CLIMATE CHANGE, NOMADIC MOVEMENT, AND THE EMERGENCE OF TERRITORIAL STATES

Climate Change and Migrations

Desperate for secure water sources and pastures, many transhumant herders and pastoralists migrated onto the highland plateaus bordering the inner Eurasian steppes. From there, some continued into the more populated river valleys and soon were competing with the farming communities over space and resources. They also streamed in from the western and southern deserts in Southwest Asia in modern-day inner Syria and Arabia. These migrants brought horses and new technologies that were useful in warfare. They brought new languages and religious practices but also created new pressures to feed, house, and clothe an ever-growing population.

HORSES AND CHARIOTS Although the hard-riding pastoral nomads contributed much to settled societies (they linked cities in South Asia and China for the first time, enhanced trade, and maintained peace), they could not control what the elites whom they disrupted wrote about them. Those who lost power described the nomadic warriors as “barbaric,” portraying them as cruel enemies of “civilization.” Yet what we know of these nomads today suggests that they were anything but barbaric.

Perhaps the most vital breakthroughs that nomadic pastoralists transmitted to settled societies were the harnessing of horses and the invention of chariots (horse-drawn vehicles with two spoked and metal-rimmed wheels, which not only were used for processions and races but also revolutionized warfare in the second millennium BCE). The chariot revolution was made possible, however, only through the interactions of pastoralists and settled communities. On the vast steppe lands north of the Caucasus Mountains, during the late fourth millennium BCE, settled people had domesticated horses in their native habitat. The domestication of horses was a major breakthrough for humans. Horses could forage for themselves, even in snow-covered lands; hence they did not require humans to find food for them. Moreover, they could be ridden up to 30 miles a day. Elsewhere, as on the northern steppes of what is now Russia, horses were a food source. Only during the late third millennium BCE did people harness them with cheek pieces and mouth bits, signaling their use for transportation. Parts of the horse harnesses, made from wood, bronze, and iron and found in tombs scattered across the steppe, have revealed the evolution of headgear from simple mouth bits to full bridles with headpiece, mouthpiece, and reins.

THE GLOBAL VIEW

MAP 3.1 | Nomadic Migrations in Afro-Eurasia, 2000–1000 BCE

Many different groups of nomadic peoples were on the move in the second millennium BCE, migrating into many of the regions that had hosted the river-basin-fueled, city-state-filled cultures of the third millennium BCE.

• According to this map, from what specific parts of the world did pastoral peoples migrate? Into what specific areas did they move? What geographical features may have shaped the migrations in terms of the regions left behind, the routes traveled, and the locations traveled to?
• What regions did these migrations bring into closer connection?
• What technological innovations were spread by these migrations, and across what regions did that technology spread?

Sometime around 2000 BCE, pastoral nomads in the mountains of the Caucasus joined the harnessed horse to the chariot. The invention of the chariot yoked to agile, speedy, and highly trained horses transformed warfare. Pastoralists lightened chariots so their warhorses could pull them faster. They were so light that an empty one could be lifted by one hand. The chariots had spoked wheels made of special wood and bent into circular shapes, as well as wheel covers, axles, and bearings (all produced by settled people), and durable metal went into the chariots’ moving parts. Hooped bronze and, later, iron rims reinforced the spoked wheels. Initially iron was a decorative and experimental metal, and all tools and weapons were bronze. Iron’s hardness and flexibility, however, eventually made it more desirable for reinforcing moving parts and protecting wheels, like those on the chariot. Thus, the horse-drawn chariots combined innovations by both nomads and settled agriculturalists.

These innovations—combining engineering skills, metallurgy, and animal domestication—and their ultimate diffusion revolutionized the way humans made war. The horse chariot slashed travel time between capitals and overturned the machinery of war. Slow-moving infantry now ceded to battalions of chariots. Each vehicle carried a driver and an archer and charged into battle with lethal precision and ravaging speed. In fact, the mobility, accuracy, and shooting power of warriors in horse-drawn chariots tilted the political balance, for after the nomads perfected this type of warfare (by 1600 BCE), they challenged the political systems of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Soon their innovations became central to the armies of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, the Vedic kings of South Asia, and the Zhou rulers in China, as well as to local nobles as far west as Italy, Gaul, and Spain. Only with the arrival of cheaper armor made of iron (after 1000 BCE) could foot soldiers (in China, armed with crossbows) recover their military importance. And only after states developed cavalry units of horse-mounted warriors did chariots lose their decisive military advantage. For much of the second millennium BCE, then, charioteer elites prevailed in Afro-Eurasia.

For city dwellers in the river basins, the first sight of horse-drawn chariots must have been terrifying, but they knew that war making had changed and they scrambled to adapt. The pharaohs in Egypt copied chariots from their Hyksos invaders, and they came to value the vehicles highly. For example, the young pharaoh Tutankhamun (r. c. 1336–1327 BCE) was a chariot archer who made sure that his war vehicle and other gear accompanied him in his tomb. A century later, the Shang rulers of the Yellow River valley, in the heartland of agricultural China, likewise were entombed with their horse chariots.

The Emergence of Territorial States

Nomad and transhumant populations toppled the river-basin cities in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. The turmoil that ensued sowed the seeds for a new type of regime: the territorial state. Sargon and the Akkadians had set up a short-lived territorial state in earlier Mesopotamia (2334–2200 BCE) (see Chapter 2), but the martial innovations and political and environmental crises of the early second millennium BCE helped spur more enduring development of territorial states elsewhere. A territorial state was a centralized kingdom organized around a charismatic ruler. The new rulers of these territorial states exerted power not only over localized city-states but also over distant hinterlands. They enhanced their stability through rituals for passing the torch of command from one generation to the next. People no longer identified themselves as residents of cities; instead, they felt allegiance to large territories, rulers, and broad linguistic and ethnic communities. These territories for the first time had identifiable borders, and their residents felt a shared identity. Territorial states differed from the city-states that preceded them in that the new territorial states in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China based their authority on monarchs, widespread bureaucracies, elaborate legal codes, large territorial expanses, definable borders, and ambitions for continuous expansion.