The dominant feature of Eurasia is its steppes, the largest unified area of flat land in the world. The steppes stretch from the plains of Hungary eastward to Manchuria. The northern border extends to the tree line of southern Siberia, and the south is defined by massive mountain ranges including the Tien Shan and the high Pamirs. However, some mountain ranges such as the Tien Shan and Altai have at times been integral to current steppe societies so that these expanses, and those beyond, were culturally or politically allied with the steppe cultures. Thus, oasis villages adjacent to the vast Taklimakan Desert in western China came under the sway of mobile tribes while the Altai Mountains in western Mongolia provided rich summer grazing for nomadic herds. The flatness of the steppes, with the paucity of natural barriers had immense cultural and political effects on adjacent regions.
From the small sedentary Bronze Age farming villages, beginning around 900 BCE, the earliest nomadic cultures exploded from all directions, developing discrete although economically similar lifestyles throughout the steppes. As these societies developed into confederacies toward the end of the first millennium BCE and in subsequent centuries, their powerful militaries allowed them to control multiple ‘Silk Roads’ that crossed Eurasia. Some centuries later the Genghis Khanite Mongol hordes were able, in a few short decades, to create one of the largest Empires ever that encompassed the vast territory from Manchuria to Hungary (see Asia, Central and North, Steppes, Deserts, and Forests).
The steppes, although connected, are divided into three zones intersected by deserts and mountains (Figure 1). The western steppes extend through southwestern Russia, along the northern shores of the Black Sea, and east to the Ural River. In the southwest, the Karakum (Black Sand) Desert encircles the northern Caspian Sea. The central (Kazak) steppes extend through southeastern Russia to encompass northern Kazakstan, moving further southeast through the Djungar Pass that lies between the Tien Shan and Altai Mountains into western China. The eastern steppes begin in the northern Xinjiang province of western China skirting the fringes of the Taklimakan Desert, eastward into the Mongol steppe lands that border the Gobi desert, ending at the Khingan Mountains on the western borders of Manchuria.
In southwestern Kazakstan, the steppes are semidesert. The northerly regions around the Aral Sea that once supported seminomadic animal husbandry populations, in recent years, have become wastelands as a result of the intense agricultural diversion of the Amu Darya (historical Oxus River) and the Syr Darya.
Eurasian continental climatic conditions have always been extremely harsh. Without seas to moderate the vast expanses the temperatures can range from well above 100 °F in summer and below 50 °F in winter. Strong winds and sand storms, sudden flooding rainstorms, and burning sun are the norm. Plant life, however, had adapted to the climatic conditions so that the herds found adequate pastures that included the waist-high coarse steppe grass. In addition to the larger rivers, that is, the Don, Danube, Dniester, the Amu Darya, Syr Darya, the Volga, and the Ural, many smaller tributary rivers meander throughout the steppes. These provided ample protein in the form of fish when small villages were established along their banks and water for herds when the nomadic herders appeared.
Southern Siberia, although not included in the Eurasian steppes, has had significant cultural interaction and diffusion with steppe people and cultural evidence points to times of migration from the steppes into the taiga.
The time divisions used in the following paragraphs are only approximations; they also differ from the similarly named divisions in Africa and Europe. Moreover, they diverge within the various ecological regions of Eurasia and are used here only as an approximate guide.
World History
