STEPPE, THE

Extent of the Eurasian steppes. belt of grassland that extends some 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometres) from Hungary in the west through Ukraine and Central Asia to Manchuria in the east. Mountain ranges interrupt the steppe, dividing it into distinct segments; but horsemen could cross such barriers easily, so that steppe peoples could and did interact across the entire breadth of the Eurasian grassland throughout most of recorded history. Nonetheless, the unity of steppe history is difficult to grasp; steppe peoples left very little writing for historians to use, and Chinese, Middle Eastern, and European records tell only what happened within a restricted range across their respective steppe frontiers. Archaeology offers real but limited help (grave relics from chieftains' tombs abound but, of course, say little about everyday life and leave political, military, and linguistic alignments to inference). As a result, until about AD 1000, information concerning the rise and fall of steppe empires and the relation between events in the eastern and western portions of the steppe remains fraught with great uncertainty. broad band of grassland, interrupted in some places by mountain ranges, that begins in Hungary and extends eastward across the Ukraine and southern Russia into Central Asia and ultimately to Manchuria. It has served as an avenue for the spread of peoples and cultural patterns throughout recorded history. The grassland zone may be divided into the Western Steppe, which extends 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from the Danubian plains eastward to the Altai Mountains, and the Eastern Steppe, which runs from the Altai eastward to the Greater Khingan Mountains, a distance of 1,500 miles (2,400 km). The western part, broken only by the low barrier of the Ural Mountains, is easily crossed by horse. The many rivers of the region tend generally to flow southward, providing access to warmer lands. The climate of the Western Steppe is one of definite seasonal changes, with cold winters and hot summers and with rainfall diminishing from west to east. The Eastern Steppe is subject to much more severe conditions. Its higher elevation makes it colder, and its infrequent rainfall provides sparser pasturage. The nomads of the Eastern Steppe have thus been motivated throughout history to seek better grazing lands either in northern China or in the Western Steppe. In prehistoric times the Steppe people gradually abandoned their food-gathering way of life in favour of settled farming. With the domestication of the horse about 2000 BC, however, their way of life changed again, as stock raising on the grasslands was a migratory pursuit. They formed tribes and eventually tribal confederacies that chose paramount chieftains who could rapidly assemble formidable military forces. Such forces began to sweep into the Middle East after 1700 BC. Armies of nomad horsemen were formidable opponents because of their mobility and their ability to live off their animals. Shortly after 700 BC the peoples known to the Greeks as the Cimmerians and the Scythians began raiding Asia Minor from their base in the Ukraine; the Scythians helped to bring about the fall of the Assyrian empire with their sack of Nineveh in 612. In the following centuries nomad cavalry posed a constant threat to the Persian empire in the west and the Chinese empire in the east. The Parthians, who were akin to the Scythians, began penetration of the Seleucid Empire in the 3rd century BC. Once having occupied agricultural land, the Parthians were able to defend it by virtue of their armoured cavalry and to deflect subsequent nomad invasions. A period of stability ensued, during which the caravan routes across Asia carried goods and ideas back and forth from Rome to China. There ensued a period of ferment, beginning about AD 200. In the 4th century the Huns, a people perhaps of Turkish stock, invaded the Roman Empire. Their invasions displaced the Germanic tribes of Europe, forcing them into Roman territory and thereby setting in motion the dissolution of the western Roman realm. In the east, China was repeatedly attacked by nomads of Turkish-, Mongolian-, and other-language groups. In 550 the Avars, migrating from the Caucasus to Hungary, were the first wave of a succession of tribes driven west by the rise of a great Turkish confederacy based in the Altai and later in Central Asia. The Turks themselves looked south to Persia; gradually they adopted Islam and Middle Eastern culture. They served as a bridge to the nomads remaining in the Steppe, who also adopted Islam. In the Far East the influence of China and Buddhism was having an analogous effect on the Mongols, who adopted Chinese administrative techniques and created a nomad empire under Genghis Khan that united all the peoples of the Eurasian Steppe by the 13th century. The Turks in the west, Seljuqs at first and later Ottomans, completed the conquest of the Byzantine Empire and laid the foundation of the Ottoman Empire. Trade and cultural exchange flourished, but unity eventually disintegrated as far-flung tribes were absorbed by conquered peoples. By the 16th century, Russia began to invade, conquer, and colonize much of the Steppe. By the 20th century, only a few Steppe nomads survived in the vast area that they once dominated. Additional reading Two classic works are still worth consulting: Ren Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (1970, reissued 1988; originally published in French, 1939); and Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940, reprinted with a new introduction, 1988). Recent studies include A.M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (1984); Luc Kwanten, Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia, 5001500 (1979); Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989); and Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990). S.A.M. Adshead, Central Asia in World History (1993), is in a class by itself for its incisive, idiosyncratic judgments. William H. McNeill