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Part 1 SpawnPoint for each of the major civilizations, there's a coherent group of people that formed a certain identity around people with certain genetics in a certain historic context, with the same region, geography and general worldview. Western civilization formed around people of West European white ancestry that were Christian in a temperate climate, a mix of Germanic and Roman influence. They had similar architecture, philosophic views, values, blood, etc. This is how every civilization has formed, whether the Indian, Chinese, Greco Roman or Arab. That's not how the steppe formed, though. The language's blood and geography of the steppe changed radically over the multi thousand year time frame in which it produced conquerors. The ancestry of the early STEP was ironically white European. We've done archaeology on mummified grave finds in western China and they show people genetically identical to modern Europeans. They even have red hair and wore tartan, which gives a nearly Celtic aura to them. The incredibly dry deserts of western China with almost no humidity allow the preservation of these mummies to conditions that seem incredibly difficult given they're 4,000 years old. The first inhabitants of Central Asia were Scythians, who were ethnically European. The Scythians were incredibly historically important at the time, ranging geographically from modern Ukraine or the Balkans in the west to western China, India and raiding as far south as Egypt. They were known as ferocious warriors by both the Persians whom they destroyed two of their field armies, one in Ukraine and the other in Turkestan, as well as the Greeks who hired them as mercenaries. In fact, modern Europe was populated from the step as the Aryan invaders who started from the area north of the Caucasus 4000 years ago, spread to become around half of modern Europe's genetics and almost all of Europe's language, culture and mythology with a complete cultural replacement. The Aryans were completely instrumental to the modern European character in a way that's difficult to overstate, which I talk about more so on my second podcast. For those who are triggered by the word Aryan, you guys know that this is an anthropological term that dates back to the 18th century, at least when they found lingual similarities between Indian and European languages. It's a proven genetic, cultural, archaeological, mythological group whose existence we've proven in each of those fields. It's called a variety of names in the Yamnaya, Kurgan, Andronovo steppe, amongst others. But what I'm talking about here is a historic fact. European culture is given a lot of its particularities due to its steppe origin. This is more pronounced the further you get into Europe, which has higher Aryan ancestry. This includes a war band culture, heroism, aggression, individualism, social fluidity and acceptance of risk. Herding societies promote these sorts of traits given the herds must lead the herds, take responsibility for them and bully them back into correct behavior. If you ever wonder why there are certain similarities between Protestantism and Islam, then the shared herder cultures is the reason. Farming populations create societies that are more conservative, risk averse, communalistic, hierarchical and others than herder peoples. Honor is the greatest value of herder peoples and Cowardice, the worst sin. Interestingly, you can see a lot of the same traits develop into very different forms in India, the northern part of which was also conquered by the Aryans, where Greek philosophy and Indian religion both stem from underlying Aryan roots that stem back to the step, one of which went into science and the other went into mysticism. Over the course of the historic period, the Europeans were gradually pushed out of the step by people from further east in Asia. At the time of the rise of the Roman Republic, all of Central Asia had European like ancestry. And by the end of the Middle Ages it was mostly East Asian. Aaronic peoples like the Scythians, Sogdians, Tocharians and Bactrians were replaced by Turkic peoples like the Kazakhs, Tatars, Pechenegs, Uzbeks, Turkmen and Uyghurs. The reason this happened and these group, one European and another Asiatic, who are genetically very different, could see this change. While the steppe maintains its fundamental cultural traits, is that the steppe creates barbarians due to a series of incentives that stem from the geography itself. The steppe is a sort of archetype that different peoples will fit. You see this in how the American Great Plains or in the Argentine Pampas, the natives there have become horse tribes, much like the Eurasian steppe. Meanwhile, white people who populated the steppe, like cowboys, Gauchos or Cossacks in the pre industrial world, also took up a very similar lifestyle. Arnold Toynbee, who's the only writer in the field of the science of history that I have not yet read, has an interesting way of explaining this. His theory of history is call and response. Or that societies are formed around beating a certain challenge. For example, populating a new continent thousands of miles from home for America, or fighting off the Celts for the Roman Republic. In each case the challenge has to be hard enough in that in trying to beat it, they grow stronger and form an identity. At the same time, it's not difficult enough to crush it under their weight. This also fits in really well with Ibn Khaldun's theory of history. He was pulling more so from the histories of the herder peoples in the Arabian Desert and the Sahara, in which a lot of the same dynamics play out in smaller scale. Interestingly, herder societies, which tend to be polygamous, have their imperial cycles play out at twice the speed of settled societies. This is something Ibn Khaldun picked up on in that North Africa, which had more herder polygamist dynasties, would collapse after four generations or 120 years in Western Europe with monogamy, the fall of dynasties occurred in 250 years. According to Peter Turchin's work, Ibn Khaldun's theory, which is paralleled in some form by each of the pre modern theories of history, agrees that a new nation starts with hard men and then over time they degenerate into weakness after that. This creates a new period of disturbance which restarts the cycle. The thing with the Eurasian steppe is that the terrain in itself is hard enough as to create a passive level of toughness in excess to the neighboring farmer peoples. Life on the steppe required fighting against the elements of enormous grassland, in which life itself required taking risks, independence and a warrior culture. Very much like the American cowboys, life on the steppe required a degree of passive barbarian toughness. The land was hard enough, it was impossible to create cities on. The land was dry, with just open grassland stretching for thousands of miles from Ukraine and Romania to Mongolia and down into Central Asia. Even when farmers did try to populate the plains as the major empires such as China, Russia and Persia, each tried, oftentimes with enormous military ferocity and huge amounts of men, is that the Steppe warriors destroyed them. We forget that modern southern Ukraine wasn't populated by Slavic Russians until nearly the 19th century due to the Tatars who killed the farmers. The Muslim Tatars enslaved millions of Slavs, selling them into the markets of the Ottoman Turkic world. There's a great book on this topic which I'd highly recommend named McNeil's Europe Step Frontier 1500-1800 which covers this era. McNeill is one of the greatest historians ever and getting this snapshot into this particular era of history is incredible. David Christian is also the best author on the broader step topic with two volume history of Mongolia, Russia and Central Asia. I'll also shout out Ken Harle as well. The difficulty of life itself on the steppe created a certain kind of lifestyle that ended up with certain perks and weaknesses. This is why materially, between the Aryans of 4,000 years ago and the most recent large wave of trans steppe invaders, the Mongols, the life of the average nomad barely changed. They lived in similar yurts or huts, had similar shamanistic religions, depended on their animal stock in similar ways, and had similar diets alongside using similar weapons or the horse and the bow. A lot of similarities, you know, they even had comparable art systems in which the gripping beast art style that started in Manchuria crossed the steppe to become the dominant art style in the British Isles and Scandinavia during the Dark Ages. This fact was also brought to us by McNeill who writes very eloquently on the steppe. In his book Rise of the west, the religious system of the steppe viewed all of life like ripples that stretched out a certain amount of space. This was a reflection of how tribes and forces would ripple across the nearly infinite space in the steps. As an example of this in political history, the Chinese war with the Huns, which occurred about a century before the birth of Christ, caused a ripple effect that stretched out to Europe in the four hundreds or to ultimately result in the dominant ruling governments of Persia and northern India. Steppe cultures practice shamanism, or a rough religious system in which gifted individuals would access the spirit world, fighting demons in hell in order to get valuable knowledge to help their people. They have a quite advanced shamanistic mythology. However, due to their lack of large population densities, they never had to evolve to the Axial Age religious standards that the major civilizations reached. For example, viewing human beings as having souls, do unto others as others would do unto you, suffer now for a better afterlife, etc. This is why the nomads committed such horrifying atrocities, which I just can't overstate, state the mongols killed over 65 million people in the pre industrial world. Genghis Khan killed 40 million while Tamerlane was 15 million. And a few others, like the sacking of Baghdad or the slaving trips to Russia pushed it up another few million to give a frame of reference for how insane that is. World War II killed 65 million people and all of communism together killed 80 plus million. The other thing to keep in mind is that the world had about 1/10 its current population in the Middle Ages. The nomads didn't see farmers as having souls since they never had to evolve the concept of a soul. Since they didn't have cities that involved seeing people outside your tribe frequently, they saw the farmers as like sheep that you could cull to get through the winter. Genghis Khan had to be reasoned into not butchering all of North China's population that he would make more money from taxing them than killing them. I was reading a book which was consistently rated one of the best history books ever on all the Internet and magazine lists. I've tried to read half of those books and they're all not that good. Not a single book on the popular list makes it into my top 100 best history books I've read. This was Jack Weatherford's book on Genghis Khan. This was a bestseller and was quite well written, showing me a side of Genghis Khan I hadn't seen before. Then he made the second half of the book Pro Mongol propaganda to make the Mongols look better than medieval Europe. I nearly spat out my drink. You know, the Crusades only killed around 2 million people at most, and most of that killing was still done by the Muslims. Read the text Wal for more info. The ridiculous thing is that he was into Mongol Apologia because he was a modern American leftist trying to make an Asian regime look better than a European regime, but it's completely against their entire value system. And Mongol Apologia was pretty popular in the last decade. I think it has some points, but it's still fundamentally silly. The underlying point I'm trying to convey here is that steppe culture, as the name even suggests, stems from a geography that demands certain cultural traits. Rather than being a civilization itself, the steppe has this spawn point which creates barbarians, almost like in the video game Civilization, where the barbarians have spawn points which churn out invaders. An example of another spawn point in Europe which acted as a comparable anti civilizational spawn point is the Sund between Denmark and Sweden, where the Baltic lets out into the North Sea. The Roman writer Tacitus called it the Womb of Nations in that the Germans, Nordics, English, Dutch, Goths, Vandals, Danish, Swedish, Lombards, Cimbri, Tetones and so many other Germanic peoples that plagued and ultimately destroyed the Roman Empire came from this spot in Denmark. It was the position of anti civilizational generation that exists in opposition to Rome. The center of civilization, as I alluded to before the Eurasian steppe, is that to major civilizations these spawn points shifted east, starting in Ukraine with the Aryans 4000 years ago until being lodged in northeastern Mongolia and Manchuria by the late medieval period. This was since as the steppe in the world got more civilized, the region needed to create the toughest men who could conquer moved into drier and colder areas. This is why the Asians coming from Mongolia replaced the earlier European populations which lived in the more fertile and soft western grasslands. The whole steppe is dry and cold, but Mongolia is the ultimate in climactic hardship. This is why for the last thousand years the new steppe tribes came out of Mongolia, particularly earlier on the Altar High mountains in the early Middle Ages, alongside the greatest nomadic conquerors ever. Genghis Khan, the most impressive nomadic conqueror ever came out of the northeastern mountains of Mongolia, which in turn proves this principle. The thing that made the steppes great was hardship, and as we can see, the greatest man that ever came out of the steppes came out of the harshest geographic region of the most inhospitable part of the Steppes. Ironically, in many ways, the barbarians needed the civilized world. They were completely economically dependent on trade with them, in that the goods they produced, they exported to the developed world. The nomads didn't come before the farmers, they existed after farmers developed and they were dependent on them. Oftentimes they were even dependent on the food that the developed societies produced in the great distances of the Silk Road. More often than not, the nomadic tribes were the merchants. This meant the nomads were actually quite cultured and worldly. The nomads weren't stupid and they developed quite advanced worldviews. Since they had to compare the different civilizations, they existed in a weird halfway point of seeing so many religions and so many ways of life without belonging to any. This is why some nomadic tribes in the Eurasian steppe did stuff like convert to obscure sects of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Manichaeism and a bunch of other religions people have forgotten about. The Mongols were one of the most religiously tolerant empires of the medieval world. Keep in mind this wasn't done it of any humanity, but rather a cynical understanding that the way to conquer a people best was to not disturb their religion. It also establishes a sort of parasitic, toxic relationship between the steppe peoples and the neighboring civilizations, which in some way acts as a sort of toxic romantic relationship which played out the worst aspects of each player. This in a lot of ways killed the vitality of the Asian continent, which was thriving before the Mongol conquests. Let's get into that part. 2. Conquerors. The peoples who came out of the steppe are, barring the modern Europeans, the most impressive conquerors ever in human history. It's quite remarkable actually. The easiest example is the Mongol Empire, which stretched across all of Asia, from Korea and the Sea of Japan to Hungary and the edges of India and Syria. The Mongols had the largest empire until the British, and the largest contiguous empire in human history ever. However, at the same time, the Mongols were just the final serenade of a list of stunning conquests, which the nomads often achieved with populations 100th those of which they conquered. This worked since through the process of civilization, which had already been occurring for thousands of years in Asia before Europe had gradually removed the barbarian vitality that the steppes forced people to have just to survive. In each of the major Asian civilizations, a single social class seized control of society, ossifying it and causing the decline of Asia over the medieval period. In China, the bureaucrats won, in India, the priests, and in Islam, an alliance of the priests and the nobility. In 1000 AD, Asia was the center of the world. While Europe was a backwater still in the Dark Ages 500 years later, the Europeans conquered the world with the Age of Discovery. A big part of this process was the relationship, if you want to call it that, between the Asian civilizations and the nomads. You see, the nomads f cked and the farmers got fucked. I apologize for the crassness. However, the nomads never developed their own authentic culture since any man of any talent attacked into the civilized world for gold. Meanwhile, the social elites of the neighboring civilizations pushed social ossification as the nomads destroyed the men of vigor and quality who would keep the civilization innovating and strong. Thus, what happened was that the nomads had parasitic behavior rewarded by gold and conquest, while the native populations became more and more docile. This is why after the Black Death and the fall of the Mongol Empire, Asia became socially conservative at the same time as Europe had the Renaissance songs, Reformation science and Age of Discovery. There's a cultural region called the former Mongol Empire which includes Russia, China, Central Asia, Iran and Pakistan. It was the former Iron Curtain block in the Cold War. The modern Chinese anti American alliance, It's Mackinder's Eurasia. Places where women were treated poorly in the pre industrial world. Modern authoritarianism, big government, social hierarchy, communitarian clan based morality and social shame based morality. Ironically, in each of these Mongolia bucks the trend with values in some ways more similar to the west, given they were the conquerors and not the conquered of the Mongol Empire. The former Mongol cultural region stems not from the Mongols per se, but the Mongols conquered a region forming the universal empire of the steppe. That means that due to proximity to the steppe, these regions developed cultural currents such as authoritarianism and collectivism. As an example, given how great the threat from the step was that you stuck together in clans for shared safety and gave the government more hierarchical militaristic power as a way to protect yourself against the demons from the steppe. The medieval Europeans literally called the Mongols demons or Tartars, as in they were from Tartarus or a Greek word for hell. The Tatars enslaved millions of Slavs to sell in the markets of the Islamic world, the defense against which was one of the big impetus for the creation of the Russian state. Russia is probably the farming society most impacted by the steppe as I talk about in the Russian civilization video more I don't think it's a coincidence that Europe was the society that conquered the world in modernity, while it was the only major civilization to not face the butchering of its major cities by the Turks and Monuments Mongols in the medieval period. This is multivariate in that I don't think that was the predominant reason the west rose to greatness. What Genghis Khan said on his deathbed was that I don't see myself so much as a man of genius, but rather every major civilization I conquered was weak and stupid. This was since the medieval golden age of Asia had in turn caused decadence, which allowed the Mongols to conquer everything. The Mongols formed the universal empire of steppe cultures, starting out as a tiny ethnicity ethnicity in the northeast of the Lake Baikal region, to her entire ethnic identity, in which the people in modern Romania would call themselves Mongols, as did the conquerors of India would call themselves the Moguls, due to Mongol ancestry. The universal empire is a normal part of a civilizational life cycle in which a single empire unifies a civilization, whether with the Arabs under the Umayyads, the American Americans with the west, the Romans with the classical world, or the Qin and Han with the Chinese. One of the interesting things I got from the Jack Weatherford book was that Genghis Khan was a sort of medieval, totalitarian new culture dictator. He even gave himself the name made of iron, much like Stalin, which is man of steel. He faced the horrors of a chaotic step in which his father, a minor chieftain, had been killed, and then he was forced to live out a life alone. He was kept as a slave for years and had his bride stolen from him, only for him to get her back. Genghis Khan clawed himself into being the first king of the Mongols and destroyed their highly complex system of taboos, social classes, clan structures and tribes into new groups based around loyalty to him and merit. He remade the steppe culture in his own image, even unifying the whole steppe into a shared Mongol ideal identity. However, in classic Spenglerian fashion, the empire, through unifying and standardizing, killed the diversity and strife that made that culture great in the first place through conquering and unifying the steppe. This was the last of the great generative steppe migrations. The Manchus, Tamerlane and the Moguls came out from the edges of the former Mongol empire. As their descendants fought against other peoples, the steppe was pacified and in doing so, lost the wars that gave them to toughness. The invention of gunpowder a few centuries after meant that the farmers could conquer the whole steppe, which was largely split between Chinese and Russian colonization. The Russians settled most of the steppe, but a few of the descendants of the old herders survive in Central Asia. To go back a Little bit in time. The Mongols were a culmination of a series of lesser steppe empires, starting with the Aryans, who conquered from Ireland to Bengal, forming the languages for more than half of the human race today. After them came the Scythians, who ruled a region stretching between Ukraine and western China. Much like the Aryans, the Scythians raided into the Middle East, Europe, India and China. Then you started to see tribes come from Mongolia. The Huns formed a tribal confederacy in Mongolia, the first to unify the whole region. They fought a series of horrifying wars with the Chinese, which they won at first. And then the Chinese launched a war of extermination, depopulating the eastern steppe. The Huns migrated west across the steppe, ultimately culminating in Attila the Huns wars with the Romans, where he reached as far west as France before being defeated at the Battle of Chalons by a Roman and Gothic army. The Huns in turn triggered another series of migrations, over the process of which oriental peoples moved into the western steppe. The Scythian Parthians conquered Iran, becoming the ruling dynasty for for centuries, while the Sakai Hephthalites and Cushions Haha, funny name. Conquered northern India. From after this period, the Turks became the greatest nomadic conquerors. The Gokturk confederacy controlled Central Asia. The Pechenegs, Khazars and Cumans migrated west into the Pontic grasslands around modern Ukraine. Funnily enough, the Khazars converted to Judaism for a few centuries. They were a nomadic tribe north of the Caucasus. The Seljuk Turks conquered the entire Middle east around the time of the early Crusades. They repopulated Anatolia, creating the country of modern Turkey, which would become the dominant universal empire of the Islamic world. Turkey has clear steppe influence since the Turks are a step people. The Ghaznavid Turks and for centuries afterwards, Muslim conquerors of step ancestry dominated most of India, eventually ruling nearly the whole subcontinent under the Moguls. Further east, the Mongols and neighboring peoples attacked into China. In the Chinese Dark Age, a dozen barbarian peoples conquered and fought over northern China. The vigor the barbarians added allowed a new Chinese golden age. Under the Tang, who were of partial steppe ancestry, the Chinese and Muslims became completely dependent upon steppe based armies, which in turn resulted in both civilizations spending centuries under step control. The Jin and Kittens, another funny name. The Kittens conquered northern China around a thousand ad. The Chinese leadership in the south wrote poetry about how much they wanted to reconquer the north, while not actually funding the military to do so, and scorning actual war. As said before, the Mongols ravaged China, even conquering the South. Part 3 Free and Slave there's an interesting duality to the nomadic character. I've said before, pulling from McNeil's work again that front. Volunteers exhibit one of two tendencies to either create societies which are slave or free. This is since when you have small populations, the incentive is to either force everyone to work for you since it's the only labor, or let people be free since there's not enough people to manage it. You saw these trends on the frontiers of North America, Eastern Europe or South America. The steppe is a sort of permanent frontier in that the population density is very low at all times due to climactic reasons. This means that the nomadic character has two very different trends towards radical totalitarianism and anarchic freedom. One of the things one of my favorite historians, Matthew White, once said is that the Mongols hold such a fascination for military historians today, given they combine the military ability of the blitzkrieg with the Big sky culture that the cowboys have. Keep in mind the American cowboy army archetype developed on our own Great Plains, which have a climate analogous to the Eurasian steppe. There's a sort of radical barbarian freedom that exists on the steppe. The steppe was often a force of freedom, anarchy and creativity, or just the human will. This was how the nomads were able to conquer civilizations who had 100 times their population. A number I will keep repeating since it's so remarkable. Since civilization has not grounded their animal will down. It was common that people would flee the major civilizations to the steppe to escape the extractive power of the state. The other element is that there is a very totalitarian statist element to the steppe. Both the Mongols and Russians had this. This is since the population number is so low that you need the people involved to have complete loyalty and strength to make up for numeric weakness. The Mongols would ask men to serve for them for their whole lives in the military, as did the Russians under the Tsars. And both were total despotisms where the ruler had complete power alongside unquestioning loyalty to the Khan being the bedrock of society. Genghis Khan is actually a quite Nietzschean figure in that he remade the Mongol legal and tribal structure while being a shaman as a way to fight against the tribal customs and taboos of his youth. When powerful formed on the step, it was transitory by nature and held together under the will power and charisma of a great leader who could conquer into the civilized world to give his supporters treasure and women. This Means that you alternated between the totalitarian power of a great leader when his power fell, and then anarchy would come out of it. I love listening to Mongolian heavy metal and it's my favorite genre of music since I was in high school or my entire adulthood life for my entire adult life. My favorite band as well has been the Buddhist Mongol metal band nine Treasures. I like them since they're about as hard as you can go without being nihilistic. I think most metal frankly doesn't go hard enough and when it does it's just too satanic and innately depressing. I was actually listening to that band as I was writing this very video. The thing is that this is sort of symbolic for the step attitude when you when they go hard, it's a primal animal motivation, not a built up resentment against society per se like a revolution. The reason the Mongols were tolerant was they didn't care. Another thing I feel is shown in Mongol metal is the pairing of Buddhism with the warrior spirit. Every imperial heartlands declines beyond the level of the neighboring lands after the empire falls. Britain is sadly seeing that now. Mongolia went into a period of decline after the great empire as the steppe afterwards got pacified and conquered by farmer empires. In the case of Mongolia, the Manchu barbarians from the forest who conquered China and then used the Chinese to rule Mongolia. After their warrior spirit was conquered, the Mongols alongside the Tibetans and many other inner Asian herder peoples turned to religion. There was a period around 18th century Mongolia when between 10 to 30% of Mongolian men were Buddhist monks. The same statistic is true in Tibet. Religion was a way to escape a harsh reality in which they were no longer able to get rich off conquests. Ironically, the Russian conquerors of Central Asia actually encouraged Islam, given it would pacify the local pagan tribes better. The steppe mostly converted to Islam since it had similar moral intuitions as the Arabs who were also a herder people. And a few of the steppe's greatest conquerors did so in Islam name such as Tamerlane or Babur. The Mongols also just killed too much of the region for inner Asia to self sustain. There was a time period when the Silk Road was the center of the world and completely vital to the global system. Before the Mongols, Central Asia and Iran were the wealthiest, most urbanized, technologically, philosophically advanced places in the world. The Mongols destroyed the region called Khorasan so hard that later travelers said the country had literally no cities. For centuries afterwards the Mongols completely ravaged China, genociding the inner Asian regions that spanned the Silk Road as well as Persia, Armenia, Iraq and large parts of Russia. The medieval order in which Asia ruled the world was no longer tenable after its heart has been ripped out. This wasn't even before Tamerlane killed another 15 million conquering for Russia to Delhi and from Turkey to China. The nomadic ruling classes like the Mamelukes in Egypt and the Levant destroyed every major city in the Levant. As well as halving Egypt's population in a 200 year period, this was also one of the wealthiest places in the world at the time. The same process also occurred in northern India under their Mamelukes. It's funny to see how anticlimactic the end of the nomadic story is. The historic scale of their ancestors is so enormous. But few of these people were really able to use the Industrial revolution to their benefit. So the population difference between Mongolia and China, which was already enormous, became even more extreme. The Russians populated most of the steppe anyway. It's remarkable to see that these relatively small and powerless peoples are the end of a line which truly pushed the edges of what's possible in the human condition. Although few tell their stories, the steppe step produced something very bloody, but also incredible in its scale by itself. As other societies prided themselves upon what they built, the steppe did so upon what it destroyed.
