Empire of Horses

by John Man

  Every grave was a mess, with treasure troves of objects, some 2,000 in all (most of them now in St Petersburg), all strewn about among human and animal bones. Not a single skeleton had been left intact. Almost all the gold had been taken, but enough had been left to show that these had been wealthy people. They loved handicrafts and foreign goods: some objects suggested links with China, even Rome and Greece. Amongst other things, the graves contained patterned felt, lacquered wooden bottles, bronze pots, spoons of horn, knee-length underpants of wool and silk, bronze buckles, fur hats, jade decorations, axle-caps, golden jewellery, silver plates with yaks and deer in bas-relief, felt carpets and tapestries embroidered with male heads and animals. The men braided their hair, often using bone hairpins. In Noyon Uul, 120 braids were found, cut off and thrown on to the floors in the rituals of mourning. In the words of one Xiongnu expert, Ts. Odbaatar, ‘Perhaps the braids were a symbolic way for the attendants and servants to join their master in spirit, while not having to sacrifice themselves.’1

  Who were these people? When were they buried? We know now that this was the first evidence of the Xiongnu. At the time, no one had a clue. The answers came slowly, and then – after the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s post-Mao liberalization – with a rush, detailed in later chapters. But the Xiongnu did not exist in a vacuum. They were the products of a long historical process that had opened up the Asian heartland – a new way of life adopted by several major groups and many smaller ones, all sharing similar traits and all commonly treated as a single culture: the Scythians.

  For 99.9 per cent of our 2.5 million years on earth, we humans were hunter-gatherers, making the best of seasonal variations, the habits of animals and nature’s bounty. About 12,000 years ago, as the glaciers of the last Ice Age withdrew, warmer climates gave rise to two new ways of living. The first, from about 7500 BC onwards, was farming, which allowed for permanent settlements and larger, more complex societies. Populations rose. Villages became cities, and life became both political (from polis, Greek for a city-state) and civilized (from civis, Latin for ‘citizen’). As every schoolchild used to know, early civilizations arose around the continental edges and along the great rivers of Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

  But there was another world in the heartland of Eurasia that was no use to anyone – an ocean of grass stretching from the Far East to Hungary, from the northern forests of Siberia down to the deserts of western China. Gazelles and horses and wolves thrived, but not hunter-gatherers, because grassland creatures were hard to kill. Here, most large rivers, which elsewhere were the life-blood of civilizations, flow north, into Arctic wastes. Winters are cruel. Grasslands were best avoided.

  But once farming had provided herds of domestic animals, farmers spread into the oases that dot the deserts and grasslands of Inner Asia. From these islands of agriculture, farmers could develop another lifestyle entirely, known as pastoral nomadism, the formal term for wandering herders. It was not an easy step, nor was there a clear division between new and old, for the evolving culture still relied on hunting, agriculture and animals.

  Before those on the margins of the civilized, citified, farming world lay that universe of grass which, when they learned to use it, would provide for food, mounts, increased populations, armies, and eventually empires. No such ends were in sight, of course, when people first dipped their toes into the sea of green. Progress out on to the grasslands must have involved countless trials, errors, dead-ends and retreats, as animals that were once prey were captured, bred, tamed, and at last ridden. Several species proved amenable: reindeer on the borderlands of Siberia and Mongolia, yaks in Tibet, camels in the semi-deserts. One in particular became the key that unlocked the wealth of the grasslands: the horse.

  Horses were first domesticated around 4000 BC on the steppes north of the Black Sea. The evidence is a bit with tooth-marks and horse teeth with bit-marks. People were breeding the wildness out of these flighty creatures, reconfiguring them for tractability, strength and endurance. A knife dating from around 2000 BC, found on the upper Ob River, shows a man holding a tethered horse. A thousand more years of enforced evolution produced a creature that was still stocky, thick-necked and shaggy, still as tough as ever, but with the inbred guts to gallop to the point of collapse, even death, as happens occasionally in Mongolia’s long-distance National Day races.

  Horses were used to pull lightweight chariots, used in warfare, and heavy wagons, which allowed for long-distance migration. They were also ridden. That’s what really opened up the grasslands. With nothing but a bit and reins, riders could herd horses, sheep, cattle, goats, camels, reindeer and yaks. Saddles helped, but were not a necessity. Iron stirrups even less so, because a rope looped round the toe does the job (the first iron stirrups probably date from the second century AD). To stay with your herds, you needed a tent – which evolved into today’s warm, cool, wind-shouldering domes of felt – and a wagon or a few camels or horses to put it on. With herds and horses and the expertise to use them properly, grass became food, fuel, clothing and more – the stuff of new life.

  It was still a harsh world, a second best. People on the brink of nomadism were probably pushed into it. In the borderlands of China in the second millennium BC, when Chinese civilization was well under way, farmers from the fertile but densely populated regions moved north in search of new lands. They put pressure on marginalized local groups, who were forced to explore other ways to make a living in the even more marginal grasslands. They were also pushed by a change of climate around 1500 BC, when colder and drier conditions forced people to abandon agriculture and take up herding instead. Evidence for these changes emerged from the soil in the 1960s. The pottery was of worse quality – coarse red or brown clay fired at lower temperatures – and horse bones appeared alongside other animal remains. It seems the farmers were halfway to becoming nomads.2

  Which turned out not to be quite such a marginal way of life after all. This new grassland culture received a boost when a decline in solar activity brought a further climate change around 850 BC. As the milder, damper climate spread, pastures became richer, life easier, and herds and populations grew. These new nomads had more than their horses and herds. They knew how to forge bronze and then iron for swords and arrowheads.

  Why bronze? Ancient peoples had long known how to mine and extract copper, lead, gold and silver. Copper was the most widely used metal, but it is relatively soft. If it is mixed with tin (among other constituents), it becomes harder, as some genius discovered in south-eastern Europe about 4500 BC. The discovery spread across Eurasia, which is why bronze is used as the name for an age in human social development between stone and iron. By about 1600 BC, kingdoms of today’s China were using it to make pots and other big ritual items, and steppe people, who had no use for heavy bronzeware, began to use it to make lightweight belt-buckles and horse decorations (on which more in Chapter 2).

  Pastoral nomads were natural warriors, their skills honed by hunting, both as individuals and in groups. One tool used for hunting made a formidable weapon. This was the recurved bow, which ranks with the Roman sword and the machinegun as a weapon that changed the nature of warfare. Who first invented it and when is much debated, but there are rock drawings of bows in Spain and Norway that are over 5,000 years old. Homer made it an object of power when he wrote about the Trojan War, which may have taken place around 1250 BC. By then it was the weapon of choice across all Europe and Asia.

  This bow looked like a three-foot semicircle of nothing much. The curve is like part of a spring, turning away from the archer. (Later designs had a flat belly and ‘ears’ that seem to curve in the wrong direction. We will get to these.) The elements – horn, wood, sinew, glue – were all readily available to steppe-dwellers. The trick was to combine them correctly. This must have occurred as the result of chance discoveries. A hunter breaks his basic wooden bow and discovers that a strip of deer-horn is whippy enough to make a rudimentary bow. He finds that boiled animal tend
ons produce a powerful glue. Perhaps he learns that glue can also be made from special bits of fish: fish-glue was a prized item of trade across Asia. A tendon pulverized with a stone reduces it to threads, which prove useful as binding. He notices that the bow, now mended with glue and sinew, actually works better. Wood has wonderful qualities, as the English longbow shows. That’s fine for infantry. But smaller bows for use on horseback need more than just wood. Horn and sinew are both whippy in their own way. Horn resists compression, and forms the bow’s inside face. Sinews resist extension, and are laid along the outside. Bowstrings are of gut, arrows of wood. Feathers, which both direct and spin the arrow like a rifle bullet, come from any large bird’s wing or tail (they have to be from the same side of the bird, because the feathers from opposite sides are not parallel and counteract each other, slowing the arrow in flight).

  Arrowheads had their own sub-technology. Bone served well enough for hunting, but warfare demanded points of metal – bronze (early) or iron (later) – with two or three fins, which would slot on to the arrow. The method for mass-producing socketed bronze arrowheads from reusable stone moulds was probably invented in (or spread to) the steppes between 1000 and 500 BC, making it possible for a rider to carry dozens of standard-sized arrows with a range of heads. To produce arrowheads, pastoral nomadic groups had smiths who knew how to work bronze and iron. Blacksmiths were crucial members of their societies, and remained so – Genghis Khan’s birth-name was Temujin, given him by his father after he captured an enemy of that name, or possibly profession: it means ‘blacksmith’.

  Expertise with horses and pastures combined with archery and metallurgy came together in the mounted archer, who could load and shoot his bow at the gallop, delivering arrows in three directions, forward, to the side, and over the shoulder. Some no doubt were ambidextrous, which gave them a 360- degree field. A demanding way of life had produced the most formidable warrior known before the age of gunpowder.

  The many groups scattered over this vast region intermingled and kept apart, remained in one place and moved about, and migrated and fought and traded in a shifting kaleidoscope of cultures to which archaeologists give many names, depending on the nations they work in. They offer indirect insight into our subject, in that almost every group would be aware of precedents, and copy, adapt or reject, choosing different ways to display wealth, or worship, or bury their dead. On the last, which left the most obvious and the most enduring remnants, there were traditions by the dozen and tombs by the ten thousand – burials under great piles of rock, or in vertical graves, or circular graves, or ‘slab graves’ made of flat rocks stuck in the ground, or huge pits, and all varying according to the grave-goods, coffin fashions and the status of the deceased. No culture on the ocean of grass was an island.

  In the early first millennium BC, pastoral nomads established themselves from the borderlands of China to the Black Sea, where they became the distant neighbours of the Greeks. They were known then and now as ‘Scythians’, a vague term grouping untold numbers of clans and tribes that spanned all Inner Asia. Persians and Assyrians knew them as Saka, the term still used in Kazakhstan. Scythians get their name from a mythical Greek hero called Scythes, who was one of the sons of the famously strong Hercules and the only one able to bend and string his father’s bow, and therefore in Greek eyes a fitting ancestor for the Scythians.

  Some Scythian groups had settlements of their own, where they produced fine works of art, especially gold ornaments. They had no writing, so, as Greek civilization rose in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, the Greeks knew about them only from peripheral contacts. The Greek historian Herodotus is the major source. In 460 BC he travelled to the Black Sea port of Olbia, then a thriving Greek frontier city on today’s Ukrainian coast, now a fine archaeological site. From here, trading caravans run by Scythians set out for Central Asia and vanished into who-knew-where. Herodotus spoke only of big rivers and much pastureland, which remained a mystery to him. As he wrote, ‘I have never met anyone who claims to have actually seen it.’

  The Scythians and their many sub-groups proved so successful that they built substantial kingdoms, recalled not by cities but by the tombs of their leaders. How many tombs? No one knows. Certainly tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. They run from north of the Black Sea, across present-day southern Russia and Kazakhstan into Mongolia and southern Siberia. To my eyes they are like Braille, dots on the pages of history that reveal truths to those with the skill to read them. Many were treasure chests of possessions, presumably to sustain the rich and powerful in the afterlife, so for centuries they were literally gold mines for grave-robbers.

  The contents of the tombs give a sense of the culture that was common to all on the steppes, including in due course the subjects of this book. Here is a selection of a few outstanding finds.

  A new age of archaeology opened in the early eighteenth century, under Peter the Great, when Russia began her great expansion eastwards into Siberia and southwards into what is now Ukraine and the various ‘stans’ of Central Asia. Russian colonists and explorers could not miss the grave-mounds, which became known by the Russian term kurgans. Graverobbers had not taken everything. In 1716, sixty items were given to Peter the Great, starting the ever-growing collection of Scythian gold that now fills the Gold Room in St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum.

  During the second half of the nineteenth century, archaeologists opened dozens more of the Black Sea kurgans, unearthing skeletons, golden plaques, cauldrons and other grave-goods by the ton. Since then, they have opened hundreds more, in ever more remote areas. The truth about Scythia and related places and peoples is far richer, far more complex and altogether far less barbaric than Herodotus could possibly have dreamed.

  ‘Scythia’ was not like a nation-state, with a capital and a centralized government, or a land empire like Genghis Khan’s, controlled from the centre. No Pony Express linked east and west. Scythia was a collection of cultures, spanning all Central and Inner Asia, unified by a few main traits: funeral mounds, horses, weaponry and a love of the so-called ‘Animal Style’ of art, made up of convoluted creatures, part real, part mythological. Every Scythian tribe and culture would have known, traded with, intermarried with and fought with its neighbours, slowly spreading ideas and customs. A few sources in literate cultures suggest that there were many Scythian languages. Herodotus was told that Black Sea Scythians who traded across all Inner Asia needed seven lots of interpreters along the way. Trans-continental links were strong: Black Sea gold came from the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia; amber in western Mongolia came from the Baltic.

  Scythian sub-groups organized prodigious grave-sites, often burying vast amounts of wealth. In southern Siberia, for instance, the Minusinsk Hollow is prime pastureland some 200 kilometres across. It and its surrounding territory have some 30,000 kurgans acquired over 1,000 years (c.750 BC–AD 500). The biggest, the Great Salbyk Kurgan (fourth century BC), is surrounded by twenty-three gigantic stones, weighing up to 40 tonnes, each cut and hauled from a quarry 60 kilometres away.

  Tuva, 200 kilometres to the south-east, is the heartland from which the Scythians originally came, and has the earliest evidence for Scythian ways. The objects were in two immense kurgans, known as Arzhan 1 and 2, after the nearby village in the valley of the Uyuk River. This is a fine, gentle pasture, with not much snow in winter – a rarity in these austere regions, and a focus for Scythian nomads for many centuries as they migrated between summer pastures in the mountains and winter pastures along the Uyuk. The valley – an arrowhead of grass, 50 kilometres long and 30 wide at its base – has some 300 burial mounds, so many in such a small area that locals call it the Valley of the Kings.

  The Scythians of the so-called Uyuk Culture were not just simple nomads, surviving off their herds. They ate freshwater fish, grew millet, built log cabins and made stone tombs with domed roofs. They mined for copper and iron, which demanded specialist miners, tools and good knowledge of the geology. Stone p
illars carved with spirals, rosettes and circles suggest they worshipped the sun. They believed in an after-life, and made sure their leaders were well prepared for it, preserving their bodies wherever they died and bringing them back to ancestral cemeteries for burial. They worked metals into animal shapes, like curled-up snow leopards and birds of prey, which were admired (perhaps) for their strength, agility and vigilance.

  The Valley of the Kings: Arzhan 1 alone would justify the title. Its start date was around 750 BC, about the time Homer was writing the Iliad and Odyssey, making it the oldest known kurgan. Once, it was a huge platform, 110 metres across, with a surrounding wall and a 4-metre-high dome. Almost all kurgans are of wood and earth; this one was covered in stones, which turned it into a giant refrigerator. Over the years, looters mined it, locals used it for their July celebrations, and in the 1960s bulldozers ground across it as part of the Soviet-era campaign to turn steppes into farmland. Even so, when archaeologists arrived in 1971, they found wonders: a wheel-shaped complex of seventy interlocking wooden chambers made from 6,000 larches. A central space held two coffins containing a chief and his wife. Round the tomb were eight hollowed-out logs holding the bones of retainers, killed to accompany their master and mistress into the next world. Nearby lay the remains of six horses, richly decorated with gold.

  No expense had been spared: grave-goods included sables, four-colour woollen clothes for the retainers, horse-trappings of bronze and gold in the shapes of snow-leopards and boars, even a golden, coiled panther in the Animal Style that would have been familiar to a Scythian on the Black Sea. In the surrounding chambers were another 160 horse skeletons, plus numerous daggers, arrowheads, a torc (a semi-circular sheet of gold worn around the neck), gold earrings with turquoise inlays, and pendants.