Hey @Skallagrim might be a bit off topic but how do you feel about this
it makes a rather interesting argument that the Steppes Barbarians might actually make a solid contender for a 5th big civilization.
At long last responding to this now.
I have some serious issues with the factual accuracy of this video. It comes across as an analysis by someone who knows a lot about lots of stuff, but doesn't really grasp the essence of
this subject.
His introduction to the steppe dynamic is pretty muddled from the start. He argues that the intial inhabitants were European, which is technically correct, but implies a context that's very misleading. He claims the original inhabitants were Scythians, which is wrong (the Scythians were descendants of the earlier inhabitants, but we're at least a millennium down the line here, most likely more).
He subsequently does mention the Indo-Europeans but edgily insists on using "Aryans". He pre-emptively calls out critics, but he's just fucking wrong. "Aryan" is, in serious discourse, used specifically for the South-Eastern branch of the Indo-European migratory population. Calling all of the Indo-Europeans "Aryans" would be as silly as implying that the Tokharians were basically Celts...
Oh. Wait. He does that, too.
The problem that arises with this is that he misses a
huge factor that could make or break his narrative. It's got four legs and it neighs. And for the longest time, we did
not manage to domesticate it. But once we did, it became a superweapon. The superweapon of the steppe. And therein lies the core of the matter. WhatIfaltHist doesn't seem to fully grasp this.
Allow me to attempt a brief[*] re-iteration of the thesis.
First off, steppes mostly suck for producing civilisation. They're vast expanses of fuck-all, and although some of the soil is actually very fertile, it's also typically soil that's pretty heavy and needs serious instruments to be properly used. Like the heavy plough. Which in turn requires a horse collar. If you happen to not have invented those, don't feel bad. Neither did the Greeks, Romans, Persians or any number of other civilisations. So the steppes, for the longest time, were pretty useless for attempts at sedentary life.
If you've got no agriculture, you can basically hunt and herd, both of which encourage mobility, and discourage urbanisation. But you'll not I mentioned the horse, and as we noted: for the longest time, that beast was not domesticated. So you had to walk. And the steppe us huge. It's not a great situation to be in, if you aim to found a civilisation. But you do have a lot of time, and if you try mastering those horses often enough, eventually it works with some. Only the mares, though. So each is a one-off. But eventually, one day... you get your hands on a new-born stallion, and you raise that fucker
from birth. And it lets you ride on its back. And you breed that stallion with likewise tamed mares, and you again raise the offspring of that union from birth...
Congrats. You've done it. You now have a population of horses that you can ride, both mare and stallion alike. And they breed in captivity. You can
multiply your domesticated horses. Your effective speed and range is ludicrously extended. You are now the Master of the Steppe. You have a superweapon.
And that's where we begin. Until then, the steppe was a marginal periphery. But with this one innovation, it became the cradle of conquerors. The Indo-European expansion began, bursting out into Eurasia, looting and conquering in all directions. In the sense that we generally understand "Europe", these weren't Europeans. These were... Steppe-eans, if you will. And
they invaded
Europe.
We descend from
them. And they invaded Central Asia, Persia, Anatolia, the Tarim Basin and India, too. (So successfully that wherever they went, the pre-existing male genetic lineage just...
ends. But the female line doesn't. So you know what happened there.)
Here's the key thing that WhatIfaltHist misses: the intial round of this "steppe exansion" is exactly the same as all the latter ones (Scythians, Huns, Turks, Mongols...) except
more successful. And the reason is simple: the other guys didn't have horses yet. That's why the Indo-Europeans conquered more than Genghis Khan did, and more thoroughly replaced the male populace wherever they went. They had the superweapon, and nobody else did.
And they co-opted all societies they conquered, and gained overlordship of the fertile lands beyond the steppe, and they became sedentary. But they kept the horses. So when in latter ages, new Steppe raiders invaded, they had to contend with "victims" who
also possessed the superweapon. And then, it only works if you reach a certain critical mass. If you just raid, you're a border nuisance. If you aim for more, you lose, because the sedentary societies have more resources to throw around than you do.
But if you scale up your raid... if you effectively become a huge mobile warrior caste of exceptional horse-riders who can shoot arrows better than anyone on Earth... if you become THE HORDE...
Then you can beat them. They have horsemen too. They have archers too. But you have the mostest, and the bestest. All you need is unity. And for that, because there's no institutional frame-work, you need a leader to unite the horde. You need.... THE KHAN.
So this is the essence of the matter. The steppe became suddenly relevant because of the horse; but the enormous success of the ('organic', relatively unorganised!) first wave of conquests by horse-riders was never again matched; and any attempts that came anywhere close only did so because they happened when (and
because) some unnaturally gifted leader managed to unite a shitload of steppe riders into THE HORDE.
Note that the original 'round' of this (the Indo-European invasions) completely overtook all target civilisations, and did not result in distorted civilisations. It simply produced new civilisations, founded by now-sedentary Indo-Europeans, and adopting bits and pieces of any pre-existing sedentary culture. But all latter 'rounds' (e.g. Huns, Mongols...) ran into much more developed civilisations, and could never again just erase-and-replace wholesale. At best, they could
yoke the conquered peoples, thereby becoming horse-lord tyrants ruling an enslaved populace of sedentary people.
Invariably, this led to the corruption of the horse-lords into self-indulgent despots. The hardships of the steppe kept them lean. In winning, they were always defeated. The Khan may be a conqueror, but chances are, his grandson is going to be so fat he can't even get on a horse.
This warps the 'victim' civilisations, too. WhatIfaltHist argues that having to huddle together against raiders made the target societies inclined to despotism. I say: bullshit. It is what they became in
defeat that warped them so. China always had a despotic streak, but after the Mongols, they never again got rid of it. Kievan Rus' had been a very free society indeed-- but after the Golden Horde, the Russia of the Boyars was forevermore a tyranny.
It is there that the legacy of the steppe invaders lingers. Because the steppe itself has again become marginal. The gun, the combution engine, the fucking aeroplane... these have rendered the horse and the composite bow obsolete. Steppe raiders cannot triumph anymore. Their age is over. It is because of this that there was never an American Khan on the Great Plains-- the horse was introduced there by Europeans, but not long after, so was the gun. And although horse-riders can use guns, too... sedentary societies have the
production advantage.
Concluding thoughts: the steppe dynamic is essentially that of any 'barbarian' raider tribe that lives outside civilisation, but can invade it. They mostly raid, but under an exceptional leader, barbarians can conquer established kingdoms, and barbarian chiefs can make themselves kings. The steppe horse-riders have been doing this same thing from the start, but on a greater scale. They are indeed not a civilisation, but not really an anti-civilisation, either. They are the pinnacle of what "the barbarians" can become. Or rather, they
were that. Because that age is now over. They sure as hell shaped the world -- shaped it thrice over at the very least. Their legacy endures. But it will not happen again. The sedentary world has won.
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[*] I think we both knew that was a lie from the start.
