Chapter XIV: Plains, Steppes and Deserts (1)

[Sidenote: Relief of the sea floor.]

Anthropo-geography has to do primarily with the forms and relief of the land. The relief of the sea floor influences man only indirectly. It does this by affecting the forms of the coast, by contributing to the action of tides in scouring out river estuaries, as on the flat beaches of Holland and England, by determining conditions for the abundant littoral life of the sea, the fisheries of the continental shelf which are factors in the food quest and the distribution of settlements. Moreover, the ocean floor enters into the problem of laying telegraph cables, and thereby assumes a certain commercial and political importance. The name of the Telegraph Plateau of the North Atlantic, crossed by three cables, points to the relation between these and submarine relief. So also does the erratic path of the cable from southwestern Australia to South Africa via Keeling Island and Mauritius.

Submarine reliefs have yet greater significance in their relation to the distribution of the human race over the whole earth; for what is now a shallow sea may in geologically recent times have been dry land, on which primitive man crossed from continent to continent. It is vital to the theory of the Asiatic origin of the American Indian that in Miocene times a land bridge spanned the present shallows of Bering Sea. Hence the slight depth of this basin has the same bio-geographical significance as that of the British seas, the waters of the Malay Archipelago, and the Melanesian submarine platform. The impressive fact about "Wallace's Line" is the depth of the narrow channel which it follows through Lombok and Macassar Straits and which, in recent geological times, defined the southeastern shore of Asia. In all these questions of former land connection, anthropo-geography follows the lead of bio-geography, whose deductions, based upon the dispersal of countless plant and animal forms, point to the paths of human distribution.

[Sidenote: Mean elevations of the continents.]

The mean elevation of the continents above sea level indicates the average life conditions of their populations as dependent upon relief. The 1010 meters (3313 feet) of Asia indicate its predominant highland character. The 330 meters (1080 feet) representing the average height of Europe, and the 310 meters (1016 feet) of Australia indicate the preponderance of lowlands. Nevertheless, anthropo-geography rarely lends itself to a mathematical statement of physical conditions. Such a statement only obscures the facts. The 660 meters (2164 feet) mean elevation of Africa indicates a relief higher than Europe, but gives no hint of the plateau character of the Dark Continent, in which lowlands and mountains are practically negligible features; while the almost identical figure (650 meters or 2133 feet) for both North and South America is the average derived from extensive lowlands in close juxtaposition to high plateaus capped by lofty mountain ranges. Such mathematical generalizations indicate the general mass of the continental upheaval, but not the way this mass is divided into low and high reliefs.[1026]

The method of anthropo-geography is essentially analytical, and therefore finds little use for general orometric statements, which may be valuable to the science of geo-morphology with its radically different standpoint. For instance, geo-morphology may calculate from all the dips and gaps in the crest of a mountain range the average height of its passes, Anthropo-geography, on the other hand, distinguishes between the various passes according as they open lines of greater or less resistance to the historical movement across the mountain barriers. It finds that one deep breach in the mountain wall, like the Mohawk Depression[1027] and Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian system,[1028] Truckee Pass in the Sierra Nevada[1029] and the Brenner in the Alps,[1030] has more far-reaching and persistent historical consequences than a dozen high-laid passes that only notch the crest. Pack-trail, road and railroad seek the former, avoid the latter; one draws from a wide radius, while the other serves a restricted local need. Therefore anthropo-geography, instead of clumping the passes, sorts them out, and notes different relations in each.

[Sidenote: Distribution of reliefs.]

In continents and countries the anthropo-geographer looks to see not what reliefs are present, but how they are distributed; whether highlands and lowlands appear in unbroken masses as in Asia, or alternate in close succession as in western Europe; whether the transition from one to the other is abrupt as in western South America, or gradual as in the United States. A simple and massive land structure lends the same trait of the simple and massive to every kind of historical movement, because it collects the people into large groups and starts them moving in broad streams, as it were. This fact explains the historical preponderance of lowland peoples and especially of steppe nomads over the small, scattered groups inhabiting isolated mountain valleys. The island of Great Britain illustrates the same principle on a small scale in the turbid, dismembered history of independent Scotland, with its Highlanders and Lowlanders, its tribes and clans separated by mountains, gorges, straits, and fiords,[1031] in contrast to the smoother, unified course of history in the more uniform England. Carl Ritter compares the dull uniformity of historical development and relief in Africa with the variegated assemblage of highlands and lowlands, nations and peoples, primitive societies and civilized states in the more stimulating environment of Asia.[1032]

[Sidenote: Homologous relief and homologous histories.]

The chief features of mountain relief reappear on a large scale in the continents, which are simply big areas of upheaval lifted above sea level. The continents show therefore homologous regions of lowlands, uplands, plateaus and mountains, each district sustaining definite relations to the natural terrace above or below it, and displaying a history corresponding to that of its counterpart in some distant part of the world, due to a similarity of relations. This appears first in a specialization of products in each tier and hence in more or less economic interdependence, especially where civilization is advanced. The tendency of conquest to unite such obviously complementary districts is persistent. Hence the Central Highland of Asia is fringed with low peripheral lands like Manchuria, China, India and Mesopotamia, into whose history it has repeatedly entered as a disturbing force. All the narrow Pacific districts of the Americas from Alaska to Patagonia are separated by the Cordilleras from the lowlands on the Atlantic face of the continents; all reveal in their history the common handicap arising from an overwhelming preponderance of plateau and mountain and a paucity of lowlands. Colombia, Ecuador and Peru have in the past century been stretching out their hands eastward to grasp sections of the bordering Amazon lowlands, where to-day is the world's great field of conflicting boundary claims. Chile would follow its geographical destiny if it should supplement its high, serrated surface by the plateaus and lowlands of Bolivia, as Cyrus the Persian married the Plateau of Iran to the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, and Romulus joined the Alban hills to the alluvial fields of the Tiber.

[Sidenote: Anthropo-geography of lowlands.]

Well-watered lowlands invite expansion, ethnic, commercial and political. In them the whole range of historical movements meet few obstacles beyond the waters gathering in their runnels and the forests nourished in their rich soils. Limited to 200 meters (660 feet) elevation, lowlands develop no surface features beyond low hills and undulating swells of land. Uniformity of life conditions, monotony of climate as of relief, except where grades of latitude intervene to chill or heat, an absence of natural boundaries, and constant encouragement to intercourse, are the anthropo-geographic traits of lowlands, as opposed to the arresting, detaining grasp of mountains and highland valleys. Small, isolated lowlands, like the mountain-rimmed plains of Greece and the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, the Nile flood-plain, Portugal, and Andalusia in Spain, may achieve precocious and short-lived historical importance, owing to the fertility of their alluvial soils, their character as naturally defined districts, and their advantageous maritime location; but while in these restricted lowlands the telling feature has been their barrier boundaries of desert, mountains and sea, the vast level plains of the earth have found their distinctive and lasting historical importance in the fact of their large and unbounded surface.

Such plains have been both source and recipient of every form of historical movement. Owing to their prevailing fitness for agriculture, trade and intercourse, they are favored regions for the final massing of a sedentary population. The areas of greatest density of population in the world, harboring 150 or more to the square kilometer (385 to the square mile), are found in the lowlands of China, the alluvial plains of India, and similar level stretches in the Neapolitan plain and Po Valley, the lowlands of France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, England and Scotland. Such a density is found in upland districts (660 to 2000 feet, or 200 to 600 meters) bordering agricultural lowlands, only where industries based upon mineral wealth cause a concentration of population. [See maps pages 8, 9, 559.]

[Sidenote: Extensive plains unfavorable to early development.]

The level or undulating surface of extensive lowlands is not favorable to the early development of civilization. Not only do their wide extent and absence of barriers postpone the transition from nomadism to sedentary life, but their lack of contrasting environments and contrasted developments, which supplement and stimulate, puts chains upon progress. A flat, monotonous relief produces a monotonous existence, necessarily one-sided, needing a complement in upland or mountain. To the pioneer settlers in the lowlands of Missouri the Ozark Plateau was a boon, because its streams furnished water-power for much needed saw and flour mills. Treeless Egypt even before 2500 B. C. depended upon the cedars of the Lebanon Mountains for the construction of its ships; so that the conquest of Lebanon, begun by Thutmose I. and completed by Thutmose III. in about 1470 B. C., had a sound geographical basis.[1033] Similarly the exploitation of the copper, malachite, turquoise and lapis-lazuli of Mount Sinai, minerals not found in the Nile plain, led the ancient Egyptians into extensive mining operations there before 3000 B. C., and resulted in the establishment of Egyptian political supremacy in 2900 B. C., as a measure to protect the mines against the depredations of the neighboring Bedouin tribes.[1034] Lowlands lack the distinctive advantages of highlands found in diversity of climate, water-power, generally in more abundant forests and minerals. The latter are earlier discovered and worked in the tilted strata of mountains and uplands.

Plain countries suffer particularly from a paucity of varied geographic conditions and of resulting contrasts in their population. Their national characters tend to be less richly endowed; their possibilities for development are blighted or retarded, because even racial differences are rapidly obliterated in the uniform geographic environment, A small diversified country like Crete, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal, Saxony, or Japan, is a geographical _multum in parvo_. The western half of Europe bears the same stamp, endowing each country and nation with marked individuality born of partial isolation and a varied combination of environment. The larger eastern half of the continent embraced in the plains of Poland and Russia shows monotony in every aspect of human life. This comes out anthropologically in the striking similarity of head-form found everywhere north and east of the Carpathian Mountains, except in the secluded districts of Lithuania and Crimea, which shelter remnants of distinct races. Over all this vast territory the range of cephalic variation is only five units or one-third that in the restricted but diversified territory of western Europe. Italy, only one-eighteenth the size of European Russia, has a range of fifteen units, reflecting in the variety of its human types the diversity of its environment.[1035]

[Sidenote: Conditions for fusion in plains.]

In the plains geography makes for fusion. Russia shows this marked homogeneity, despite a motley collection of race ingredients which have entered into the make-up of the Russian people. Without boundary or barrier, the country has stood wide open to invasion; but the intruders found no secluded corners where they could entrench themselves and preserve their national individuality.[1036] They dropped into a vast melting-pot, which has succeeded in amalgamating the most diverse elements. The long-drawn Baltic-North Sea plain of Europe shows the same power to fuse. Here is found a prevailing blond, long-headed stock from the Gulf of Finland to the Somme River in France.[1037] Yet this natural boulevard has been a passway for races. Prehistoric evidences show that the dark, broad-headed Celtic folk once overspread this plain east to the Weser;[1038] it still tends to trickle down from the southern uplands into the Baltic lowland, and modify the Teutonic type along its southern margin throughout Germany.[1039] The Slavs in historic times reached as far west as the Weser, while the expansion of the Teutons has embraced the whole maritime plain from Brittany to the Finnish Gulf. Here it is difficult to draw an ethnic boundary on the basis of physical differences. The eastern Prussians are Slavonized Teutons, and the adjacent Poles seem to be Teutonized Slavs, while the purest type of Letto-Lithuanian at the eastern corner of the Baltic coast approximates closely to the Anglo-Saxon type which sprang from the western corner.[1040] A similar amalgamation of races and peoples has taken place in the lowlands of England and Scotland, while diversity still lingers in the highlands. In the Lowlands of Scotland, Picts in small numbers, Britons, Scots from Ireland, Angles, Frisians, Northmen and Danes have all been blended and assimilated in habits, customs and speech.[1041]

[Sidenote: Retardation due to monotonous environment.]

This uniformity is advantageous to early development in a small plain, because of the juxtaposition of contrasted environments, but is stultifying to national life in an immense expanse of monotony like that of Russia. Here sameness leaves its stamp on everything. Language is differentiated with only two dialects, that of the Great Russians of the north and the Little Russians of the southern steppes, who were so long exposed to Tartar influences. Most other languages of Europe, though confined to much smaller areas, show far greater diversity.[1042] While the Russian of Kazan or Archangel can converse readily with the citizen of Riga or St. Petersburg, Germans from highland Bavaria and Swabia are scarcely intelligible to Prussian and Mecklenberger. And whereas Germany a few decades ago could count over a hundred different kinds of national dress or _Tracht_, Great Russia alone, with six times the area, had only a single type with perhaps a dozen slight variations. Leroy-Beaulieu comments upon this eternal sameness. "The cities are all alike; so are the peasants, in looks, habits, in mode of life. In no country do people resemble one another more; no other country is so free from political complexity, those oppositions in type and character, which even yet we encounter in Italy and Spain, in France and Germany. The nation is made in the likeness of the country; it shows the same unity, we might say the same monotony, as the plains on which it dwells."

[Sidenote: Influence of soils in low plains.]

The more flat and featureless a lowland is, the more important become even the slightest surface irregularities which can draw faint dividing lines among the population. Here a gentle land-swell, river, lake, forest, or water-soaked moor serves as boundary. Especially apparent is the differentiating influence of difference of soils. Gravel and alluvium, sand and clay, chalk and more recent marine sediments, emphasize small geographical differences throughout the North German lowland and its extension through Belgium and Holland; here various soils differentiate the distribution of population. In the Netherlands we find the Frisian element of the Dutch people inhabiting chiefly the clay soils and low fens of the west and northwest, the Saxon in the diluvial tracts of the east, and the Frankish in the river clays and diluvium of the south. All the types have maintained their differences of dialect, styles of houses, racial character, dress and custom.[1043] The only distinctive region in the great western lowland of France, which comprises over half of the country, is Brittany, individualized in its people and history by its peninsula form, its remote western location, and its infertile soil of primary rocks. Within the sedimentary trough of the Paris Basin, a slight Cretacean platform like the meadow land of Perche[1044] (200 to 300 meters elevation) introduces an area of thin population devoted to horse and cattle raising in close proximity to the teeming urban life of Paris. The eastern lowland of England also can be differentiated economically and historically chiefly according to differences of underlying rocks, Carboniferous, Triassic, Jurassic, chalk, boulder clays, and alluvium, which also coincide often with slight variations of relief.[1045] In Russia the contrast between the glaciated surface of the north and the Black Mould belt of the south makes the only natural divisions of that vast country, unless we distinguish also the arid southeastern steppes on the basis of a purely climatic difference. [See map page 484.]

The broad coastal plain of our South Atlantic States contains only low reliefs; but it is diversified by several soil belts, which exert a definite control over the industries of the inhabitants, and thereby over the distribution of the negro population. In Georgia, for instance, the rich alluvial soil of the swampy coast is devoted to the culture of rice and sea-island cotton, and contains over 60 per cent. of negroes in its population. This belt, which is only 25 miles wide, is succeeded inland by a broader zone of sandy pine barrens, where the proportion of negroes drops to only 20 or 30 per cent. of the total. Yet further inland is another fertile belt, devoted chiefly to the cultivation of upland cotton and harboring from 35 to over 60 per cent. of negroes in its population.[1046] Alabama shows a similar stratification of soils and population from north to south over its level surface. Along the northern border of the state the cereal belt coincides with the deep calcareous soil of the Tennessee River Valley, where negroes constitute from 35 to 60 per cent. of the inhabitants. Next comes the mineral belt, covering the low foot-hills of the Appalachian Mountains. It contains the densest population of the state, less than 17 per cent. of which is negro. South of this is the broad cotton belt of various rich soils, chiefly deep black loam of the river bottoms, which stretches east and west across the state and includes over 60 per cent. of negroes in its population. This is succeeded by the low, coastal timber belt, marked by a decline in the quality of the soil and the proportion of negro inhabitants.[1047]

[Sidenote: Value of slight elevations.]

In the dead level of extensive plains even slight elevations are seized upon for special uses, or acquire peculiar significance. The Kurgans or burial mounds of the prehistoric inhabitants of Russia, often twenty to fifty feet high, serve to-day as watch-towers for herdsmen tending their flocks.[1048] Similarly the Bou-bous, inhabiting the flat grasslands of the French Congo between the Shari and Ubangui Rivers, use the low knolls dotted over their country, probably old ant-hills, as lookout points against raiders.[1049] The sand hills and ridges which border the southern edges of the North German lowland form districts sharply contrasted to the swampy, wooded depressions of the old deserted river valleys just to the north. Early occupied by a German stock, they furnished the first German colonists to displace the primitive Slav population surviving in those unattractive, inaccessible regions, as seen in the Spreewald near Kottbus to-day.

[Sidenote: Plains and political expansion.]

The boundless horizon which is unfavorable to a nascent people endows them in their belated maturity with the power of mastering large areas. Political expansion is the dominant characteristic of the peoples of the plains. Haxthausen observed that handicapped and retarded Russia commands every geographic condition and national trait necessary for virile and expansive political power.[1050] Muscovite expansion eastward across the lowlands of Europe and Asia is paralleled by the rapid spread of American settlement and dominion across the plains and prairies of the Mississippi Valley, and Hungarian domination of the wide Danubian levels from the foot-hills of the Austrian Alps to the far Carpathian watershed. It was the closely linked lowlands of the Seine and Loire which formed the core of political expansion and centralization in France. Nearly the whole northern lowland of Germany has been gradually absorbed by the kingdom of Prussia, which now comprises in its territory almost two-thirds of the total area of the Empire. Prussian statesmen formulated the policy of German unification and colonial expansion, and to Prussia fell the hereditary headship of the Empire.

Lowland states tend to stretch out and out to boundaries which depend more upon the reach of the central authority than upon physical features. We have seen American settlement and dominion overleap one natural boundary after another between the Mississippi River and the Pacific, from 1804 to 1848. Russia in an equally short period has pushed forward its Asiatic frontier at a dozen points, despite all barriers of desert and mountain. Argentina, blessed with extensive plains, fertile soil and temperate climate, which have served to augment its population both by natural increase and steady immigration (one-fourth of its population is foreign), has expanded across the Rio Negro over the grasslands of the Patagonian plain, and thereby enlarged its area by 259,620 square miles since 1881. The statesman of the plains is a nature-made imperialist; he nurses wide territorial policies and draws his frontiers for the future. To him a "far-flung battle line" is significant only as a means to secure a far-flung boundary line.

[Sidenote: Arid plains.]

From these low, accessible plains of adequate rainfall, which at first encourage primitive nomadism but finally make it yield to sedentary life and to dense populations spreading their farms and cities farther and farther over the unresisting surface of the land, we turn to those boundless arid steppes and deserts which Nature has made forever the homes of restless, rootless peoples. Here quiescence is impossible, the _Voelkerwanderung_ is habitual, migration is permanent. The only change is this eternal restlessness. While the people move, progress stands still. Everywhere the sun-scorched grasslands and waterless waste have drawn the dead-line to the advance of indigenous civilization. They permit no accumulation of productive wealth beyond increasing flocks and herds, and limit even their growth by the food supply of scanty, scattered pasturage. The meager rainfall eliminates forests and therewith a barrier to migrations; it also restricts vegetation to grasses, sedges and those forms which can survive a prolonged summer drought and require a short period of growth.

[Sidenote: Distribution and extent of arid plains.]

The union of arid plains and steppe vegetation is based upon climate, and is therefore a widely distributed phenomenon. These plains, whether high or low, are found in their greatest extent in the dry trade-wind belts, as in the deserts and steppes of Arabia, Persia, Sudan, the Sahara, South Africa and Central Australia; and in vast continental interiors, where the winds arrive robbed of their moisture in passing intervening highlands, as in the grasslands of our western plains, the llanos and pampas of South America, and the steppes of Central Asia. But wherever they occur, whether in Argentina or Russian Turkestan or the higher plains of Mongolia and Tibet, they present the same general characteristics of land surface, climate, flora and fauna, and the same nomadic populations of pastoral or hunting tribes. In them the movement of peoples reaches its culminating point, permanent settlement its nil point. Here the hunting savage makes the widest sweep in pursuit of buffalo or antelope, and pauses least to till a field; here the pastoral nomad follows his systematic wandering in search of pasturage and his hardly less systematic campaigns of conquest. It is the vast area and wide distribution of these arid plains, combined with the mobility which they impose on native human life, that has lent them historical importance, and reproduced in all sections of the world that significant homologous relation of arid and well-watered districts.

[Sidenote: Pastoral life.]

The grasslands of the old world developed historical importance only after the domestication of cattle, sheep, goats, asses, horses, camels and yaks. This step in progress resulted in the evolution of peoples who renounced the precarious subsistence of the chase and escaped the drudgery of agriculture, to devote themselves to pastoral life. It was possible only where domesticable animals were present, and where the intelligence of the native or the peculiar pressure exerted by environment suggested the change from a natural to an artificial basis of subsistence. Australia lacked the type of animal. Though North America had the reindeer and buffalo, and South America the guanaco, llama and alpaca, only the last two were domesticated in the Andean highlands; but as these were restricted to altitudes from 10,000 to 14,000 feet, where pasturage was limited, stock raising in primitive South America was merely an adjunct to the sedentary agriculture of the high intermontane valleys, and never became the basis for pastoral nomadism on the grassy plains. However, when the Spaniards introduced horses and cattle into South America, the Indians and half-breeds of the llanos and pampas became regular pastoral nomads, known as llaneros and gauchos. They are a race of horsemen, wielding javelin and lasso and bola, living on meat, often on horse-flesh like the ancient Huns, dwelling in leather tents made on a cane framework, like those of the modern Kirghis and medieval Tartars, dressed in cloaks of horsehide sewn together, and raiding the Argentinian frontier of white settlement for horses, sheep and cattle, with the true marauding instinct of all nomads.[1051]

[Sidenote: Pastoral nomads of Arctic plains.]

Aridity is not the only climatic condition condemning a people to nomadic life. Excessive cold, producing the tundra wastes of the far north, has the same effect. Therefore, throughout Arctic Eurasia, from the Lapp district of Norway to the Inland Chukches of eastern Siberia, we have a succession of Hyperborean peoples pasturing their herds of reindeer over the moss and lichen tundra, and supplementing their food supply with hunting and fishing. The reindeer Chukches once confined themselves to their peninsula, so long as the grazing grounds were unexhausted; but they now range as far west as Yakutsk on the Lena River, The Orochones of the Kolima River district in eastern Siberia, who live chiefly by their reindeer, have small herds. A well-to-do person will have 40 to 100 animals, and the wealthiest only 700, while the Chukches with herds of 10,000 often seek the pasture of the Kolima tundra.[1052] Farther west, the Samoyedes of northern Siberia and Russia and the Zirians of the Petchora River range with their large herds northward to the Yalmal Peninsula and Vaygats Isle in summer, and southward in winter. [See map pages 103, 225.] Here a herd of fifty head, which just suffices for the support of one family of four souls, requires 10 square versts, or 4.44 square miles of tundra pasturage.[1053] Hence population must forever remain too sparse ever to attain historical significance. [See map page 8.] The Russian Lapps, too, lead a semi-nomadic life. Each group has a particular summer and winter settlement. The winter village is located usually inland in the Kola Peninsula, where the forests lend shelter to the herds, and the summer one near the tundra of the coast, where fishing is accessible. In winter, like the nomads of the deserts, they add to their slender income by the transport of goods by their reindeer and by service at the post stations.[1054]

[Sidenote: Historical importance of steppe nomads.]

These nomads of the frozen north, scattered sparsely over the remote periphery of the habitable world, have lacked the historical importance which in all times has attached to the steppe nomads, owing to their central location. The broad belt of deserts and grasslands which crosses the old world diagonally between 10 deg. and 60 deg. North Latitude from the Atlantic in Africa to the Pacific in Asia, either borders or encompasses the old domains of culture found in river oases, alluvial lowlands or coastal plains of the Torrid and Temperate Zones. The restless, mobile, unbound shepherds of the arid lands have never long been contained by the country which bred them. They have constantly encroached upon the territory of their better placed neighbors, invading, conquering, appropriating their fields and cities, disturbing but at the same time acquiring their culture, lording it over the passive agriculturists, and at the same time putting iron into their weaker blood. It is the geographical contact between arid steppes and moist river valley, between land of poverty and land of plenty, that has made the history of the two inseparable.[1055]

[Sidenote: Mobility of pastoral nomads.]

Every aspect of human life in the steppes bears the stamp of mobility. The nomad tolerates no clog upon his movements. His dwelling is the tent of skin or felt as among Kalmucks and Kirghis, or the tent wagon of the modern Boer[1056] and the ancient Scythian as described by Herodotus.[1057] "This device has been contrived by them as the country is fit for it," he says,--level, grassy, treeless. The temporary settlement of shepherd tribes is the group of tents, or the ancient _carrago_ camp of the nomadic Visigoths,[1058] or the _laager_ of the pastoral Boers, both a circular barricade or corral of wagons.

[Sidenote: Tendency to trek.]

Constant movement reduces the impedimenta to a minimum. The Orochones, a Tunguse nomadic tribe of eastern Siberia, have no furniture in their tents, and keep their meager supply of clothing and utensils neatly packed on sledges, as if to start at a moment's notice.[1059] The only desirable form of capital is that which transports itself, namely, flocks and herds. Beyond that, wealth is limited to strictly portable forms, preferably silver, gold and jewels. It was in terms of these, besides their herds, that the riches of Abraham and Lot were rated in the Bible. That the Israelites when traveling through the wilderness should have had the gold to make the golden calf accords strictly with the verisimilitude of pastoral life.[1060] Moreover, that these enslaved descendants of the Sheik Abraham, with their traditions of pastoral life, should have simply trekked-ruptured the frail ties of recently acquired habit which bound them to the Nile soil, is also in keeping with their inborn nomadic spirit. Similar instances occur among modern peoples. The Great Trek of the South African Boers in 1836, by which they renounced not only their unwelcome allegiance to England, but also their land,[1061] was another exodus in accordance with the instinct of a pastoral people. They adopted no strange or difficult course, but traveled with their families as they were wont in their every day life of cattle-tenders, took all their chattels with them, and headed for the thin pastures of the far-reaching veldt. The Russian government has had to contend with a like fluidity in her Cossack tribes of the steppes, who have been up and off when imperial authority became oppressive. In the summer of 1878 West Siberia lost about 9000 Kirghis, who left the province Semipalatinsk to seek Mongolia.

[Sidenote: Seasonal migrations.]

Environment determines the nomadic habits of the dweller of desert and steppe. The distribution of pasture and water fixes the scope and the rate of his wandering; these in turn depend upon geographic conditions and vary with the season. The Papago Indians of southern Arizona range with their cattle over a territory 100 by 150 miles in extent, and wander across the border into Mexico. When their main water supply, derived from wells or artificial reservoirs near their summer villages, is exhausted, they migrate to the water-holes, springs or streams in the canons. There the cattle graze out on the plains and return to the canons to drink.[1062] Every Mongol tribe and clan has its seasonal migration. In winter the heavier precipitation and fuller streams enable them to collect in considerable groups in protected valleys; but the dry summer disperses them over the widest area possible, in order to utilize every water-hole and grass spot. The hotter regions of the plains are abandoned in summer for highlands, where the short period of warmth yields temporary pastures and where alone water can be found. The Kirghis of Russian Turkestan resort in summer to the slopes and high valleys of the Altai Mountains, where their auls or tent villages may be seen surrounded by big flocks of sheep, goats, camels, horses and cattle.[1063] The Pamir in the warm months is the gathering place for the nomads of Central Asia. The naked desert of Arabia yields a rare herbage during the rainy season, when the Bedouin tribes resort to it for pasturage;[1064] but during the succeeding drought they scatter to the hills of Yemen, Syria and Palestine,[1065] or migrate to the valley of the Nile and Euphrates.[1066] The Arabs of the northern Sahara, followed by small flocks of sheep and goats, vibrate between the summer pastures on the slopes of the Atlas Mountains and the scant, wiry grass tufts found in winter on the borders of the desert.[1067] When the equatorial rains begin in June, the Arabs of the Atbara River follow them north-westward into the Nubian desert, and let their camel herds graze on the delicate grass which the moisture has conjured up from the sandy soil. The country about Cassala, which is flooded during the monsoon rains by the rivers from the Abyssinian Mountains, is reserved for the dry season.[1068] In the same way the Tartar tribes of the Dnieper, Don, Volga and Ural Rivers in the thirteenth century moved down these rivers in winter to the sea coast, and in summer up-stream to the hills and mountains.[1069] So for the past hundred years the Boers of the South African grasslands have migrated in their tent wagons from the higher to the lower pastures, according to the season of the year, invading even the Karroo Desert after the short summer rains.[1070]

[Sidenote: Marauding expeditions.]

This systematic movement of nomads within their accepted boundaries leads, on slight provocation, to excursions beyond their own frontiers into neighboring territories. The growing herd alone necessitates the absorption of more land, more water-holes, because the grazed pastures renew their grass slowly under the prevailing conditions of drought. An area sufficient for the support of the tribe is inadequate for the sustenance of the herd, whose increase is a perennial expansive force. Soon the pastures become filled with the feeding flocks, and then herdsmen and herds spill over into other fields. Often a season of unusual drought, reducing the existing herbage which is scarcely adequate at best, gives rise to those irregular, temporary expansions which enlarge the geographical horizon of the horde, and eventuate in widespread conquest. Such incursions, like the seasonal movements of nomads, result from the helpless dependence of shepherd tribes upon variations of rainfall.

The nomad's basis of life is at best precarious. He and want are familiar friends. A pest among his herds, diminished pasturage, failing wells, all bring him face to face with famine, and drive him to robbery and pillage.[1071] Marauding tendencies are ingrained in all dwellers of the deserts and steppes.[1072] Since the days of Job, the Bedouins of Arabia have been a race of marauders; they have reduced robbery to a system. Predatory excursions figure conspicuously in the history of all the tribes. Robber is a title of honor.[1073] Pliny said that the Arabs were equally addicted to theft and trade. They pillaged caravans and held them for ransom, or gave them safe conduct across the desert for a price. Formerly the Turkoman tribes of the Trans-Caspian steppes levied on the bordering districts, notably the northern part of Khorasan, which belonged more to the Turkomans, Yomut and Goklan tribes of the adjoining steppe than to the resident Persians. The border districts of Herat, Khiva, Merv and Bukhara used to suffer in the same way from the raids of the Tekkes, till the Russians checked the evil.[1074] The Tekkes had depopulated whole districts, invaded Persian towns of considerable size, and carried off countless families into slavery. Both Turkomans and Kirghis tribes prior to 1873 raided caravans and carried off the travelers to the slave markets of Bukhara and Samarkand.[1075] [See map page 103.]

Among these tribes no young man commanded respect in his community till he had participated in a _baranta_ or cattle-raising.[1076] For centuries the nomadic hordes of the Russian steppes systematically pillaged the peaceful agricultural Slavs, who were threatening to encroach upon their pasture lands. The sudden, swift descent and swift retreat of the mounted marauders with the booty into the pathless grasslands, whither pursuit was dangerous, their tendency to rob and conquer but never to colonize, involved Russia in a long struggle, which ceased only with the extension of Muscovite dominion over the steppes.[1077]

[Sidenote: Depredation and conquests of African nomads.]

All the Saharan tribes are marauders, whether Arabs, Berber Tuaregs, or Negroid Tibbus. The desert has made them so. The Tuaregs are chronic freebooters; they keep the Sahara and especially the caravan routes in constant insecurity. They stretch a cordon across these routes from Ghadames and Ghat in the east to the great oases of Insalah and Twat in the west; and from the oases and hills forming their headquarters they spread for pasturage and blackmail over the desert.[1078] They exact toll over and over again from a caravan, provide it with a military escort of their own tribesmen, and then pillage it on the way.[1079] This has been the experience of Barth[1080] and other explorers. Caravans have not been their only prey. The agricultural peoples in the Niger flood-plain, the commerce on the river, and the markets of Timbuctoo long suffered from the raids of the Tuaregs of the Sahara. They collected tribute in the form of grain, salt, garments, horses and gold, typical needs of a desert people, imposed tolls on caravans and on merchant fleets passing down the Niger to Timbuctoo. In 1770 they began to move from the desert and appropriate the fertile plains in the northern part of the Niger Valley, and in 1800 they conquered Timbuctoo; but soon they had to yield to another tribe of pastoral nomads, the Fulbes from the Senegal, who in 1813 established a short-lived but well organized empire on the ruins of the Tuareg dominion.[1081] [See map page 105.] The other agricultural states of the Sudan have had the same experience. The Tibbus, predatory nomads of the French Sahara just north of Lake Chad and the River Yo, mounted on camels and ponies, cross the shrunken river in the dry season and raid Bornu for cattle, carry off women and children to sell as slaves, pillage the weekly markets on the Yo, and plunder caravans of pilgrims moving eastward to Mecca.[1082] Nowhere can desert nomads and the civilized peoples of agricultural plains dwell side by side in peace. Raids, encroachments, reprisals, finally conquest from one side or the other is the formula for their history. [See map page 487.]

[Sidenote: Forms of defense against nomad depredations.]

The raided territory, if a modern civilized state, organizes its border communities into a native mounted police, as the English have done in Bornu, Sokoto and the Egyptian Sudan, and as the Russians did with their Cossack riders along the successive frontiers of Muscovite advance into the steppes; or it takes into its employ, as we have seen, the nearest nomad tribes to repress or punish every hostile movement beyond. Among the ancient states the method was generally different. Since the nomad invaders came with their flocks and herds, a barrier often sufficed to block their progress. For this purpose Sesostris built the long wall of 1500 stadia from Pelusium to Heliopolis as a barricade against the Arabians.[1083] Ancient Carthage constructed a ditch to check the depredations of the nomads of Numidia.[1084] The early kings of Assyria built a barrier across the plains of the Euphrates above Babylon to secure their dominion from the incursions of the desert Medes.[1085] In the fifth century of our era, the "Red Wall" was constructed near the northern frontier of Persia as a bulwark against the Huns. It stretched for a hundred and fifty miles from the Caspian Sea at the ancient port of Aboskun eastward to the mountains, and thus enclosed the populous valley of the Gurgen River.[1086] In remote ages the neck of the Crimean Peninsula was fortified by a wall against the irruptions of the Tauro-Scythians.[1087] The Russians early in their national history used the same means of defense against Tartar incursions. One wall was built from Pensa on the Sura River to Simbirsk on the Volga, just south of Kazan; another, further strengthened by a foss and palisades, extended from the fortress of Tsaritzin at the southern elbow of the Volga across the fifty-mile interval to the Don, and was still defended in 1794 by the Cossacks of the Don against the neighboring Kirghis hordes.[1088] The classic example of such fortifications against pastoral nomads, however, is the Great Wall of China.

[Sidenote: Pastoral life as a training for soldiers.]

The nomad is economically a herdsman, politically a conqueror, and chronically a fighter. Strife over pasturage and wells meets us in the typical history of Abraham, Lot and Isaac;[1089] it exists within and without the clan. The necessity of guarding the pastures, which are only intermittently occupied, involves a persistent military organization. The nation is a quiescent army, the army a mobilized nation.[1090] It carries with it a self-transporting commissariat in its flocks and herds. Constant practice in riding, scouting and the use of arms, physical endurance tested by centuries of exertion and hardship, make every nomad a soldier. Cavalry and camel corps add to the swiftness and vigor of their onslaught, make their military strategy that of sudden attack and swifter retreat, to be met only by wariness and extreme mobility. The ancient Scythians of the lower Danubian steppes were all horse archers, like the Parthians. "If the Scythians were united, there is no nation which could compare with them or would be capable of resisting them; I do not say in Europe, but even in Asia," said Thucydides.[1091] In this opinion Herodotus concurred.[1092] The nomad's whole existence breeds courage. The independent, hazardous life of the desert makes the Arab the bravest of mankind, but the settled, agricultural Arab of Egypt and Mohammedan Spain lost most of his fighting qualities.[1093]

[Sidenote: Military organization of nomads.]

The daily life of a nomad horde is a training school for military organization. In the evening the flocks and herds are distributed with system around the camp to prevent confusion. The difficult art of a well ordered march, of making and breaking camp, and of foraging is practiced almost daily in their constant migrations.[1094] The usual order of the Bedouin march could scarcely be surpassed by an army. In advance of the caravan moves a body of armed horsemen, five or seven kilometers ahead; then follows the main body of the tribesmen mounted on horses and camels, then the female camels, and after these the beasts of burden with the women and children. The encampment of tents with the places for men, arms and herds is also carefully regulated. More than this, the horde is organized into companies with their superior and subordinate leaders.[1095] John de Carpini describes Genghis Khan's military organization of his vast Tartar horde by tens, hundreds and thousands, his absolute dominion over his conquered subjects, and prompt absorption of them into his fighting force, by the compulsory enlistment of soldiers out of every freshly subjugated nation.[1096] In the same way the Hebrew tribes, when preparing for the conquest of Canaan, adopted from the desert Midianites the organization of the horde into tens, hundreds and thousands under judges, who were also military leaders in time of war.

[Sidenote: Capacity for conquest and political consolidation.]

Thus certain geographic conditions produce directly the habitual and systematic migration of the nomads, and through this indirectly that military and political organization which has given the shepherd races of the earth their great historical mission of political consolidation. Agriculture, though underlying all permanent advance in civilization, is handicapped by the lack of courage, mobility, enterprise and large political outlook characterizing early tillers of the soil. All these qualities the nomad possesses. Hence the union of these two elements, imperious pastor superimposed upon peaceful tiller, has made the only stable governments among savage and semi-civilized races.[1097] The politically invertebrate peoples of dark Africa have secured the back-bone to erect states only from nomad conquerors. The history of the Sudan cannot be understood apart from a knowledge of the Sahara and its peoples. All the Sudanese states were formed by invaders from the northern desert, Hamitic or Semitic. [See map page 487.] The Galla or Wahuma herdsmen of East Africa founded and maintained the relatively stable states of Uganda, Kittara, Karague, and Uzinza in the equatorial district; the conquerors remained herders while they lorded it over the agricultural aborigines.[1098] In prehistoric times when the various peoples of the Aryan linguistic family were spreading over Europe and southern Asia, the superiority of the shepherd races must have been especially marked, because in that era only the unobstructed surface of the steppes permitted the concentration of men on a vast scale for migration and conquest. Everywhere else regions of broken relief and dense forests harbored small, isolated peoples, to whom both the idea and the technique of combined movement were foreign.

[Sidenote: Scope of nomad conquests.]

The rapidity and wide scope of such conquests is explained largely by the fact that nomads try to displace only the ruling classes in the subjugated territory, leaving the mass of the population practically undisturbed. Thus they spread themselves thin over a wide area. How lasting are the results of such conquests depends upon the degree of social evolution attained by the herdsmen. Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, after the manner of overlords, organized their conquered nations, but left them under the control of local princes,[1099] while their tribute gatherers annually swept the country like typical nomad marauders. The Turks are still only encamped in Europe. They too make taxation despoliation. And though their dominion has produced no assimilation between victor and vanquished, it has given political consolidation to a large area occupied by varied peoples. The Hyksos conquest of Egypt found the Nile Valley divided into several petty principalities under a nominal king. The nomad conquerors possessed political capacity and gave to Egypt a strong, centralized government, which laid the basis for the power and glory of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The Tartars in 1279 A.D. and the Manchus in 1664 conquered China, extended its boundaries, governed the country as a ruling class, and left the established order of things undisturbed. The Saracen conquest of North Africa and Spain showed for a time organization and a permanence due to the advanced cultural status of the sedentary Arabs drawn into the movement by religious enthusiasm. The environment of Spain tended to conserve the knowledge of agriculture, industry, architecture, and science which they brought in and which might have cemented Spaniard and Moor, had it not been for the intense religious antagonism existing between the two races.

The history of nomad conquerors shows that they become weakened by the enervating climate and the effeminating luxury of the moist and fertile lowlands. They lose eventually their warlike spirit, like the Fellatah or Fulbe founders of the Sudanese states,[1100] and are either displaced from their insecure thrones by other conquerors sprung from the same nomad-breeding steppe, as the Aryan princes of India by the Mongol Emperor, and the Saracen invaders of Mesopotamia by the victorious Turkomans; or they are expelled in time by their conquered subjects, as the Tartars were from Russia, the Moors from Spain, and the Turks from the Danube Valley.

[Sidenote: Centralization versus decentralization in nomadism.]

Nomad hordes unite for concerted action to resist encroachment upon their pastures, or for marauding expeditions, or for widespread conquest; but such unions are from their nature temporary, though a career of conquest may be sustained for decades. The geographically determined mobility which facilitates such concentration favors also dispersal, decentralization. This is the paradox in nomadism. Geographic conditions in arid lands necessitate sparse distribution of population and of herds. Pastoral life requires large spaces and small social groups. When Abraham and Lot went to Canaan from Egypt, "the land was not able to bear them that they might dwell together, for their substance was great." Strife for the pasturage ensued between their respective herdsmen, so the two sheiks separated, Lot taking the plains of Jordan and Abraham the hill pastures of Hebron. Jacob and Esau separated for the same reason. The encampment of the Kirghis shepherds rarely averages over five or six tents, except on the best grazing grounds at the best season of the year. The flow of spring, well or stream also helps to regulate their size. The groups of Mongol yurts or felt tents along the piedmont margin of the Gobi vary from four tents to a large encampment, according to water and grass.[1101] Prevalsky mentions a population of 70 families or 300 souls in the Lob Nor district distributed in 11 villages, or less than 28 in each group.[1102] Barth noticed the smallness of all the oasis towns of the Sahara, even those occupying favorable locations for trade on the caravan routes.[1103]

[Sidenote: Spirit of independence among nomads.]

The nature-made necessity of scattering in small groups to seek pasturage induces in the nomad a spirit of independence. The Bedouin is personally free. The power of the sheik is only nominal,[1104] and depends much upon his personal qualities. The gift of eloquence among the ancient Arabs has been attributed to the necessity of persuading a people to whom restraint was irksome.[1105] Political organization is conspicuously lacking among the Tibbus of the Sahara[1106] and the Turkoman tribes of the Trans-Caspian steppes. "We are a people without a head," they say. The title of sheik is an empty one. Custom and usage are their rulers.[1107] Though the temporary union of nomadic tribes forms an effective army, the union is short-lived. Groups form, dissolve and re-form, with little inner cohesion. The Boers in South African grasslands showed the same development. The government of the Dutch East India Company in Cape Colony found it difficult to control the wandering cattlemen of the interior plateau. They loved independence and isolation; their dissociative instincts, bred by the lonely life of the thin-pastured veldt, were overcome only by the necessity of defense against the Bushmen. Then they organized themselves into commandos and sallied out on punitive expeditions, like the Cossack tribes of the Don against marauding Tartars. Scattered over wide tracts of pasture land, they were exempt from the control of either Dutch or English authority; but when an energetic administration pursued them into their widespread ranches, they eluded control by trekking.[1108] Here was the independent spirit of the steppe, reinforced by the spirit of the frontier.

[Sidenote: Resistance to conquest.]

Though the desert and steppe have bred conquerors, they are the last parts of the earth's surface to yield to conquest from without. The untameable spirit of freedom in the shepherd tribes finds an ally against aggression in the trackless sands, meager water and food supply of their wilderness. Pursuit of the retreating tribesmen is dangerous and often futile. They need only to burn off the pasture and fill up or pollute the water-holes to cripple the transportation and commissariat of the invading army. This is the way the Damaras have fought the German subjugation of Southwest Africa.[1109] Moreover, the paucity of economic and political possibilities in deserts and grasslands discourages conquest. Conquest pays only where it is a police measure to check depredations on the bordering agricultural lands, or where such barren areas are transit lands to a desirable territory beyond. It is chiefly the "Gates of Herat" and the lure of India which have drawn Russian dominion across the scorched plains of Turkestan. France has assumed the big task of controlling the Sahara to secure a safe passway between French Tunisia and the rich Niger basin of the French Sudan. The recent British-Egyptian expansion southward across the Nubian steppes had for its objective the better watered districts of the upper Nile above Khartum. This desert advance is essentially a latter day phenomenon, the outcome of modern territorial standards; it is attended or secured by the railroad. To this fact the projected Trans-Saharan line is the strongest witness.

Nature everywhere postpones, obstructs, jeopardizes the political conquest of arid lands. The unstable, fanatical tribesmen of the Egyptian Sudan, temporarily but effectively united under the Mahdi, made it necessary for Kitchener to do again in 1898 the work of subjugation which Gordon had done thirty years before. The body of the Arabian people is still free. The Turkish sovereignty over them to-day is nominal, rather an alliance with a people whom it is dangerous to provoke and difficult to attack. Only the coast provinces of Hejaz, Yemen and Hasa are subject to Turkey, while the tribes of the interior and of the southeastern seaboard are wholly independent.[1110] The Turkoman tribes of Trans-Caspia have been subordinated to Russia largely by a process of extermination.[1111] China is satisfied with a nominal dominion over the roaming populations of Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan. The French pacification and control of Northwest Africa meets a peculiar problem, due to the extreme restlessness and restiveness of the dominant Arab race. The whole population is unstable as water; a disturbance or movement in one tribe is soon communicated to the whole mass.[1112]

[Sidenote: Curtailment of nomadism.]