot of ancient technologies, the barbarians were more advanced than the civilized peoples. So the Aryans were significantly more militarily advanced than the urban civilized populations they fought. And so the chariot developed and the cart developed on these Pontic grasslands. And there's, there's a very distinct culture that you see with the Aryans. And they viewed chariots and carts as sacred. And it took thousands of years to genetically engineer horses to be large enough to first pull a cart and then to ride, where it took cross breeding in order to be able to do both. And the first horses were the size of donkeys. By the time we get to 2500 BC, you could attach a horse to a cart and make it a chariot. And they would have two riders, one to drive it, the other to shoot arrows. By the time you get to a thousand B.C. and this was the brick that caused the Sumerians and the Scythians, you could have keep watching riding horses and then firing. It's a lot of skill to ride a horse with your, your legs through body language and then fire an arrow at the same time. That's a pro gamer move. And so with the, with the, the origins, you see the development of this society, which was highly militaristic, where they had these warrior groups called the Korios, who were the dog men, where they'd have a ritual. This is an example of such cool archaeology. The Koryos were these war bands where they'd swear together their eternal loyalty and they'd kill a dog to signify their entry. And they had their own code of honor. It's the origin of a lot of chivalry. They had a language called PI, where I'm shocked. Academics never Proto Indo European. I'm shocked. Academics never make the pie joke. Academics have no humor. And then they also had a religion that was a composite of all of the Aryan religions. So you have the like Diu Pater became Jupiter, the thunder God on top. You had the drag. The hero kills the dragon. The Norse God Odin was supposed to be a man who lived 4,000 years ago, who got the German tribes from Ukraine to Scandinavia and is the father of the German nation. And that's actually from the Heimskringla. I believe that's Heimskringla and the Edda. And it's interesting that so many of these European peoples knew that their ancestors were from the Pontic grassland, because the Germanic myths is that Odin took them from the area around. They say Troy, but I think they mean the Black Sea area to Scandinavia. In the Celtic myths, their ancestors are also heroes from Troy. And if you live in Ireland or Britain, you'll think the Black Sea region equals Troy, because Troy is where it lets out same thing as the Romans. Their original myth is that they're from that area. And so the Europeans had some sort of faint notion that their ancestors came in from the steppe. And they talk of the indigenous peoples being the fairies or the elves. Fairies are Celtic, elves are Norse, dwarves are Norse, dryads are Greek. And that's been this mythologization of the indigenous Neolithic farmer populations, where it would be as if centuries after the American conquest of the New World, we had turned the natives into mythical creatures. Where you can see that sort of trajectory in culture and cinema from a century ago, where they created these sort of racist extrapolations of Native Americans.
- [34:42]
Eric Torrenberg
Right.
- [34:42]
Whatifalthist
Study of no literacy. That just compounds. Right.
- [34:46]
Eric Torrenberg
And it. And it. If that continued compounding in that way, you could see it leading to a similar kind of mythology. But I guess we. We got ahead of that narrative, I don't know, by being able to dig up more information, to double check it.
- [35:03]
Whatifalthist
Were were several levels of consciousness more advanced than they were where back then they were incapable of distinguishing between my reality. They were incapable of distinguishing between your internal monologue and the outside world. And so for them, these myths would form naturally. And because they corresponded to these divine archetypes, the myths, even if they were not factually true, they were still true. And that's one of those Things where it would take me a lot of time to explain their logic. And ancient cultures combine sort of childlike stupidity in some ways with profound spiritual truths more advanced than what we have. Where on one level they have these very silly sort of nursery rhyme stories, oh, the gods made the earth because the humans were too loud. And then they'll also combine these mystery traditions that have these incredibly profound truths. And ancient religions are sort of. You have to pick through which of those is which. But.
- [36:03]
Eric Torrenberg
Right. The key is the point more than making fun of the silly metaphor. It's like, oh, what is the metaphor representing? Well, at least they're getting that right.
- [36:11]
Whatifalthist
Yeah. And a lot of the very oldest stories are of Aryan origin, like the Dragon Slayer or Hansel and Gretel, or Snow White are all Snow White. Little Red Riding Hood are all stories that we can trace back to the Aryan homeland, like in Ukraine and the Pontic Grassland. And there's a lot of names in the topic. I don't want to step too much in the toes of the Aryan video I released with Eric, like, a century ago, but people. Academics have tried to get around the Aryan invasions partly for Indians. They don't want to admit they were conquered by Europeans thousands of years ago, so they say it started in India. For Western academics, they don't like the Nazi connection. So for a while they said there was no Aryan invasion. Then the genetic, the linguistic, the archaeological, the mythological proof was just too much. Most North Europeans are majority Aryan ancestry now. So that's a huge genetic component you can't remove.
- [37:09]
Eric Torrenberg
Right. They may have thought that the Irish were elves, but at least they knew that Europeans came from the Caspian Sea area.
- [37:18]
Whatifalthist
And so academics tried to deny the Aryan invasions at all. The genetics results came in. They were way too ironclad. Then you saw the mixing up of terms. This group, who I call Aryans because that's the old 18th century term. They've been called the Yamnaya, the Kurgan, the Pie, or the Pie. There's like this one type of step ancestry. There's another type of step ancestry. There's the. The Beaker culture in Europe, the Corded Ware. The Beaker culture is Northwest Europe. Corded Ware is Central Europe. The Andronovo culture is Central Asia. The Indo Aryan culture is into India and Iran. And so for this one group, in this singular migration which came out of Ukraine, we have 10 different names. And that makes it a quite daunting topic because people will pick different names for each of these. For some of the biggest ones, the Kurgan one of the more popular names is because they leave these huge burial mounds and you'll see like sacrificed wives and slaves and all their goods. And these steppe peoples, they were the most amenable to female warriors and they had some of the highest status for women out of any culture. Because warrior cultures are the ones that give women the most status. And so when the Greeks talked of the Amazons or these Scythian steppe women who would fight, they were talking about a culture where women had significantly higher status than Greece, where Athens at the time of Pericles treated women as bad as the Taliban does today. In this sort of attacked Greek concepts of civilization. Because the Scythians were clearly quite manly and a quite vigorous people, but they also gave women very high social status. And this sort of horrified Greek authors.
- [39:12]
Eric Torrenberg
The more manly you are, the more status you can give to the women without feeling emasculated.
- [39:17]
Whatifalthist
Exactly.
- [39:18]
Eric Torrenberg
That was their metric that they got wrong.
- [39:20]
Whatifalthist
Yeah. And so the Aryan peoples. There's an interesting book I haven't read yet. It's by an Italian author. I keep it in my world history shelf. It's on the influence of steppe civilization across all the major Eurasian civilizations. And that's true. And we're going to go through it where Europe is the society most influenced by the steppe. Which is interesting because over the last millennium, Europe of the big four was the civilization least affected by the steppe. Because the Aryans migrated in, became the dominant population in north Europe, became a nobility in south Europe. Europe has a north south genetic gradient for Aryan versus Neolithic ancestry. And they put these step characteristics into Europe like a warrior culture, the worship of the descendants of the Aryan gods. Aryan languages more like social fluidity, comfort with chaos. Because out of the big four civilizations, Europeans are the ones that have the least farmer ancestry. And that gives Europeans more comfort with chaos and those things because farmers need to have seasonality, they need to have stability. And so Europe manifests the trait of archaic civilization less than other societies. Because what the step societies did was they just utterly destroyed the archaic phase. Where one of the things I don't like about a lot of these cultural historic metrics of development is they just utterly ignore the rise of the Aryan warrior cultures. Because they'll go from the archaic phase is this is what the Aryans destroyed was we revere Mother Nature. Everything's a cycle. Everything is the family rooted in the land. We have war, but we're not that serious about it. We submit to the priest class. And those societies dominated the Middle East, India and China and in each case, the Aryan invasions and its consequences wiped that out. So that's a huge historic event. It's like the presage for the masculine revolution, where in Europe it was utter cultural demolishment. We find practically no evidence of the older Neolithic populations in Europe. For the builders of Stonehenge, we don't know what language they spoke. We don't know. We have almost no trace words from their language, which is pretty insane because even in America, we have a lot of Native American trace words. But Native Americans are 0.5% of our genetics. And so there's been a complete cultural wash over Europe. And in the Middle east, the Aryans pushed and they conquered Turkey and Mitanni in North Iraq and Persia, and they installed the ruling class that were Aryan on top of the local population. Population. And this caused a chain reaction in which the Middle Eastern states had to build out their military structures and their sort of dominance. Because before then, in Mesopotamia, the two big river valley civilizations were Mesopotamia and Egypt. And the area in between in Greater Syria was a series of sort of small city states. The Mesopotamians had to introduce chariot warfare rather than their earlier pike formations. And this killed early Mesopotamian. I don't want to call it democracy, but rule by councils of elders, because the war king had to stay in charge. Where Mesopotamia had the war king and there was the peace king. And then as war got bigger, the peace king was never in charge. And then in Egypt, they were conquered by the Semitic Hyksos, people from Israel, who took the chariots from the Aryans and then conquered Egypt. Because in Egypt, they didn't even have bronze weapons yet, and they had barely integrated bows into their warfare. I think the Egyptians might have used slings before the Hyksos. They'd have to check that. And so in Europe, it was an utter sort of cultural wash from the steppe and in the Middle east, created the congress of warring states. That the Bronze Age world was where the. The Step turned up the pressure in the Middle Eastern equilibrium. So by the end of the Bronze Age, you have the warring states of the Hittites and the Mycenaeans and the Egyptians and the Babylonians and the Assyrians.
- [43:55]
Eric Torrenberg
Kind of like how Napoleon turned Europe into larger warring states. Like an external force forces, a series of unilate, more organized blocks. That's really interesting, and it tracks with what you said about how the Step people in the east, they ruled China a lot, but they didn't replace the population as much. Maybe India, it's like 50, 50, but in Northern Europe, it's like 95 or something.
- [44:23]
Whatifalthist
Yeah.
- [44:24]
Eric Torrenberg
So maybe not that high.
- [44:26]
Whatifalthist
In the modern British are 90% Aryan invaders with 10% of the local population. The thing with that, in Irish mythology, Ireland had four waves of genocidal invaders, with the modern Irish being the fourth. And we think that's fairly accurate. You should check with Uber Boyo. But that fairly commensurate with the genetics data we have. But then the Aryans, before they migrated to Britain, mixed with Neolithic farmers back on the continent. So it's not 90% Aryan ancestry, it's 90% invaders who had already mixed with the Neolithic farmers in the Netherlands and Germany or whatever. And so in the Middle east, the first wave of Aryan invaders, they formed those states like Mycenae, the Minoans, we believe, were Aryan. I've seen conflicting evidence on that. The Hittites were. The Mycenaeans were so the top part of states in the Bronze Age geopolitical world. And with the Bronze Age collapse and the collapse of all civilization in the greater Middle east between Turkey, Greece and northern Iraq and the Levant in Pakistan, except for Pakistan, that largely was not facilitated by the nomadic tribes, which is disappointing because the nomadic tribes facilitate all the civilizational collapses. It's like when your dad normally attends your baseball games, but he misses due to a work meeting. Sorry I'm so cruel, but. So the Bronze. The end of the Bronze Age collapse created another pressure in the step where I don't think these are really different groups, they're just different names because people weren't keeping track of what was going on in Ukraine. They were just watching the waves of barbarian invaders. And after the original Aryans, that culture mutated into the Sumerians, like Conan the Sumerians. Because Robert E. Howard, the. You know Conan, right?
- [46:33]
Eric Torrenberg
Oh, yeah. I didn't know he was Sumerian.
- [46:35]
Whatifalthist
So Robert E. Howard was a Texan. I should probably visit his house at some time. Conan was this barbarian warlord from a 1930s fantasy novel. My friend Samo Berger likes to say that Conan is a better representation of the ancient and prehistoric world than most modern academics. And I would agree, because they believe monsters and magic and heroic adventures. Howard was a huge history buff, so he'd throw these obscure references in. And he was also a Celtic nationalist because he was of Scots Irish ancestry. So Conan the Cimmerian, there's those proto Celtic populations. And he took the name of Cimmerian from this Ukrainian people and then applied it to this fantasy nation.
- [47:22]
Eric Torrenberg
Okay, I was thinking like Babylon, Sumeria.
- [47:25]
Whatifalthist
No people make up this. People get Confused. Sumerian is C I m m e r I N Southern Iraq is S u m e r I a n. A lot of people get messed up by that, so don't take it personally. This is. You're like the 12th person I've seen that happen to.
- [47:48]
Eric Torrenberg
Fascinating.
- [47:49]
Whatifalthist
Yeah.
- [47:50]
Eric Torrenberg
All right. That helps color the Conan thing. And that also leads into another question I had because this I knew about the horse evolution progression. I didn't know they had to breed them so much before the carts. And I didn't know that it wasn't until 1000 BC that they had horses because that really messes with my mental model because I thought of the Step people always traveling across on horses. Did they walk?
- [48:14]
Whatifalthist
So they rode carts.
- [48:16]
Eric Torrenberg
And then right before the carts, I guess they didn't travel as much. Probably.
- [48:19]
Whatifalthist
Yeah, they. So the invention of the carts was a huge breakthrough in Step history. David Christian talks about it. Because what it did is it allowed the mass migration across the Step, because the Step is so huge, where the distance from the distance from the borderland between Germany and Poland, the distance between the borderland between German occupied Poland and basically Belarus to Moscow is the distance from the east coast to Kansas City. And that's just the western fifth of the Step. So the steppe is an enormous landscape and a lot of it is not really habitable. And so when the Aryans invented the cart in the western steppe, it allowed them to facilitate migration out to western China. So the invention of the cart in the chariot was a snapping moment because it firstly allowed the mass slaughter of urban populations. Because McNeil likes to say that chariots fighting spearmen was the equivalent of infantry without anti tank weapons or bazookas fighting tanks. So the chariots could just slaughter infantry armies, whole scale. And the civilized nations had to get their own chariots to fight back against the nomads. That was the first thing, the profound military advantage. The second thing was it allowed rapid mobility. So you saw the Aryan spread from Ukraine and the Caspian Sea to Transoxiana in modern Uzbekistan, then down to Afghanistan, Iran, India, and then out to the Tian Shan mountains. So the invention of the cart allowed this rapid Aryan migration across the steppe, which they had not been able to do beforehand. And I think this involved the introduction of apples across Asia. And then they reached out to the Tian Shan Mountains and the Altai on the edge of China, where there were Aryan populations in western China until the time of the Romans. Then the Huns picked up this technology from the Aryans, where there are some historians suspect the Aryans even made it to North India. Then when the Huns took that technology, they could turn it back on the West Eurasians more easily and especially. So the invention of riding on horses by itself gave eastern Eurasia an advantage over western Eurasia because Mongolia didn't have enough wood to make a lot of chariots. It didn't have the wealth because very expensive Ukraine and Kazakhstan did. But once it was just guys on horses with arrows, then the toughness of Mongolia could offset the wealth of further west in the steppe.
- [51:16]
Eric Torrenberg
That makes a lot of sense because I was confused about how it went from west to east and then east to west based on the hardness of the dry, less wet climate. And then I'm wondering if, like. Because I looked up Conan, it was set a long time ago, and he rode horses and camels and elephants. So that's one inaccurate part of Conan we're gonna have to Conan address.
- [51:41]
Whatifalthist
Conan's an imaginary universe. It's just so made up. I wouldn't even hold it historic.
- [51:46]
Eric Torrenberg
Oh, yeah, I'm just joking. But like, the, the, the joke that I'm getting to with this is that Conan's so big, he wouldn't be able to ride a horse till at least 500 BC. But then I'm also wondering if our Mongolians smaller and would that give them like a couple 100 years earlier ability to ride a horse? Plus they had the incentive because they didn't have the cards. It's just an interesting factor.
- [52:11]
Whatifalthist
I know you're joking here, so I'm not going to take it too seriously. Conan would be Hrolf the Walker. He was a Viking chieftain who conquered normandy in the 10th century, who was so large he had to walk everywhere. His horse couldn't carry him. He was like six, nine. Nice. And then the Mongolians, I think they're like several inches shorter than the West Eurasians. Asians are in general versus West Eurasian populations. I don't think it's noticeable. I think the Mongolians are the tallest of East Asian populations because steppe peoples are always taller and healthier than former peoples. Under most contexts, it's just a more virile lifestyle. And the. So the first nomadic confederacy is in the eastern part of Eurasia, where the schwang knew around 200 BC they were fronting up against the Han dynasty, where the nomadic confederacy's parallels to China formed at the exact same time as the unification of China, which I don't think is a coincidence. I think it's civilization and barbarism exist in duality. Where once the Qing monarchy unified all of North China. Then the Xuangnu formed a parallel state that was actually geographically larger in Mongolia. And we're getting ahead of the schedule here because I have to talk of the Sumerians who were 800 years earlier. But the Shangnu and the Chinese fought. And I think Modu. I think the name was. It might not be Modu Khan. I want to say Modu Khan. I think the word Khan is anachronistic. Two thousand years ago, he built up the Shuangu Empire. He fought the Chinese and they actually beat the Chinese. For the first few generations, they utterly humiliated them. The Chinese had to build the Great Wall against them. But then eventually the Chinese were able to form their enormous national size and they just salted the grassland. They went to all the water sources. They committed genocide against the Chuangnu, which then created a migratory pattern, which we've spoken about in several videos already, where the Xuangnu migrated west to escape the Chinese, creating this void in Mongolia. They then kept going west. They knocked up against the Yue Qi people of modern western China, like Uyghurstan, the Yuehi bumped into the Kushins. We don't know if they're the same or different. Cushions went to India, became the White Huns or the Hephthalites. The Xuenu became Hunu Huns and kept going west until 600 years later, they smashed into Europe with Attila. And so you see this migratory pattern stem from the Chinese war and genocide of The Huns in 200 BC eventually result in Attila the Hun and the fall of Rome.
- [55:19]
Eric Torrenberg
It makes me think how much like chaos and fog of war increases the incentives for a genocide or something, because they're just getting raided every few years. They don't know how like far this force goes. They don't know if they're going to get totally invaded. It's very anxiety inducing.
- [55:37]
Whatifalthist
Yeah.
- [55:37]
Eric Torrenberg
And then they're just, they move up and like, poisoning the water source is probably not even a second thought to them.
- [55:44]
Whatifalthist
Yeah, the, the, the, the Huns fought the Chinese in a more brutal way than any other opponents fought them. And the, the nomads were in general more brutal than sedentary populations. That was a consistent theme that the Mongols really exacerbated because they saw the foreign people as sheep. So the Chinese didn't feel any guilt treating genociding the Huns. And the thing that really stung them was the dishonor of having to pay the Huns tribute and also marrying Chinese princesses off to the Hunnish royal family. And those were the things that really sunk into the Chinese that they needed to take revenge for. But the Chinese could only pull that trick a few times. The Han could master the eastern grassland. It was impossible to really settle sedentary populations in the grassland till gunpowder. You could do it periodically, but if you're a farmer out in the steppe, you're just way too vulnerable. You can get destroyed at any given time. You can. It's. Your nation cannot muster an army to defeat you, to defend you, because you're out. You're. You're out in the grassland. And both the Indians and the Chinese didn't really have cavalry warfare before they fought the nomads. The Indians didn't shift and they just got conquered. And the Chinese tried to shift where they would buy out these huge amounts of cavalry from the steppe and then train Chinese men to fight with them. Combined with steppe nobilities taking over China. But the dynamic between Mongolia, or the geographic area of Mongolia, which was only later populated by ethnic Mongols, and China has helped create both. Because part of the reason the Chinese state has held together is the external threat that the Mongols posed. Because Beijing is not very far from the Step. And the reason Beijing held all of China was because it was so hard to fight the Step that the Chinese who could do it were the ones who developed the leadership abilities and the military abilities to conquer the rest of China.
- [57:58]
Eric Torrenberg
Yeah, right. That makes total sense. And it's an interesting thing with the shame of having to give tribute and the resistance to that, because I think, and I don't have any historical proof of this, and maybe you do. I think there's a corollary, corollary on the other side, where accepting tribute also can create internal division or resistance from your side. Because it. The idea that they. Because you build up these myths about being superior and dominant and we're going to win easily. And then the implication of accepting tribute is that you don't have full control over them, so you're coming to a compromise, when in reality it's like a way to pragmatically extract value more than you're going to lose. But I imagine there was some, like, internal divisions and psychological upsetness with accepting tribute as well as giving it.
- [58:53]
Whatifalthist
I think the Huns just wanted money. They were so desperate. Keep in mind, Mongolia is so desperately poor that they need this to maintain themselves. And so after a while, it becomes.
- [59:05]
Eric Torrenberg
The pattern and the goal.
- [59:06]
Whatifalthist
Yeah, exactly. Because it's not like the Shuang New had other valuable industries. I mean, they did sell horses and hides and stuff. But the, the Schwangnu did become dependent on Chinese luxuries and then that in turn made them weak enough that the Chinese could destroy. That was actually something Chinese historians wrote about at the time because they visit the Shuang new capitals later and they'd find that they lived in their own towns. They would have fine silks and wines and they became civilized. They understood Chinese literature and the Alphabet and all those different things. But to get back to the western step, the there was the migration from the Aryans down to India. We've spoken of that in several other videos. They formed the ruling class and the philosophic and linguistic structure of India because the Aryans conquered the north Gangetic plain through Afghanistan, populating the area there. And they Sanskrit, the dominant religious language of India is of Aryan origin. The upper castes across all of India, even in the bottom, claim to be of Aryan ancestry. The Tamil Brahmins claim to be Aryan, although genetically they're more Dravidian ancestry. It's a kind of pwn to racists that the smartest and highest achieving demographic of Indians are the least Aryan. That's the Tamil.
- [60:41]
Eric Torrenberg
Oh, in the south, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [60:44]
Whatifalthist
And so the step formed this underlying substructure in India which then had to mold with the local population in a way that in Europe it just didn't. And that symbolized in the priest class eventually winning out over the the warrior caste in India. But then in the west, the people that took advantage on the switch from carts to horses were the Sumerians and later the Scythians who are basically the same group. They were Indo Iranic peoples where if you were to go to the western Steppe in the B.C. period, there were people who spoke a language closer to Iranian who would have appeared European genetically or lookwise or we'll see Andronovo peoples in Central Asia or Iran, where there's a term, I think it's like I forget it starts with an A. It's the Indo Iranian Persian culture. And they look European when you do reconstructions of their genetics or skulls. And I've spoken before, this is a highly sort of romanticized culture, especially in Europe 200 years ago they had a lot of noble savage traits between the Scythians and the Sumerians, giving women high status, being made mighty warriors, smoking weed, having long hair. I always include those details because they're funny. But the Sumerians started in Ukraine. They smashed south over the mountains of Turkey and Armenia and they attacked Assyria. And this is a war. I wouldn't think much else about it, except Dan Carlin had a really good explanation. Where Assyria was the universal empire of Mesopotamia. It was the first people to conquer the entire Fertile Crescent, from Egypt through the Levant into Iraq. And they were a brutal totalitarian state like Nazi Germany. And one of the things that Dan Carlin says is the Assyrians stopped the Sumerian invasions multiple times at the gates of. At the bowl gates, the Taurus gates between Syria and Turkey, where the Assyrians mustered their energy to fight off these enormous Sumerian barbarian invasions. And they ultimately succeeded, but at great cost. That ultimately killed the Assyrian empire because Assyria, a big reason it died was they just ran out of young men or the willpower to run this military operation. And so Dan Carlin liked to say, we see the Assyrians as bad and evil, which they were, but they did also save civilization.
- [63:25]
Eric Torrenberg
That's interesting, because I always thought of Assyria collapsing because it got too authoritarian. It turned all the countries in the region against them, which is true. That's a big factor. But I didn't know that they were also blocking, using a lot of their resources to block the Northern. Yeah, so to speak.
- [63:43]
Whatifalthist
So they had several highly draining wars. One was their attempt to conquer Armenia, which failed, where the Armenians just slaughtered them in the mountains and the. The snow. They tried multiple times and it didn't work. They lost a lot of men fighting the Sumerians. And then Babylon. The Jews in Egypt kept rebelling again and again and again because they were so authoritarian and they weren't able to sort of stay in their conquered people's good graces because they didn't know how to use sort of carrots. Where the Persians and Aryan steppe people after did a much better job with that because they learned the lessons from Assyria. The Scythians were the next group. They were the population which lived across the entire western steppe, from Kazakhstan in Central Asia out to Romania. And the Greeks wrote a lot at the Scythians. They were people they respected a lot. The Scythians around Ukraine, they'd use slave labor to make grain. And Athens and the Greek city states were dependent on the grain produced in Ukraine by the Scythians. And they also sold lots of slaves to the Greeks, especially sex slaves, which have been a consistent. The nomads have sold lots of sex slaves to sedentary populations from Eastern Europe. That was one of their biggest industries. And a big point of the Peloponnesian War was Athens was cut off from this Ukrainian grain supply. So they started starving, which is an ancient example of globalization. But the Scythians raided pretty far out after the Bronze Age collapse and with the fall of Assyria, there were Scythian armies who made it all the way down to Israel. And they raided the edges of Egypt, they raided Babylon. It's a wonder the Scythians didn't attack Greece. There's a theory that the reason why is because the Balkans, this was a wet period, so the Balkans was super wooded. So the Scythians couldn't get their horses through the woods of the Balkans. In a way, the Step tribes attacked Greece later. And the Scythians, as we said in the Inner Asia video, they wiped out two Persian field armies in Ukraine and in Central Asia, where Cyrus the Great died fighting the Masagti Queen Timuris in Central Asia. And the Scythians were just, they were just mighty warriors.
- [66:17]
Eric Torrenberg
And it reminds me of what you said about technology not always emerging or developing in the civilization that seems like directly tied to these kind of groups using not only horses, but iron weapons or the sea people having iron weapons, conquering the more sophisticated quote unquote, Bronze Age civilizations. And. And then also the Assyrians. It sounds like they saved us from a really confusing war between the Sumerians and the Sum Sumerians because if they got down to Babylon, it would have.
- [66:50]
Whatifalthist
Been a disaster for technicalities case the Sumerians had died, they've been replaced by Babylon. But it was the same civilizational trajectory. They spoke a different language, used the same cities, same sort of self identity, etc. The Babylonians were Arabs, they were Semites. But your joke is funny and the point you made is brilliant as well, that the reason the Step nomads did not participate in the Bronze Age collapse was that by that point the large Middle Eastern states had already integrated chariot warfare, which was the steppes advantage. The European Sea peoples had the iron weapons advantage, which gave them the ability to crush the Middle east in the Bronze Age collapse. And then the Step peoples only caught up 200 years later with the ability to ride horses.
- [67:44]
Eric Torrenberg
Yeah, I was watching this animated show called Primal, which is just a fun show that this caveman kind of goes through different civilizations and he's like in an Egypt kind of area. And then he ends up in Celtic area with stone houses and iron swords. And I'm like, okay, well this is kind of taking me out of it because it's so a horse, a historical. It's just Max mixing ancient Egypt's with like modern calcium that are like these sophisticated Warriors. And I'm like, oh, that are beating up the Egyptians. And I'm like, oh, wait, that actually existed. There were like stone house villages with iron swords that you, you know, associate with later periods.
- [68:23]
Whatifalthist
You had Celtic, you had Celtic populations living in central Turkey. They were the Galatians, and they also fought for mercenaries for the Egyptian government or the Syrian government. So that happened. Culturally, the Persians were another steppe people. They started to settle down, and once they settled down, they lost a lot of their military ferocity. Where the Persians conquered, they conquered a majority of the Earth's population in the around 500 BC and they used a lot of like horse cavalry. They were on top of the Medes, who were an earlier horse tribe, Aryan Empire, who the Persians integrated with them because they were culturally close enough. And once the Persians grew weak, then the Parthians, who were another Aaronic horse people who are very closely related, they were from Turkestan, they conquered Persia and revitalized the Persian state. And so once we get to what McNeill calls the first ecumene around the birth of Christ, where you have the great states of the Han dynasty in China, which stretched out to Central Asia, Europe, with the Roman Empire hugging the Mediterranean. And these were states with roughly comparable populations with roughly comparable territories. And then you have the smaller Kushan Empire in Central Asia, North India, you have the Persian Empire, who are Parthians. And so Eurasia is centralized into four major states. And then you had a few others around the map, like in India or Armenia or whatever. And this is when the steppe was its calmest. And it's the first stage of the Silk Road, where Romans would travel out to Vietnam and China. Chinese made it to Iraq. The western steppe became populated by the Sarmatians, who were another Indo Iranic people who conquered the Pontic grassland from further east once the Scythians grew wealthy and decadent. But the Sarmatians themselves had the same issue after a few centuries. And the Romans loved Sarmatian cavalry. They would use them as heavy cavalry knights. And they were actually instrumental in the conquest of Britain, where they would use these Scythian knight cavalry in Britain, where they left a distinct population there for centuries.
- [71:12]
Eric Torrenberg
They left a distinct population of what?
- [71:14]
Whatifalthist
There was a Sarmatian Scythian population in Rome written for centuries. And there's even theories that King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table is a descendant of that.
- [71:24]
Eric Torrenberg
That's crazy. And what, what year would that have been?
- [71:26]
Whatifalthist
That would have been first century A.D. i'm kind of skeptical that it's the origin of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Because by that point cataphract heavy cavalry warfare had been normalized across the empire.
- [71:40]
Eric Torrenberg
I was gonna say, because I can't picture King Arthur smoking weed. But.
- [71:46]
Whatifalthist
And so you have the Sarmatians in the west in the Roman period out east you had the remnants of the Huns. The eastern steppe was mostly depopulated. In the middle you had a variety of Scythian tribes. But even in the Roman Empire period, the Asians were moving west and displacing the central steppe where both of them get to the medieval period. The population of Ukraine and the Pontic grassland were Turkic peoples, originally from Mongolia. And so over the early medieval and the Roman period you saw this demographic transfer across the steppe of Asian populations replacing European populations. And so as an example, it wasn't fully demographic where in the Mongol period there were lots of Asian Mongols in Russia, but it was mostly sort of white Turkic people where the Turkic peoples maintained an Asian language with more west Eurasian populations. And so when you're dealing with the Pechenegs, the Pecheneg or Circassian mercenaries who ruled Mameluke Egypt, or the Tatars who were fighting the Russians in the early modern period, these are people speaking Turkic languages who looked mostly European with a sort of Asian flair. And they were known to have the most beautiful women in the world, both the Volga Tatars and the Circassians. And by the time you get to fall of Rome, the west Eurasian populations who have been removed from western China, from Central Asia. And with the fall of Rome era came the collapse of the first Eurasian ecumen Where of the great states the Roman Empire fell, the Han dynasty fell. Northern India fell into a dark age. The Persians did a better job. They didn't have a lot of big cities anyway, so they didn't have a lot of space to fall. And this was the second revitalization of the nomad tribes where they worked in conjuncture with the collapse of these states. And also the world got colder, which meant there was a bigger impetus across the steppe where the Huns smashed into Europe starting in the Pont in Kazakhstan and from China, going into the Pontic grassland in Ukraine, settling in Hungary. And then they launched a terrible series of wars between nearly taking Constantinople, genocide in the Balkans, attacking into Western Europe, being narrowly defeated at the Battle of Chalons by the Gothic Roman military under Aetius. They nearly took Rome. And the Huns were the last time that a nomadic threat really threat a nomadic threat really endangered Europe. The final Nomad invaders, I guess the Mongols did. But there were several other variables. There were several other Hun invaders, but the last time that nomadic armies were in France, or actually no, the Magyars, the last time it was really an existential threat was with the Huns. And that fell apart with Attila the Hun's death at the gates of Rome, because none of his sons could maintain the empire that stretched from the Netherlands and Poland out to the Balkans and Central Asia.
- [75:24]
Eric Torrenberg
And the German forests probably acted as a large barrier for this. Right. In a way that I maybe hadn't.
- [75:30]
Whatifalthist
Considered the Hun empire in the later European nomad empires, they were facilitated by German and Slavic allies. Where I read this book, Age of Attila, that said there were like four to ten slaves for every single Hun. And the Huns were dependent on German allied people like the Ostrogoths, where the western steppe for a lot of the late Roman period were populated by German peoples like the Ostrogoths in Ukraine, the Visigoths in Romania, and there were even the Alans, who were an ironic German affiliated people who migrated west. They were from the Caucasus. So there were vaguely Germanic cultural people in the Caucasus. Watch the Volkerwanderung video, because the Huns were like, when you're playing pool, you hit one ball that bounces to other balls. So the Hun migration from Central Asia into Central Europe created this triggering migration where you saw the Anglo Saxons migrate to England, the Franks migrate from Germany into, into France, the Visigoths to Spain, the Vandals in North Africa. So the Huns pushed the Germans west and ultimately they pushed the Germans out of Eastern Europe into Western Europe. And then the Slavs came from the marshlands of North Ukraine, populating a huge geographic region from Greece to Poland, Western Germany up to Russia. And the reason for that was that the Huns were dependent on a lot of German mercenaries and intellectuals and bureaucrats earlier on. But they also worked with a lot of Slavs. And then the later nomadic empires like the Avars or the Magyars, they would import Slavs into their empire as well. Where Hungarians are. Genetically, Hungarians speak a Finno Ugrian language. Where Finns are 20% East Asian ancestry because of Siberian origin. Where the Hungarians are very clearly of Asian origin linguistically, but they're genetically identical to the neighboring Slavic populations.
- [77:41]
Eric Torrenberg
And that's because of their relationship with the Mongols. And the. Or the hunts. Sorry. And the hunts.
- [77:48]
Whatifalthist
Yeah.
- [77:48]
Eric Torrenberg
And they, they, the Huns cleared, cleared their way to replace the Germans in those areas. Interesting. I Didn't know that. And then going back like a thousand or two thousand years or so to the first Aryan invasion or Steppe invasion, I imagine a lot of those farmers probably disappeared into those large forests with. Which also fits with the Tolkien's vision.
- [78:16]
Whatifalthist
Of the elves in the forests, I'd imagine. So the places the Orient would clear out, the first would be the river valleys. So we know archaeologically they went up the Danube first. And then the mountains and the deep forests would be the last places the natives would survive. Ice age Europe or prehistoric Europe went through so many genocides, it feels weird to call the earlier population natives because they just took it from an earlier one. But after the fall of the Hun Empire, which again was huge, you saw this void emerge across Europe and it was filled by several later tribes which were never able to really match the Huns intensity. You had the Avar Confederacy also based out of Hungary. The thing with Hungary is it's a mini grassland in the middle of Europe, so you can sustain small ish nomadic confederacy is based out of Hungary. And so the Avars, they threatened Byzantium, where them and the Persians teamed up to siege Byzantium, one on the European side, the other on the Persian side. And the Byzantines really had to pull a gamer move to get out of being besieged on both sides. But Byzantium won a lot in the beginning. The Avars eventually did grow decadent because Hungary is still fairly climactically temperate, farmable. And then Charlemagne destroyed their fortress center called the Ring, turning Hungary into a Frankish possession. And with the fall of the Frankish Empire, the Magyars or the Hungarians entered the region. They caused a lot of hell, wherein in what Tom Holland calls the Crucible of Christendom, or the period in the 9th 10th centuries when the Vikings, the Magyar Hungarians and the Arabs raided Europe. The Hungarians were a big component where they attacked across Germany to France, down the borders of Spain, they attacked across Italy where the Hungarians who were called Hungarians because they reminded a lot of Europeans of the earlier Huns, they're both from Hungary. We think the Huns spoke a Finno Ugrian language, so it's not unreasonable. And the modern German, I don't want to say the modern. The medieval German state formed as the Dukes of Saxony formed military organizations to fight off the Hungarians. And they succeeded at the Battle of Lechfeld, which created the second Holy Roman Empire. The French also fought back against the Huns, sorry, the Hungarians. And after the loss at Lechfeld, the Hungarians converted to Catholic Christianity, formed a Western country with a government and cities. But they kept enough of the nomadic traits where they had the light cavalry. A lot of the Hungarian plain was really lightly populated until the 18th century. Parts of it were populated at the same time as America. And so you had this open space for herding and grasslands and not really fully formed farming in Hungary, where although Hungary was a developed European country like any other, it kept enough of the nomadic elements and the Hungarians knew enough of the nomad games that they could keep the nomads from taking Hungary again form it as a country. And so the western border of the steppe moved from Vienna to Ukraine and Romania, which was a fairly important move in European history because it gave central, gave Germany a much larger buffer against the wilds in Italy too.
- [82:10]
Eric Torrenberg
Interesting. And that makes me think of my Napoleon comment earlier in terms of forcing centralization in France and Germany, etc. Because the Huns already did that by pressing them into the Holy Roman Empire and Charlemagne's kingdom before that at least contributing in some ways. And it's interesting that that dynamic actually reversed in Europe after that. For a while it didn't like create a permanent.
- [82:38]
Whatifalthist
Yeah, it's interesting is I think of it through the terms of the Slavs, where at the time of Charlemagne the Slavs controlled modern Berlin and northeast Germany and they're up on the Elbe. There were. There was barely a connection between Denmark and Germany of German speakers because the Slavs are pushing up in the borders of German of Denmark and they even raided Denmark. The, the, the Vikings would raid the Slavic lands, then the Slavs would raid the Viking lands in Denmark and Germany.
- [83:07]
Eric Torrenberg
And so then the Vikings in the Slavic lands would raid the Vikings and Scandinavian lands.
- [83:13]
Whatifalthist
Whoa, man. I don't think they did that. But the Middle Ages was a constant war cluster. What wouldn't surprise me, yeah, like Scandinavia.
- [83:21]
Eric Torrenberg
And Russia, they definitely invaded.
- [83:23]
Whatifalthist
I don't think the Russ attacked back into Scandinavia at the same time. The Middle Ages was a constant kaleidoscope of violence. So I don't know about it, but it would not surprise me.
- [83:32]
Eric Torrenberg
Well, you clearly haven't watched the show.
- [83:34]
Whatifalthist
Vikings, so I hate that show so much. I literally loathe that show. It's one of the most historically inaccurate things I've ever watched.
- [83:42]
Eric Torrenberg
We've broken down some of it before.
- [83:44]
Whatifalthist
Yeah, they're not friggin leather. They're not leather bikers. And the Vikings definitely knew about England before the year 800.
- [83:53]
Eric Torrenberg
Exactly.
- [83:54]
Whatifalthist
But so around a thousand A.D. there was a buffer of Hungary, Byzantium, 1100 A.D. by 1100, the Russian states, the Hungarians and the Byzantines, formed a buffer around the Pontic grassland of Ukraine. In Wallachi. And Turkic peoples populated the western steppe, like the Pechenegs and the Cumans. These were largely not that threatening. They weren't super dangerous, the Rus or the Vikings in western Russia, they had wiped out the powerful Khazar confederacy, which was based around the area north of the Caucasus, the Aryan homeland. And the Khazars converted to Judaism because they were looking for a monotheistic religion to manage their society. And they didn't want to be Christian or Muslim, so they didn't want to be dependent on the Umayyads or the Byzantines. So they converted to Judaism, a religion which could not control them. And the Khazars were fairly advanced. They had a city around modern Stalingrad, they had a trade system, they had a government. And then the Vikings destroyed the Khazars, they lost their power, which created a chaotic period in the western steppe. But before the Mongols, the Rus did a pretty good job of holding off the steppe peoples. But then we're not going to get to the Mongols. Next, I need to summarize what was going on in central and eastern Eurasia. So in eastern Eurasia, with the fall of the Han Dynasty, you saw a period of barbarian state take over and conquer North China. Between I read a book by Eberhard, which a history of China written a century ago, which goes through all of these. And it was just a chaotic clusterfuck where you had the Hun descendants conquer a lot of China. You had, I believe, the Xianbei, who were a mix of Huns and Turks. You had Tibetans conquer parts of North China, Manchus, where just all of the barbarian peoples conquered their own part of North China. And it was very similar to the fall of Rome with all these Germanic tribes, with the Vandals or the Visigoths or the Saxons conquering their own areas. And so China went through a chaotic phase. First segment of which was like 200 to 600, where barbarians conquered the north of the country. And through this chaos, China changed a lot. The barbarians introduced Buddhism to China, making it the most popular religion. Over the medieval period. They established a new warrior nobility which helped lead China, where China was unified again from 600 until like 900. And that was under barbarian descendant leadership, where the Tang Dynasty were part barbarian blood, part nomad Turkic blood. And they, we think the Zhou Dynasty might have been part Siberian ancestry. That was thousands of years earlier. I should have brought that up, but I Talk about in the ancient China video. And the Tang were again able to conquer the eastern steppe because they had enough of sort of steppe culture, Rizzo, to know how to control those people. So the Chinese controlled Mongolia. The Tang Dynasty got as far into Inner Asia of any Chinese empire ever. They were out in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. They fought the Arabs there. But then with the fall of the Tang dynasty in the 900s, you saw this opening because the later Song dynasty lacked that sort of vigor. And with the fall of the Tang, you saw the rise of like the 12 warlords on the edge between China and. And Mongolia. The strife with trying to keep these warlords down collapsed the Chinese central government. Then you saw the north of China get conquered again by the Jin and the kitten meow peoples. And so by the time of Genghis Khan, North China was controlled by these Manchurian and Mongolian peoples. South China was ethnically Hannah. And then Gansu province was controlled by ethnic Tibetans, where western China was populated by a people who were called Uyghurs. But they're not related to the modern Uyghurs, which I don't know how much I believe that or if that's propaganda.
- [88:33]
Eric Torrenberg
Interesting. That'd probably be complicated to break down.
- [88:38]
Whatifalthist
The current narrative is that There were the 12th century Uyghurs who allied with Genghis Khan who lived in modern uyghurstan. In the 18th century, there was a wide scale genocide of the Dzungar people which the modern Uyghurs were supposed to migrate into the region. I talked to a professor about this. He said this narrative. But that seems like it would be very convenient propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party that the modern Uyghurs have only been there for 300 years. But if there's a people who call themselves the same thing, who speak the same language in the same area, I suspect there's the bedrock Uyghur population who just stayed there. And then there was a Zungar population on top of it who got genocide in 1700.
- [89:21]
Eric Torrenberg
Right. And the Uyghurs and the Zungars were much more similar to each other than the Zungars were to the Chinese.
- [89:28]
Whatifalthist
Yes.
- [89:29]
Eric Torrenberg
Yeah.
- [89:30]
Whatifalthist
And I, I also don't.
- [89:31]
Eric Torrenberg
And 300 years is enough anyways.
- [89:33]
Whatifalthist
Yeah, yeah. I don't fully trust the narratives in this region of the world because they're so colored by propaganda. China is one of the worst countries for that.
- [89:43]
Eric Torrenberg
And then, yeah, I'm not going to spend all my time worrying about it because of various things, but I'm not going to like not acknowledge it or whatever.
- [89:52]
Whatifalthist
Yeah, I agree with that. That seems fair. So with the Tang Dynasty and their fall, we moved to the center of the Asian region because by the period of Genghis Khan, the West had stabilized. The east had stabilized, but the big breakthrough was in the center with the Turks. And the Turks were originally from Western Mongolia and the Altais, and they were Asians who gradually mixed with West Eurasians to form the current population of Central Asia, which appears Eurasian, like a mix of a European and a Chinese. And the Turks, under their great leader Alp Arslan and his father, who was also pretty cool or his grandfather, they claimed descent from the wolf, much like the Mongols. There's a great Turkic old war song. It's about how you see your horses riding by and they're so beautiful and you're just overcome by the beauty of your charging horses. Step people be like. And so the Turks form the Gokturk confederacy, which is one of those like sort of placeholder historic dynasties. I know they were there. I know they did stuff. I don't know that much more than that. They controlled the Central step in like the 7th and 8th centuries. And then with the weakening of the central Muslim empire, the Turks filled the void. Because in the Muslim world, they couldn't trust. They could not trust people to help govern because the family is so strong in Islam that if you hire someone else to help you govern your country, they will support their family's interests, not the country's interests. And with your own family members, they get really uppity and they expect stuff from you which you don't want to offer them because it's not in the interest of the country. So the way Muslim dynasties across the region, whether in India or in Egypt or Iraq, solved this is by having slave barbarian slave soldiers fight for them. And it got these very strange dynamics where these slave soldiers, they would often live in palaces, they'd have armies, they'd live in quite wealth, but they were still technically slaves. And as is totally obvious, I don't know, I haven't thought of it, the slaves would just take power because if you have the swords, you have the power. And that occurred across the Muslim world, where after the sort of impetus of the shared faith in Islam, from the Prophet Muhammad, which powered first the Umayyads and then the Abbasids, the people with the will to rule in the Muslim world were these slave soldiers. And so the Turks seized control as being slave soldiers as the dictators of Central Asia around 1000 A.D. then the ruling dynasty of India were Mameluke slave soldiers. From the 12th to the 13th centuries. They founded Delhi and conquered the Gangetic plain. Mahmud of Ghazni, the first Muslim leader to push back the push to conquer beyond the indus in the 11th century. He was an ethnic Turk and he just looted the Hindu palaces of modern Pakistan. And then the next generation were the Mamluks, who conquered out into from modern Pakistan into modern India. And the Delhi Mameluke slave sultans by the 14th century controlled nearly all of India. Before collapsing. They raided across almost the entire subcontinent. And then the Muslims fell apart. And then another Muslim dynasty conquered almost all of India again in the 17th and 18th centuries, that being the Mughals. And the Mughals were also a lot of ethnic Turks and Mongols. So it's this consistent pattern of India just getting utterly destroyed by step peoples and their descendants.
- [94:04]
Eric Torrenberg
What are Turks? I keep getting confused by this because I know like, you got Europeans, you've got Eurasians, you've got Asians, you've got Arabs. The Turks seem to be like kind of in the middle of it all.
- [94:17]
Whatifalthist
Yes. So this is a hard issue to deal with because. So as far as I understand, their languages are still mutually intelligible. A Turk can talk to a Uyghur in western China and they'll understand each other fairly well. It's even close for like a Turkmen, which is Central Asia. I mean, if you're freaking cold, like if a Turkmen lives in Central Asia and a Turk lives in Anatolia, that's a close enough identity. Keep in mind these are populations that diverge centuries after the Anglo Saxons and the Germans. So if the Icelanders, because you have the Norman conquest in England messing up the data set, if the Icelanders are intelligible to the Scandinavians back home, the Turks will be intelligible to the Turkmen or the Kazakhs. So there's a broad level of lingual in intelligibility. Then beneath it you see demographic transfers. The initial Turks and they all call themselves Turks in Mongolia were demographically East Asians, like the Chinese, they would have looked nearly purely East Asian. Once you get to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, it's half Persian European ancestry, half East Asian ancestry. Then we get to modern Anatolia. It's a real cultural and genetic mix between an underlying Mediterranean population which are most which like the Greeks or Italians, you have a significant North European population from invasions and slave trading. You have a Middle Eastern population and you have an East Asian population with Siberian characteristics. And that differs across Anatolia. And the reason that happened is that One branch of the Turks went east, another branch went west with the Seljuks. And then you have the later slave Mamelukes. So the Seljuks were this Turkic confederacy from Central Asia which conquered the entire Middle East. And they wiped out the Byzantine army in Armenia at Manzikert, destroying the Byzantine control of Anatolia, which had been their main power center, center. And they took out everything down to even Jerusalem. So for a generation, in normal step fashion, the Seljuks controlled the entire Middle east before it fell apart in Anatolia. Seljuk commanders could pull things back together under the Sultanate of Raoul or Rome, which controlled Central Anatolia. They fought the Byzantines and won. And when the Crusaders took Constantinople, it cemented the Turkish control of Anatolia. And they had mass conversions of the local Greek Orthodox population through Sufi mystics. So the average modern ethnic Turk in Anatolia is someone of Byzantine Christian ancestry who was converted in the high medieval period. And their identity as being ethnically Turkish was this switch from a Christian to a Muslim identity.
- [97:26]
Eric Torrenberg
Oh, right, right. So that's why it's also confused. You broke it down, the confusion perfectly. Because that's why, you know, is it Arab? Is it what? And their actual identity changed with the religious swap. But Turks themselves are a civ with no ethnically consistent components.
- [97:48]
Whatifalthist
Yes, this has been a consistent thing in the Muslim world where Arab is an identity that stretches from Morocco and the Maghreb to southern Iran. I'm sure you'd find who identify as Arab, and I know you'd find them in Tanzania and you'd find them in Indonesia. But inside the Arab designation are people who look straight up European to people who are blacker than African Americans. The blackest people on earth are Sudanese Arabs. They even have a sort of hue to their skin. And the reason for that is that Arab was this religious identity which formed where if you're one of the Arabs who conquers Syria and you have six wives, all of the children of those six wives will claim to be Arab, even if they further intermix into the. Into the local region. So the Arabs had a system where if you have the slightest amount of Arab ancestry, you can claim to be as Arab as the Prophet Muhammad. At least that was the ideal it took centuries to work through. So the Arabs, and that was converted to the con that was related to the conversion to Islam. And most of all, the Turks converted to Islam because you should read the Quran in the original Arabic. And so it was this broader system of cultural assimilation. System, culture, simulation of cultural assimilation that both The Arabs and the Turks did effectively. You can even see it in the Balkans where the Bosnians are ethnically identical to the neighboring Serbians, but they took up the Turkic religion, which took up a certain degree of cultural traits, which is why they fuse as a different ethnic identity.
- [99:28]
Eric Torrenberg
And I guess part of the reason why it's so confusing is if you look at the ethnic map, there's a lot more variation and mixing in the Middle east and that area than in Europe. Like there's a lot in Africa as well.
- [99:43]
Whatifalthist
But yeah, that's been a consistent thread with Middle Eastern history where their ruling families tend to be nomads and charismatic family lines. Because there's constantly so much demographic change and invasions, it's hard to stabilize distinct nation states like France or Germany or England, because in Persia you'll have the Persian at heartland, you'll have the Aziris in the north, the Arabs in the south, you'll have the Baluchis in the southeast, and then you'll have the ruling Turkic families like the Qahars or the Seljuqs or those people. So there's enough confusion. Like the Balkans, it's hard to stabilize in a nation states. And for most of the last thousand years, the Islamic world, or most of it's been governed by these Turkic peoples, where the Turkish invasions, I will easily say were significantly more impactful to human history than the Mongols. But no one thinks about Turkic migrations where Egypt was governed by Turkic speaking peoples, the Mamluks, who were slave soldiers from the 13th to the 19th century centuries, they destroyed Egypt more than halving its population through their rapacity, because every generation they would recruit new soldiers from the steppe land. And the second you were born in Egypt, you were a second class citizen. And the reasoning for that was they didn't want to grow weak. And so they would import new people, but it would create this dissatisfied descendants of the Mamelukes in Egypt. And the Turks dealt with a similar mechanism by recruiting these Christian slave soldiers from the Balkans and then murdering all of the people who did not get the title of Khalif every generation. So when Ibn Khaldun wrote his theories about Islam and the failures of Islamic regimes, enough Muslims read it, figured out the issues of basically elite overproduction and then developed these highly draconian measures to get around it. And so the Islamic world crystallized into these extractive oppressive regimes which had figured out the loopholes of failures for previous Islamic regimes which only lasted 120 years. And that's how the Turks governed the eastern half of the Mediterranean from the 14th through the 20th centuries. And the Mamelukes governed Egypt from the 13th to the 20th century. But both of them were highly extractive regimes which weakened the Muslim world's power.
- [102:16]
Eric Torrenberg
That's a funny example of how understanding the problem can result in an absolutely terrible solution.
- [102:23]
Whatifalthist
Yeah, no cap.
- [102:26]
Eric Torrenberg
And then that reminds me very much of how you spoke about the Spanish colonies and how they would make the mixed population or people born in. In Mexico were a lower class or whatever because they were threatened by the implications of that. So interesting to see that pattern with the Turks, which. Who are also connected in character to the Spanish Empire. And just to get a visualization of who are the Turkish people? Are these the same people as the Ottomans, etc? Like, are the Pechenegs the same people as the Ottomans? Partly that might be, yeah, because they.
- [103:06]
Whatifalthist
Were on that river that went down Turkey, because. So the Turks are the Turkic people of Anatolia. The Turks are the broader designation from Anatolia to Uyghurstan and to the Akut people in Siberia. But when to break this unsimplistically, I'll say the Turks are the people in Anatolia, the Turkic peoples are the broader linguistic group. And the Turks are really interesting as a people where we tend to view them purely in Islamic terms, because that's how they'd like to be portrayed. But they've taken enormous influences from Orthodox civilization, which is obvious. They took on the structure and most of the bureaucrats and sort of administrators of the Ottoman Empire were Christians. They have that element, Hagia Sophia. The Turks kept building in the style of Hagia Sophia, which was an Orthodox church, because they just thought it was beautiful. So there's the strong Orthodox element, there's the steppe element, where until the 19th century there were still Turks who were fighting in the nomadic horseback style, because they were living in the grasslands and of central Anatolia, which, much like Hungary, can mirror the steppe enough to create a mini step. There's the Islamic element and they had a lot of Persian court culture and they had an Arabic religion. So the Ottoman Turkish Empire was a multicultural empire that mixed all of these distinct elements. And the Turks were very good at managing internal power relations on top of it. But the Turks did not have a tyranny bad enough that it fell apart, but it was a tyranny extractive enough that they held back the potential of a huge region stretching from Algeria to Iraq and from Somalia to Ukraine. And it's part of them and Spain are the two powers that killed the Mediterranean's global dominance by building these trust systems. And we talk about that in the gunpowder empires video.
- [105:17]
Eric Torrenberg
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
- [105:18]
Whatifalthist
Ottomans were the Osmanli family who were a ruling line from the borderland frontiers on the edges of Byzantium. So the Osmanlis were a Turkic warlord people who gained their skill from being on the borderlands with the Christians. Their biggest gains were conquering into the Christian Balkans, not against other Muslims for the first 200 years. And so the Osmaneli's were a ruling family which unified this latent Turkish national identity which had formed in Anatolia over centuries but had not yet been realized.
- [105:57]
Eric Torrenberg
So the Turks are essentially like Anatolians who were converted to Islam a long time ago and then mixed with Arab and Eurasian cultures.
- [106:07]
Whatifalthist
Yes, there's an extra layer of complexity here that the Anatolians before the Turks were very close to Greeks, but they weren't at the same time. Where at the time of Herodotus, western Turkey were populated by the Phrygians and the Lydians who were. The Greeks would write, yeah, they're basically identical to us. It's like Canada versus America. But the Phrygians and the Lydians had their own weird sort of degenerate practices that the Greeks scoffed at. The Greeks in turn took those practices and then the Romans scoffed at the Greeks only to take those practices. It's just the nature of degeneracy, which is life.
- [106:49]
Eric Torrenberg
Don't get cocky.
- [106:51]
Whatifalthist
Yeah, exactly. And, and so it's this gradient where like a lot of Anatolia's population were people who were ostensibly Greeks. Hellenism made them more Greek. But then you're hitting up people like the Isaurians who were the, the bandit tribes out by Tarsus on the edge with Syria. And they'd say, we're Greeks too gang. And the Greeks like, no, you guys are freaking savages. And then you get the Galatians who are the Celts of Central Turkey. You get down to the Armenians who are kind of part of the squad being orthodox gang, but they weren't. And so it's whoa, man. Identity is multifaceted. And that's especially true in the Middle.
- [107:32]
Eric Torrenberg
East where this population has developed for a while separately within similar categories. So yeah, if you try and categorize it simply, you lose the nuance.
- [107:42]
Whatifalthist
Yeah. Before the Turks, you would split them into identities like Cappadocian or Galatian or they're from Bethel Bithynia. So Turkey with like six different sub nations that they identified with. So we did the Turkish migrations now is the final one, that being the Mongols. And the Mongols were The universal empire of steppe peoples. In the universal empire thing that happens in civilizations, it's the great empire that unifies the Warring States period and then brings the final phase of civilizational development. It was the Romans for the classical civilization, America for the west, the Mauryans for India, Assyria for Mesopotamia, and Chin for China. And so the steppe had its own development as sort of anti civilization. And by the year 1200, the steppe looked pretty peaceful. Either steppe peoples had conquered enough into the neighboring territories to let off pressure on the Step, or the sedentary populations neighboring the Step had developed a good equilibrium to fight against the Step. And then Genghis Khan showed up, which utterly changed the game. And we already had a Mongol Empire video. You can watch that. But Genghis Khan made this is the prelude to the Mongol Empire video, or the Mongol Empire video is the epilogue. Genghis Khan is one of the singular figures in history, if you can point to who he, as an individual, changed history the most because he rose from poverty and homelessness to, first of all, unify all the Mongol tribes. I compared him before to a totalitarian dictator because he destroyed the earlier rigid Mongol clan and religious structure and hierarchy, and made himself universal king as a spiritual leader. He was a shaman who would engage in rituals of ecstasy to develop battle plans for battle. And he built the Mongol society around his organizations, which were based around merit and loyalty to him. And the Mongols were an unimportant evil beforehand. They hadn't unified before Genghis Khan, but he brought the Mongols together out of distinct tribes like the Buryats and the Karaites. And the Mongols themselves were the poorest people of the steppe who didn't know how to read. They didn't touch silk, they barely even ate grain. They were in the northeast extremity. But Genghis Khan first unified the sort of ethnic identity of the eastern steppe, and then he created a Mongol identity that rippled across the steppe, where all of these peoples further west who were ethnically distinct from the Mongols, to move with the theme of the Arabs, the Turks, integrating genetically distinct populations, the people on the edges of Russia, in Ukraine and in the Volga region, as well as the Mughals in India and Tamerlane and Uzbekistan, all claims to be Mongols, even if they were ethnically distinct, because the Mongols did the empire and culture building of the centralized Step identity.
- [110:59]
Eric Torrenberg
So it actually had a lasting impact beyond. And this fits really well with the Spring analogy and the water analogy, because you said the borders of the Step stabilized either from internal factors. Let's like call That a natural barrier or external factors, which is someone putting up some barriers. Right. And then it. The water from the spring built up because it wasn't going out. It built up until it spilled over and out. And, and that. And ever since that, the dynamic has been, even where civilization outnumbers the step much more than it used to. Like the water spilled out. It used to be 100 to 1. Now it's like a thousand to one. The step can't compete. The water is all out the pool. The civilizations are dominant.
- [111:46]
Whatifalthist
This is the principle of polarity. For every reaction is an equal reaction in the other direction. And so Genghis Khan unified the steppe. He attacked China first, and he utterly destroyed China, killing 30 million people, taking Beijing, slaughtering a Chinese army four times his size. And this was the bloodiest Mongol war. It's one of the bloodiest wars ever in history. He used those gains to subjugate Korea, which survived as a vassal state. And then he fought the Shah of Khorasan in Central Asia, which was a Turkic ruling family on a Persian land. He utterly destroyed Transoxiana in Khorasan, making it from one of the wealthiest places on Earth, the great backwater of Eurasia. And what the Mongols did was unify the Eurasian system, but also destroy it. Where they ravaged North China, they genocided a lot of the nomadic peoples of Inner Asia that resisted them and didn't assimilate. They destroyed Central Asia, they destroyed Russia, they destroyed Armenia. Part of the reason the Mongols won was they were in the western part of Anatolia. And the Mongols ravaged Central Anatolia, killing all their competitors. And so before the Mongols, it appeared as if Eurasia was an interconnected system held together by the Silk Road, centered on Khorasan. And I've said this many times before because it's true, what the Mongols did was destroy the entire hub of this system. The grassland itself was depopulated. The neighboring Asian civilizations were cowed because the Mongols made it pretty far. They attacked India, they burned Baghdad, they. They took all of Russia except Novgorod. And they even made it out to Hungary and Germany and Croatia and these places. And that sort of destroyed the steppe by killing a lot of their competitors. And the Black Death hit the steppe harder. The neighboring areas. And so the pressure was gone in the steppe. The neighboring peoples were cowed. And then this set up the period of European dominance. Dominance. So the, the Mongol Empire was both the finishing act and the climax of step anti civilization.
- [114:25]
Eric Torrenberg
Right. And the hardest regions of the step, once they spread out enough, became the least desirable, the least powerful. And so you we're not going to recreate that dynamic where it's spraying from the hard and hard spots.
- [114:41]
Whatifalthist
With the fall of the Mongol Empire, you saw the division of the former Mongol possessions into civilizations. And this is the way to end the steppe because there was the broader steppe civilization that was shamanistic and pagan and Tengriist. But then once the steppe peoples converted to the neighboring religions, they were roped into those civilizations more so than the other steppe peoples. So the western steppe converted to Islam. Even Russia they converted to is the. The nomads in Russia as far north as Kazan, which is right next to Moscow. They converted to Islam because the, the nomadic step culture of the Arabs, sorry, the desert nomad culture of the Bedouins mixed with the nomadic step culture better than former Christianity did. But the Western step converting to Islam, that brought them as part of Islam's cultural trajectory. And they sort of got cowed by larger Islamic empires where there were horse tribes that survived in the bottom of Ukraine with the Khanate of Crimea until past the period of the American Revolution. The Russians were only able to conquer South Ukraine in the 1780s. And it was a dynasty which claimed descent from the Mongols, but they were ethnically Turkic. They were feudatories of the Ottoman Turks. So the Ottoman Turks kept them on life support for centuries. But this doesn't really do the nomads justice. Where they held on to Russia or these western Islamic Turkic nomads. The conet of the Golden Horde based out of Saratov on the Volga River. They held Russia until the time of Christopher Columbus where the Russians fought for independence and then they captured millions of Russians as slaves just out of the markets of the Middle east until the 18th century where the Russians built their own version of the Great Wall of China, which I believe is called the. It wasn't the Saratov line. It wasn't the. I forget. The Russians had their own version of the Great Wall of China in the 17th century. And a lot of the Russian character formed to fight off the descendants of the Mongols in the same way that was true for all of the Eurasian civil. Most of the major Eurasian civilizations besides Europe.
- [117:28]
Eric Torrenberg
Most of the Eurasian civilizations besides Europe got wiped out, impacted by the Mongols.
- [117:33]
Whatifalthist
Their identity was formed by the Mongols.
- [117:36]
Eric Torrenberg
Yes, right. Like Russia and their government.
- [117:38]
Whatifalthist
Yeah, in Russia, a lot of their government leadership structure is Mongol origin. In the Islamic world, their ruling families were of nomad origin. The last, the last peoples to convert were the Uyghurs and the Kazakhs in the middle of Central Asia. I love the fact that the Russians encouraged conversion to Islam after they conquered the Kazakhs, where the Russians took a while to fully beat the Steppe peoples. Where it wasn't until again, nearly the time of the Napoleonic wars or past them, that the Russians conquered Kazakhstan, because the Kazakhs offered this strong military resistance as horse tribes. Although the long term trajectory was the Russians and the Chinese dividing up the step due to. Due to gunpowder, because gunpowder negated the military advantage of the step peoples. But after the period of Genghis Khan, you saw the edges of the steppe produce new conquerors, where I keep on giving Tamerlane short drift. I think we talk about Tamerlane enough in like five different videos that we never really give him the highest time of day. I mean, I have to read a book on him. But he was an Uzbek warlord, conquered a huge area from Russia to India, Turkey to the edges of China, killed 15 million people, made Samarkand a great capital. He was an Elizabethan sort of early villain called Tambourlaine the Great that was a huge influence on Shakespeare. He was a descent of the Mongols and he was a step nomad himself. Then Babur, the conquerors of India, were also descendants of both Tamerlane and Genghis Khan. At least that was his narrative, which I think is plausible given both them and so many descendants. And then in China, the Manchus were the edge of the hunter, gatherer, farmer and herder space, where the Manchus were from the edge of the steppe, in the forest region next to Mongolia, and they conquered China, Although the Mongols had been a sort of military threat to China in the 15th and 16th centuries. But the Manchus conquered Mongolia and then they conquered China. And you saw the pacification of the steppe, where the eastern step, like Mongolia, converted to Buddhism with I believe, a third of Mongol men in the 18th century being Buddhist monks. Maybe it was 10%. Then you saw the middle converting to Islam. And after the Mongols, the Chinese and the Russians divided up the entire steppe. And it took a little bit of time where the Russians only took the final bits in the 19th century, but the Mongols were the finishing act. And then the time just ran out for the nomadic peoples because they couldn't fight in an industrialized world where the population of cities went up radically, where Mongolia's got less than a billion people, I think maybe a few million, and China's got 1.5 billion. And then the Russians could populate the entire steppe. And there's a sort of sad duality where there's a certain noble character to the nomadic peoples that we've lost. But at the same time, they committed so much brutality that it tainted sort of noble, savage characteristics they have. And you can't really. At least the things that have replaced them have not yet been of equivalent historic importance to the nomads. But I expect at least one important historic event to come out of Inner Asia in the next 300 years. I don't know what it's going to be.
- [121:28]
Eric Torrenberg
Yeah, I think like Eastern Europe, it could have some advantages in that it was under the communist rule. And so it's reversing earlier than Western Europe. It's a little bit isolated, probably take a little bit longer. But I mean, it's, you know, if we're talking about building civilization on Mars, then the stands have a lot of potential.
- [121:47]
Whatifalthist
Agreed.
- [121:48]
Eric Torrenberg
Especially with modern technology, you could, with agriculture technology, you could revive those areas in really big ways, which would be interesting. And then it makes sense that I kind of thought of the Mongols collapsing after they blurted out or whatever. But they were still dominant in the Step for a long time. It's just that they were concentrating and projecting themselves in the more valuable parts of the Step, which wasn't, you know, where Genghis Khan originated from.
- [122:18]
Whatifalthist
Yeah.
- [122:19]
Eric Torrenberg
And then by that point, it, it's. They didn't like, you know, before the Aryan invasions or the Mongol invasions, et cetera, they bring like horse technology, they bring wagons to iron swords, whatever it is. But by the Mongol point, they're not really adding any technology. They're not really adding any positive civilizational institutions. If you look at Russia, it was a negative. And so I wonder if that correlates somehow with like the end of the process. Right.
- [122:51]
Whatifalthist
That's a very good point, which I don't have a good answer for. It's. I, I forgot to bring up that the Mongols did conquer Tibet in the early modern period. So there were like separate Mongol invasions or Kiva, which was the big state in Central Asia. They were of nomad, I believe, Turkic ancestry. Persia was under nomadic Turkic ancestry. They still were doing stuff. It's. They just. They were overshadowed by European colonialism. And I think a lot about Asia's future because they're going to have to adjust out of their old cultural forms, which just don't work in a modern globalized world. At the same time, they have that hurdle. I don't know how they're going to jump it because they don't really have. Their cultures haven't been creative in centuries, and they're going to have to create new cultural forms to adapt to modernity. They're going to figure it out somehow. But I think it's going to be done in like the weirdest, most schizo way possible. I think they're going to like some new. It wouldn't surprise me if there's some Prophet Muhammad figure which arises in Asia in the next 300 years and he conquers across the borders of what we expect Asia to be like. Some Prophet Muhammad figure emerges in China and that empire makes that to Persia. I've thought that might happen for years. Because the thing with Asia is you have these highly brittle boundaries that have the potential to get punched through. But you'd have to remove like two or three pillars from our current Jenga for the incentives for that to make sense. But history constantly removes Jenga pillars.
- [124:34]
Eric Torrenberg
So a Chinese religious force, I don't know, going through the stands, it's going.
- [124:41]
Whatifalthist
To be somewhere in Asia. I just said that. It's like Jorjani thinks that Persia could become this new industrial juggernaut under Mithraism. I don't really believe that, but it's fun to fantasize where Asia seems ripe for a cultural. The culture word cultural revolution has been spoiled in the Asian context. But Asia is ripe for like a Prophet Muhammad or Buddha or like new.
- [125:08]
Eric Torrenberg
Civilization event east, west synthesis kind of thing. Anti Soviet.
- [125:16]
Whatifalthist
Inside Asia, you have a polarity where I could see Japan as an example being a powerful cultural hub where Asia is going through its own crisis of identity where I think America has the greatest cultural potential to fix the West. Japan is the most creative and the freestyle. So I think a cultural shift in Japan could help China, for example. But I think that Japanese cultural shift would only make sense to cynic East Asian countries. You could not apply a Japanese structure in India or in Iran. And I think the inner Asians and this might transcend across civilizational boundaries would need a distinct cultural breakthrough. Apart from from what the Japanese would do, I think the Indians also have potential. They would have to. India could make a modern civilization jump by connecting certain elements of Hinduism to modern science. That's already been done by a lot of thinkers. They just have to apply it. But then with inner Asia, they have this huge civilizational boundary where what happens if a great Persian figure emerges? They form a new identity, not purely ethnic, but on ideological or religious foundations. And that's how Asian societies grow. The Turks, the Arabs grew because of that ideological identity. The Chinese grew because of the idea of empire that unified the distinct tribal groups. In India, it was the shared religion. And in Asia they need to develop new Cultural technologies to transcend the boundaries of these ethnic groups that aren't large enough for a era of history operating at a continental scale. Does that make sense?
- [126:56]
Eric Torrenberg
That makes a lot of sense. And I was, and I was wondering if like the collection of stands are big enough to generate it itself. But you kept talking about how it would be generated by like Iran or China, like anywhere but the center of the stands.
- [127:12]
Whatifalthist
I mean it's possible to be in the center of the stands.
- [127:14]
Eric Torrenberg
Could it be like an Eastern Europe stanish kind of cultural trend?
- [127:19]
Whatifalthist
Perhaps the reason I picked China and Iran is those are industrialized societies, lots of educated people, Iranians at this. Educated Iranians are more educated than educated Europeans at this point. And China has a huge industrial educated population. And I can't see pre industrial populations having the implicit understanding to make industrial era ideological and civilizational breakthroughs.
- [127:48]
Eric Torrenberg
Well, maybe you haven't spent enough time in Eastern Europe if you think of them as industrial civilization.
- [127:55]
Whatifalthist
They clearly are.
- [127:56]
Eric Torrenberg
I'm just kidding. But like I, I see like this kind of Eastern Europe's really on the up and up. A lot of the countries was like especially the former Soviet countries. And I just see them as kind of like I categorize them as more along the gradient to the stands than I do Iran or China. That might be to referring wrong, especially with the case of Iran, but that's just how I, I picture it.
- [128:18]
Whatifalthist
Have to be very careful with the modern era because things change so rapidly. Where 20 years ago everyone thought the BRICs would replace the west and now all of the bricks except one or two are a joke. People were really bullish on China 10 years ago. A lot of people are very bearish on China now. People were very bullish on Brazil or Africa 10 years ago. Those have fallen out. People said in the 90s or the early 2000s that Europe would replace America and now that's a joke. The industrial world changes what places are important so quickly. It's hard to keep track of this stuff. Where maybe in 200 years Central Asia will be wealthier than Iran. I don't know. I have no reason to believe that. But these changes occur very quickly.
- [129:08]
Eric Torrenberg
Yeah, the volatility is fun and interesting.
- [129:12]
Whatifalthist
Well, I'm going to get going. Good to talk to you. Next video is the rise of capitalism.
- [129:17]
Eric Torrenberg
Awesome. All right, see you guys.
- [129:20]
Rudyard Lynch
History102 by Rudyard lynch and Eric Torrenberg is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen, live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube. Forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.