The great centers of cultural radiation—northern China, northern India, and the Near East together with the eastern Mediterranean—were separated from each other by deserts and mountain chains, while to the north they were hemmed in by a broad zone of forests and steppes that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Around the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, in this steppe area there occurred an economic and social change that was to profoundly influence the history of the continent: the emergence of horse nomadism. The utilization of the horse for riding, unlike its use as a draft-animal for chariots that was already known in the 2nd millennium B. C, conferred a new mobility on peoples who depended for their livelihood on their horses and herds of sheep. This made them practically self-sufficient, while their new mobility allowed them to acquire more goods, by plunder or extortion and also by commercial exchange, from the sedentary inhabitants of the agricultural areas. In this way, a period of confrontation and symbiosis between two worlds began that was to last far into the European Middle Ages. The symbiosis was important for all concerned, but the impact of the opposition between these two worlds was mainly negative. The agrarian and urbanized societies never succeeded in eliminating the dangers posed by the nomads, despite numerous punitive expeditions and payment of subsidies. In their turn, the nomads could periodically plunder the areas of sedentary culture but were unable to permanently subjugate them without giving up their own nomadic way of life. This situation ultimately prevented the expansion of urbanized cultures to the north and created for many centuries a barrier to overland contacts between the worlds of China, India, the Near East, and Europe. The agricultural areas would time and again suffer the often-destructive incursions of successive invasions from the steppes by peoples of Iranian, Turkish, or Mongolian descent, with as a consequence sometimes unexpected twists and turns in their history. The interrelationships between various nomad peoples created a largely homogeneous culture between the Danube in the west and the Amur in the east, characterized by the rich graves of warrior-chieftains, a predilection for abundant ornamentation with various animal motifs, as well as, perhaps, by the dominance of shamanism in religious matters.
World History
