The Legacy of the Aryan Pastoralists

What was the contribution, if any, to human history of the Aryan pastoral herders and warriors of the Eurasian plain? We know of the great civilizations of the distance past such as Greece, Rome, Persia, and India which have made our own pos­sible and which are a part of our own heritage.

Without a written language and refusing to live in cities, the east European pastoralists were not a civilized people; and moving freely with their herds they had no need for permanent dwellings to store agricultural produce or to claim personal ownership of land. Most of our knowledge of them is obtained from archaeological excavations of the wooden hill forts built as tribal centers and for the smelting of metals for the wide range of weapons they produced, and particularly from the spec­tacular burial mounds which they left in their wake.

A huge area had been occupied by the extraordinary Aryan conquests, consisting of today s Central Europe, the Balkan Peninsula, Greece, Asia Minor, Italy, Iran, CentralAsia and the southern lands of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Indus Valley of India. Only the great civilization of China escaped destruction by the Indo-European nomads but it, too, would fall to the later pastoral nomads of Mongolia and CentralAsia. Pastoralist tribes began to settle down to depend on agricultural produce and other knowledge which had been preserved from the earlier civilizations, such as the cuneiform script adopted by the Hittites. We have a surviving Hittite manual on exercising horses:

Thus (speaks) Kikkuli the assussani (horse trainer) from the land of the Mitanni. When he lets the horses onto the meadow in the autumn, he harnesses them. He lets them trot three miles, but he lets them gallop over seven fields. But on the way back he has them gallop over ten fields. Then he unharnesses them, pro­vides for them, and they are watered. He brings them into the stable. Then he gives them mixed together one handful of wheat, two handfuls of barley and one handful of hay. They eat this up. As soon as they have finished their fodder he binds them close to a post.¹⁰⁰

The particularly simple alphabet of the Phoenicians which was adopted in the Middle East and by the Greeks, together with archaeological excavations show that the pastoral nomads as they settled down in the warm climates which they sought, proceeded to build the great civilizations of Greece, Persia, Rome, and India, to which we owe much of our own develop­ment and culture—including the traditions of patriarchal war­fare which continued to rule so much of European and Asian history.

Not all Aryan tribes took part in the nomad invasions, and many Gaelic (Celtic) and Iranian-speaking tribes remained in central and Eastern Europe, while others headed east towards Siberia and the Chinese border. The Sarmatian dominance of the east European steppes was ended by other nomads, Turkic tribes from Asia which following the retreating Sarmatians began to attack the Roman Empire. With the collapse of Roman civilization in western Europe many Sarmatians who had been in the service of Rome played an important part in the formation of feudalism and its military ruling class. Sarmatian customs and the practices of their heavy cavalry provided not only the model for western European medieval cavalry, together with the long lance and broadsword, but also the knightly tra­ditions of chivalry. The steppe practice Ofhuntingwith domes­ticated eagles and falcons became common amongst the feudal nobility, and the legends surrounding King Arthur have been traced to the Sarmatian presence in Roman Britain. Is the me­dieval French troubadour tradition also due to the Sarmatian settlements in France? Ballads were often accompanied by a plucked string instrument which would have been a simple ex­tension of the bow. Such an instrument was found in a 270O- year-old in northwest China near Turpans belonging to the Gushi people. Buried with the skeleton of a 45-year male was a pouch containing some 800 grams of cannabis, horse bridles, archery equipment, and a harp.¹⁰¹

The war-like legacy of the Indo-European speaking nomad pastoralists would continue for centuries to come, as they were replaced by Turkic and Mongol nomads of central Asia. With similar lifestyles and armed with the Scythian composite bow the new invaders would wreak havoc in Asia and Europe well into the Middle Ages. The Chinese, Indian and Eastern Roman empires would be conquered, much of Eastern Europe de­stroyed, and from the ashes of Kyiv-Rus would emerge the Cos­sack movement of the Ukrainian frontier, which owed so much to the nomad horsemen of the steppe.