Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World

by Anthony Sattin

The alternative to the well-told narrative of human civilisation is the compelling story of wanderers, of tribes who lived beyond imperial borders, and who created their own kingdoms and empires: Scythian, Xiongnu and Persian, Hun and Arab, Mongul, Mughal, Ottoman and others.

Humans have been on the move for most of history. Even after the great urban advancement lured people into the great cities of Uruk, Babylon, Rome and Chang'an, most of us continued to live lightly on the move and outside the pages of history. But recent discoveries have revealed another story . . .

Wandering people built the first great stone monuments, such as the one at Göbekli Tepe, seven thousand years before the pyramids. They tamed the horse, fashioned the composite bow, fought with the Greeks and hastened the end of the Roman Empire. They had a love of poetry and storytelling, a fascination for artistry and science, and a respect for the natural world rooted in reliance and their belief. Embracing multiculturalism, tolerant of other religions, their need for free movement and open markets brought a glorious cultural flourishing to Eurasia, enabling the Renaissance and changing the human story.

Nomads traces the path of wanderers across twelve thousand years, from before Cain and Abel to the modern day. With both nomads and the natural world on which they rely facing extinction, Anthony Sattin uncovers a string of their extraordinary and little-known stories and asks what we can learn from them and what we will lose without them. Reconnecting with our deepest mythology, our unrecorded antiquity and our natural environment, Nomads is the ground-breaking alternative history of civilisation, told through its outsiders.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Ancient History, World History, Archaeology, Historical

368 pages, Hardcover

First published May 26, 2022

About the author

Anthony Sattin (1956- ) is a British journalist, broadcaster and travel writer. His main area of interest is the Middle East and Africa, particularly Egypt.

Reviews

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tonight came and went. I'm home and totally exhausted.

Nomads:
A whole range of views on the lives and cultures of many nomadic people through the ages: early Europe, the Huns, the Goths, the Mongols and across the globe to visit the indigenous tribespeople of the Americas.
The writing is wonderful, utterly engaging and so descriptive.
A real enjoyment.

[Andreas Hofer · Rating 5 out of 5]

History is mostly about settled people, and when it’s about nomads it’s usually about them from the perspective of settled people who typically describe them as barbarians or savages. The reason is simple: nomads don’t have writing systems. Anthony Sattin in Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World (2022) attempts to set the record straight. Of course, he is not the first one to do so (e.g. James C. Scott is another important writer in this area), but his book is the most comprehensive I have read to date.


While “civilised people” have always looked somewhat down on nomads, Anthony Sattin, like others before him, paints a different picture of nomadism: one of a high degree of freedom and egalitarianism. Sattin starts his book with a discussion of the DRD4-7R gene variant, dubbed the “nomad” or “wanderlust” gene. As we can expect sedentary people to have a host of adaptations to a different lifestyle and mode of subsistence. DRD4-7R, which is thought to be present in around 20 percent of the population, however nomadic people have made a much larger genetic impact in civilizations. While sedentary Neolithic farmers have a genetic contribution of more than 70% in Tuscany, this percentage is reversed in Ukraine with huge contributions by hunter-gatherers and Yamnaya pastoralists (herders). All in all, the genetic contribution of nomads in Europe is almost 50%. This percentage is way too high to ignore nomads in the history of humankind.


How did this high amount of nomadic genetic contribution get into settled farmer communities? This is the part of history that is still largely unwritten. Sattin extensively uses the ideas of Ibn Khaldun, who was a Muslim Arab sociologist, philosopher, and historian widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages. Khaldun saw nomadic people as superior to settled people and more fit to rule due to their courage, group cohesion (tribalism) and unspoilt nature. Khaldun developed a theory of civilization in which nomads come to rule over sedentary people, however the very traits that had made them able to conquer sedentary people and to establish a strong rule, lead to the demise of the new civilization. Indeed, this is what we usually find when pastoralist tribes (e.g. the Mongols) establish an empire - it falls apart almost as quickly as it came into being. However, through recent genetic research (e.g. David Reich) we know that pastoralists left a huge amount of their genes in sedentary populations before disappearing from history again. Where can we see their genetic influence nowaday? Our personalities.


Colin G. DeYoung showed that the Big Five factors can be divided into two metatraits: Stability and Plasticity. Stability is defined by one's maintenance of stability and hypothesised to be related to the neurotransmitter serotonin, while Plasticity is seen in one's adaptability to novelty and hypothesised to be related to the neurotransmitter dopamine. This is exactly what we would expect from biological adaptations to sedentism vs nomadism, respectively.







History has always been written more by people with the plasticity profile (the Wanderers), than by people with the stability profile, who are inherently conservative of the status quo. History has always been written by people like Marco Polo (forager type) and Christopher Columbus (pastoralist type).




Ibn Kahldun was genetically a nomad, a forager type (ENFP in MBTI), and so is Anthony Sattin, who has travelled extensively in Africa and the Middle East, living with the nomads. Their admiration for the free and egalitarian pastoralist lifestyle is baked into their psychological makeup.


Sattin is spot on with his subtitle “The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World”. It’s the nomads who have always written history. Not only the barbarian peoples who knocked at the Roman and Chinese empires, but the people who have always been ill at ease with authority, hierarchy, bureaucracy, the status quo and a sedentary lifestyle.


For more on evolutionary types and history check out my books

Understanding History: Herders, Horticulturalists and Hunter-Gatherers



https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09P8S9RNV

and

Foragers, Farmers and Pastoralists : How three tribes have been shaping civilization since the Neolithic



https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B08ZR3...

[Korey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nomads took us from nomadic hunter/gatherers to present day van-lifers. While I enjoyed the premise of the book, the historical parts were less historical and more mythical - with a lot of references to the bible. To be fair, the author does preface the book with the fact that nomadic humans didn't leave much behind (like their city counterparts who started documented everything in writing). Because of this, there was a lot of loosely developed theories and stories. Again, this is no fault to the author who was trying to surmise a history based on theories. Overall, it was a fast read that did provide some nuggets of information I enjoyed - in particular the nomadic gene that individuals with ADHD have today. I did a lot of research after learning about that from this book and found it very interesting.

[TG Lin · Rating 3 out of 5]

如果以正經的研究層次來看，本書有那種「捧一踩一」的典型論述問題：先將人類文明分成「游牧者」和「定居者」兩類，然後在書中各個篇章段落裡讚揚前者、貶低後者。作者可說是致力於將歷史上常聽到的「游牧是野蠻的生活型態」給翻轉過來，並進一步論證「游牧才是塑造世界文明的根源」。
這類把自己在乎的主題無限提升的書寫方式，基本上的學術價值不會太高。而且作者從一開始的「對立」，即游牧和定居兩種，過於一廂情願。的確，將游牧給污名化是不對的，但過度美化而無視於它的「不文明」（作者將其歸於游牧者放棄原本生活方式轉而投向定居的繁華），就過於矯枉過正，陷於套套邏輯了。
總之，本書看成是作者親身的旅遊探訪體驗，順便複習一下曾經出現過的（前）游牧政權的歷史，倒也值得一讀。

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took this in as the audiobook edition well-narrated by the author and published in 2022 by HighBridge Audio. I was drawn in to learn more of the mysterious nomad empires such as the Scythians, Hittites, Mongols, and more. This delivers on that and in doing so suggests much of what we assume about these roaming warriors is from an understandable smear campaign from their foes, largely European and Chinese. What really makes me glad I read this is the philosophical reflection on the nomadic way of life as an important and perhaps vital if not even redemptive dimension of the human experience. The lack of settlement (materialism) and acceptance of a cyclical reality suggests this way of life more resilient to climate change, less burdensome environmentally, and more about the community than the individual.

Much of these themes are very nicely tied together in a letter written by Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, I believe it is the one dated 9 May 1753:

We had here some years since a Transylvanian Tartar, who had travelled much in the East, and came hither merely to see the West, intending to go home thro’ the spanish West Indies, China &c. He asked me one day what I thought might be the Reason that so many and such numerous nations, as the Tartars in Europe and Asia, the Indians in America, and the Negroes in Africa, continued a wandring careless Life, and refused to live in Cities, and to cultivate the arts they saw practiced by the civilized part of Mankind. While I was considering what answer to make him; I’ll tell you, says he in his broken English, God make man for Paradise, he make him for to live lazy; man make God angry, God turn him out of Paradise, and bid him work; man no love work; he want to go to Paradise again, he want to live lazy; so all mankind love lazy. Howe’er this may be it seems certain, that the hope of becoming at some time of Life free from the necessity of care and Labour, together with fear of penury, are the mainsprings of most peoples industry.

To those indeed who have been educated in elegant plenty, even the provision made for the poor may appear misery, but to those who have scarce ever been better provided for, such provision may seem quite good and sufficient, these latter have then nothing to fear worse than their present Conditions, and scarce hope for any thing better than a Parish maintainance; so that there is only the difficulty of getting that maintainance allowed while they are able to work, or a little shame they suppose attending it, that can induce them to work at all, and what they do will only be from hand to mouth.

The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and labour appears strongly in the little success that has hitherto attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians, in their present way of living, almost all their Wants are supplied by the spontaneous Productions of Nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when Game is so plenty, they visit us frequently, and see the advantages that Arts, Sciences, and compact Society procure us, they are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never shewn any Inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts; When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural [to them] merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger Brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and a match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.

Though they have few but natural wants and those easily supplied. But with us are infinite Artificial wants, no less craving than those of Nature, and much more difficult to satisfy; so that I am apt to imagine that close Societies subsisting by Labour and Arts, arose first not from choice, but from necessity: When numbers being driven by war from their hunting grounds and prevented by seas or by other nations were crowded together into some narrow Territories, which without labour would not afford them Food. However as matters [now] stand with us, care and industry seem absolutely necessary to our well being; they should therefore have every Encouragement we can invent, and not one Motive to diligence be subtracted, and the support of the Poor should not be by maintaining them in Idleness, But by employing them in some kind of labour suited to their Abilities of body &c. as I am informed of late begins to be the practice in many parts of England, where work houses are erected for that purpose. If these were general I should think the Poor would be more careful and work voluntarily and lay up something for themselves against a rainy day, rather than run the risque of being obliged to work at the pleasure of others for a bare subsistence and that too under confinement. The little value Indians set on what we prize so highly under the name of Learning appears from a pleasant passage that happened some years since at a Treaty between one of our Colonies and the Six Nations; when every thing had been settled to the Satisfaction of both sides, and nothing remained but a mutual exchange of civilities, the English Commissioners told the Indians, they had in their Country a College for the instruction of Youth who were there taught various languages, Arts, and Sciences; that there was a particular foundation in favour of the Indians to defray the expense of the Education of any of their sons who should desire to take the Benefit of it. And now if the Indians would accept of the Offer, the English would take half a dozen of their brightest lads and bring them up in the Best manner; The Indians after consulting on the proposal replied that it was remembered some of their Youths had formerly been educated in that College, but it had been observed that for a long time after they returned to their Friends, they were absolutely good for nothing being neither acquainted with the true methods of killing deer, catching Beaver or surprizing an enemy. The Proposition however, they looked on as a mark of the kindness and good will of the English to the Indian Nations which merited a grateful return; and therefore if the English Gentlemen would send a dozen or two of their Children to Onondago the great Council would take care of their Education, bring them up in really what was the best manner and make men of them.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "Nomads," Sattin takes us on a long walk through history with the peoples who are too often treated as antagonists in most history narratives. He provides a very good attempt at telling the story of those who, quite literally, neither put down enough roots nor built temples (libraries) dedicated to disseminating knowledge of their great deeds. The book does, in fact, make the case that wanderers are the real protagonists in all of our collective story.

"Nomads" is a very well written pop-history read that quite literally runs the course of human history, from our earliest ancestors to contemporary nomadic societies. Sattin stops here, then, and there along the way, sharing stories from that long history that are at once familiar and, to some extent, divergent. Through it all, he illustrates just how inextricably linked they have been and are to the development of human societies. Indeed, to humanity itself.

I essentially have but one real criticism of the book. Namely that attempting to set history right, the author is perhaps a tad bit too romantic and far-reaching in doing so. It does have a Grand Unified Theory feel to it.

Regardless, it's a really good read.
Highly recommended.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite type of synthesis of learning from a variety of disciplines to tell a story. In this case, the story of peoples who remained on the move when others settled and why an understanding of their contribution to human history is important. An excellent bibliography for readers who wish to delved deeper into the subject.

[Faye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like many at high-school I did the half-hour lesson on hunter/gatherers becoming arable community builders. I never at any point (I don't think I can be blamed) considered any other course of human development.
I accept from the author that there is little written history and much is supposed and/or pieced together from artefacts and myth.
My recent reading has given me a different view of myths. Lately I've been digging around on the www with regard to the origins of myths in Eastern-Europe and Asia. I've no fixed ideas just yet, we'll see.
There is a question being asked: What, if anything, came before the Silk Road (the network of trading routes). I'm not convinced these roads were blazed by traders. I wonder if in the very beggining they were trod by small groups pasturing and moving on, governed by the elements, governed by the presence of marauding tribes.
This, although lacking solid evidence for much, was a interesting and enjoyable read.

[Anchali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an interesting read. All the history I have ever read focused upon the societies as they grew/faltered/fell. The hunter/gatherer became the farmer. Here I found an exciting tale of those who continued to survive as nomads and doing so they carried ideas from society to society: they as much as the growing societies shaped our future.
So enjoyable.

[ConfusedMagpie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such a beautifully written book and a delight to read. The author truly captures the feeling of adventure and searching for the unknown that his book attempts (successfully) to be. I found it dissapointing that a book about nomadism was only focused on central asia and europe when there are so many other nomadic groups all over the world worth studying and much less known than the mongols or the goths (hence the deducted star), and ignored the huge role that influential women played in the rise of the Mongolian Khanate and the Timurid Empire, but I understand that the author’s research and scope had its limits. A great read for my resolution to read outside of my confort zone.

[Cameron Tinkler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was a great introduction to the whole history of nomads! Obv deals with a huge timescale so there are parts which dont get the attention they fully deserve, but I think that’s really the point of this book - to inspire our own research and encourage the world to pay more attention to such an important part of our history! Obviously the book interweaves facts with myths but I feel Tony makes it clear the importance of both in the history of our people - we are not only what we have done but also the stories we have told!!

For me I really loved the sections of the books touching on nomadic genetics and how they influence our lives (will need to dig out some of those papers!!)

[Sonali V · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book on the spur of the moment and I don't regret it. It is well-written, presenting history with nomads as heroes. Most of the events I had read many times previously , presented by different authors with their own unique approaches. This was one such. However it gradually became repetitive, so that I just skimmed through the last part.

[S.M.Y Kayseri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Sattin’s account of the history of nomads and their influences on the world was a poetic journey.

It is loosely arranged chronologically and not that detailed historically, but it delivered its case perfectly: that human history begins with nomads, revolves around the mercy of nomadic upheavals, and, with today’s globalization, includes multinational digital nomads.

The narration centered around Ibn Khaldun’s ideas on how civilizations arose from the purity and camaraderie of the nomads, resulting in strong, united foundations. It results in many bounties, which eventually invite inertia and thus decay. The once-settled nomads would then be displaced by other nomads who had a stronger asabiyya.

And his thesis holds true in all ages: from the Hyksos interregnum in Ancient Egypt, the great Scythian/Indo-European/Xiongnu expansions, the spillover of Arabian warriors to the farthest corners of the known world, to the rise of the Mongols and their successor states.

But those happened prior to Ibn Khaldun’s life. He theorized about them, but never experienced the systole-diastole of empires’ lifespans himself—until he escaped the walls of Damascus and surrendered himself to Timur, the personification of the force of asabiyya in his own days.

The meeting between Ibn Khaldun and Timur is replicated by Goethe’s encounter with Napoleon, of whom he famously remarked, “Here is the World-soul on horseback,” as the French Emperor marched into the city after his victory at Jena-Auerstädt.

The nomadic world gained another age of renaissance during the 1700s, when the three Turkic-Persian empires—the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal—reigned over much of the known worlds of Asia, North Africa, and the Balkans.

Countless scholars tried to reason the success of such nomadic empires. One distinguishing characteristic of all of them would be a relatively high level of freedom in religion, trade, and culture. I suspect another factor, though: their brutal and summary punishments acted as a powerful deterrent. Tribal nomadic empires, putting romanticism aside, remain a violent eruption in humankind’s history, both in their inception and in the wars of their successors.

I started to wonder why Ibn Khaldun’s thesis appears to no longer be fulfilled in subsequent chapters, aside from the obvious fact that there are no longer large pockets of nomads remaining (after the massacre of 600,000 of the Zungars, the last of the Mongol confederation).

I believe the answer lies in the increasing interdependence of people as a consequence of modern liberal capitalism. Despite the bravado shown by Trump and other modern dictators, they all redoubled back on their words after delivering their message. Levels of warfare and cruelty akin to what happened in previous ages will only happen to marginalized and dehumanized societies. Ironically, it is interdependent globalism that acts as the most robust deterrent.

Without the upheavals by the nomads of the past, humankind lapses into a lull, intoxicated by peace and bounty. If history is a collection of pivotal events, we have reached the end of history and herald an age of uniformity…

[Maher Razouk · Rating 5 out of 5]

ابن خلدون
.
.
عاش ابن خلدون أربع سنوات بين البربر وتلالهم. أمام اتساع الصحراء ، وثراء الأراضي الزراعية ، وجلال الآثار ، مع الأخذ في الاعتبار أنماط التاريخ وقوة الهوية القبلية ... وقصة عائلته وخبراته الخاصة ، وظلام سقوط الأندلس ، عواقب الدمار الذي أحدثه الموت الأسود والآن ، بعد ثلاثة عقود ، الوصول المتوقع للبرابرة القتلة من الشرق ، حاول الإجابة على سلسلة من الأسئلة ذات الصلة مع الآن كما كانت في القرن الرابع عشر. كيف تدور عجلة الحظ؟ لماذا ينهض ويسقط الأباطرة وإمبراطورياتهم؟ هل هو أمر حتمي؟ كيف يختلف الناس في المدن عن أولئك الذين يعيشون في الأماكن النائية؟ لماذا بعض مجموعات الناس أقوى من غيرها؟ ما هي الحضارة وماذا نتوقع منها؟

الكتاب الذي بدأ فيه الإجابة على هذه الأسئلة ، المقدمة: مقدمة في التاريخ ، هو ، كما يوحي العنوان ، مقدمة - مقدمة من ثلاثة مجلدات - لكتابه الأكبر بكثير: كتاب التحذير ومجموعة البدايات. لكن المقدمة هي عمل العبقرية ، وكما هو الحال مع كتاب الأمير لمكيافيلي ، فقد أثرت على طريقة تفكيرنا جميعًا اليوم. وصفه مؤرخ أكسفورد في القرن العشرين بأنه "أعظم عمل من نوعه تم إنشاؤه بواسطة أي عقل في أي وقت أو مكان" ، وضعت المقدمة الأساس للدراسة المنهجية للتاريخ وما نسميه الآن علم الاجتماع.

يصف الموضوعات والمجالات التي تحتاج إلى التحقيق ، ويقترح أيضًا الطرق التي يمكن من خلالها تطوير تلك الدراسات. الاقتصاد موجود أيضًا ، لأن ابن خلدون قدم ملاحظات ذكية حول عمل الأنظمة المالية ، وأشهرها أنه "في بداية حكم سلالة ما، تدر الضرائب عائدًا كبيرًا من الأنصبة الصغيرة. في نهاية السلالة ، تدر الضرائب عائدات صغيرة من الأنصبة الكبيرة ". التقط هذا الفكر الاقتصادي جون ماينارد كينز في القرن العشرين ، حيث لاحظ تحويله إلى نظرية من قبل آرثر لافر ؛ ينسب لافر كيرف الفضل إلى ابن خلدون في كونه أول من لاحظ العلاقة العكسية بين الإيرادات الضريبية والسلطة. وهذا يفسر لماذا قال الرئيس الأمريكي الراحل رونالد ريغان ساخرًا "لم أكن أعرف ابن خلدون شخصيًا ، على الرغم من أنه ربما كان لدينا بعض الأصدقاء المشتركين!"
.
Anthony Sattin
Nomads
Translated By #Maher_Razouk

[Verico · Rating 2 out of 5]

Una historia contada de modo algo desordenada. Aburrido.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this really interesting. A good chunk of the story is based upon suppositions; there is no hard evidence from those times. That so, it's tells of the foundation that built our civilisations.

[Elen Lebet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fucking grain! ⛺🐎🫐🏹

[Janalyn, the blind reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anthony Sattin had my full attention with his book nomads. I never realized what great impact no mad head on us and we had on them. I also didn’t realize that nomads stretched the whole social genre from the very rich noble man to the lesser affluent the hunters and gatherers. This book is a very buffet of nomads from all over the world. I knew it was something that would interest me but I found it so interesting from archaeological digs to those who just wanted on to something that told the story from history. This is a great book and the narrator did a great job and had such a nice voice. I really enjoyed this book so much! If you love stories that or not told every day you really need to read Anthony Sattin’s Brooke nomads a truly interesting find. I received this book from net galley and the publisher but I am leaving my review voluntarily please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

[C. L. Pillory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall this was an enjoyable and informative read. The author is obviously very passionate and well-read regarding these subjects, and his research appears to be thorough.
However, I think in trying to cover all of human history and creating an overarching theme, Sattin overreached and ended up leaving many cultures out. Of course one can't talk about every single facet of every single culture, but the fact that a very large portion of the book is given to discussing the Mongols and their relation to the Europeans frustrates me when so much more was going on at that time.
Another thing--Sattin is trying to decolonize history and tell the story from a non-Western point of view, but the constant relating to Europe and the Mongols combined with the final section of the book being written mostly through a white American lens frustrated me.
I may come back and edit this review further, but for now those are my thoughts.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great pop history books weaving a lot of narratives together.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

“…The settled needed nomads and nomads needed the settled. When they cooperated, when borders and markets and minds were open, the world was a better place, as St Sidonius, Bishop of Clermont in France…. In the lush volcanic lands of central France ‘where pastures crown the hill-tops and vineyards clothe the slopes, where villas rise on the lowlands and castles on the rocks, forests here and clearings there, headlands washed by rivers . . .’ the bishop recognised that there was room enough for herders and farmers and city people alike.”

“Jump forward to a few years ago and to a man called T. T. Karma Chopel, who visited the big open spaces of Green River in Utah. Chopel was a member of Tibet’s parliament-in-exile. He was also someone who knew about life on the vast Eurasian uplands, about nomad life. As he looked out across the river and the vast empty landscape of red rocks and red desert – hopeless for farming, but possible for herds – it seemed obvious to him to ask, ‘Where are your nomads?’”

NOW: Population: 7.8 billion Urban population: 5.6 billion Nomad population: 40 million

I have toyed with a phrase that some will get, some with be baffled by: “alive history.” Other terms were resonating history, vibrant history; what I am getting at is history that is not boring, history that is meaningful other than just recitation, history that makes you wonder and want to think about it. Much, if not most, of written books about history is still colonized, still dry facts, still inscrutable by means of boredom. This book is an example of mostly alive history (he lost me in the war section, missing the point entirely with a desire I think to write adventure into history) but overall it was very good.

The author is taking a decolonizing lens as well and he is showing the past as it is, not revised. Instead of pioneers, barbarous invaders. Etc. Still with a human supremacy lens though, refers to the land as nomads sharing “their” land with wild horses, and that is something we need to eradicate also. It is obvious to me that bears and other wild animals share their land with us instead of even nomads “owning” every inch of land, but when book writers and history writers are white European men, it is too common and editors are not catching it either. Maybe one day soon.

Nomadic people all reminded me of a sublime harmony that exists with the natural world. They knew their environment in a way that can only be acquired through living on equal footing with everything in that world, not in domination, through a recognition that we humans are dependent on our surroundings, something those of us who live in towns and cities too easily forget.

There is an urgent need for new thinking about how we live and what it means to be human. Change is needed. We need to tread with a lighter footprint, and those of us who live in cities need to find a better way of relating to the world beyond the city limits. But before we can understand who we are and what we might become, we need to know who we have been.
History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. James Baldwin

We know that each of our own versions of history leans toward our achievements and the fulfilment of our visions. Whether in China or the United States, the UK, EU or elsewhere in the world, the history we are taught in school omits a large part of the human story. But we are of and in an age when some of what has been edited from view is being restored, from the domestication of horses and the development of the cart and chariot to the creation of trans-Asian post and trade routes, the evolution of nomadic social structures, the championing of individual liberties… Try to imagine the world if we take away nomads and all the others who live lightly. Without them, we would have a much harder path to follow to reach an understanding of what it is to be human and of our place in the natural world.

Nomads have always been at least half of the human story and have made essential contributions to the march of what many historians have traditionally called civilisation….Most of us have settled since then and in the past century most of us have done so in towns and cities. This dramatic shift in lifestyle out of the natural world and inside walls has turned some of us into miscreant kids, unreliable partners, drug addicts, thrill seekers, gamblers and risk takers, and it has left others struggling to resist the lure of wandering through nomadland, longing for the open road, the promise of a new city, a fresh landscape or the next partner.

American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins calculated that most hunter-gatherers devoted around twenty hours a week to feeding themselves…They used this time to laugh, love, sing and dance. Critics have pointed to the drawbacks of seasonal food shortages, disease and conflict. But even allowing for these, and for time to prepare and cook food, even to clean up afterwards, the average hunter-gatherer spent and spends significantly less time providing for their bed and board than the average twenty first-century urban worker.

There are many translations of the word Eden, but all of them point in the same direction, from the Sumerian edin, meaning a plain or steppe, to the Aramaic word for well-watered and the Hebrew for pleasure.

The Genesis narrator names two of these streams as the Tigris and the Euphrates, so the garden of Eden might have been somewhere on the Mesopotamian plain, now southern Iraq. The Roman historian Josephus decided that the other two rivers were the Ganges and the Nile, which expanded the range of geographical possibility. Perhaps Eden was up into the Armenian highlands, on the Iranian plateau or in the Shangri-La uplands of Pakistan.

Göbekli Tepe, as Potbelly Hill is called in Turkish, may be one of the first places on earth, it may even be the first place where our ancestors set out to reshape the landscape to represent something out of their imagination. As we alter vast areas of our planet, we now take this for granted. But 12,000 years ago this was a revolutionary act. It is the beginning of monumental architecture, the beginning of constructed art, and it marks the beginning of the current, human phase of our history.

There is nothing revolutionary in the fact that there is art on the columns at Göbekli Tepe. Homo erectus was creating zigzag patterns on shells in what is now Indonesia 500,000 years ago. Recent finds in Blombos Cave, South Africa, show that Homo sapiens was doing similar work with red ochre 100,000 years ago. When it was abandoned, Göbekli Tepe had been in use for at least 1,500 years, which is the same span of time as from you and me back to the abdication of the last Roman emperor.

‘A wide boundless plain encircled by a chain of low hills’ is how Anton Chekhov describes the steppes. ‘Huddling together and peeping out from behind one another, these hills melted together into rising ground, which stretched right to the very horizon and disappeared into the lilac distance; one drives on and on and cannot discern where it begins or where it ends.’ For once, this is not writer’s hyperbole: Eurasia accounts for over a third of the planet’s landmass and its overwhelming vastness, one of the steppes’ most dominant features, really does run ‘on and on’. From the meadows of Hungary almost to the granite gates of Chang’an, the early Chinese capital, this grassy corridor reaches across 9,000 kilometres to link the Mediterranean with the Yellow Sea, east with west.

If you saddle up on the Great Hungarian Plain before meadow saffron heralds the arrival of spring you could reach Mongolia before the great winter freeze… crossing rivers, woods and marshes, and making your way through the uplands of the Altai Mountains, for most of the journey you would be riding ‘on and on’ over steppe grasses, milkwort and wild hemp. Lapwings, wheatears and partridges would break cover in front of you, rooks, hawks and eagles would scout your movements, while grass crickets, locusts and hoppers scoot out of your way. The old hills would run away to the left, while the misty plain stretches ahead and a deep, transparent sky arcs above. Today, this vastness remains one of our planet’s most daunting geographical features. How might it have looked thousands of years ago to people who were obliged to travel on foot and shared the land with wild horses?

William Jones, judge and linguist…‘whatever be its antiquity, [Sanskrit] is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’.The idea that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit came from the same lost mother tongue was revolutionary and Jones went on to add Gothic, Celtic and old Persian to the same linguistic family.
It was a brilliant linguist and polymath, Thomas Young who called the mother of these languages ‘Indo-European’. It came out of the steppes and in its various forms is today spoken by more than 3 billion people….Certain words are common to the whole family of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) languages. Because these words are so widespread, they throw light on what was of importance to early steppe nomads. These include words for horse, cow, pig, sheep and dog as well as the word reg, ruling, from which we have raj, regal, rex. Other common words include bow, arrow and sword, mother, father, brother and several relating to in-laws, which confirms the importance of family relationships…

This convergence of linguistic and physical evidence now places the original Proto-Indo-Europeans on the Pontic–Caspian steppe, north of the Black and Caspian seas, and enclosed by the Dnieper and Ural rivers. They lived there after the domestication of the horse and many of them were nomadic.

In fourteenth-century North Africa, with darkness and difficulty spreading around him, governments fighting each other, and people left to fend for themselves. It was a time when to move was to risk attack, or infection by deadly disease, when travel was both difficult and dangerous. It was in this time of universal difficulty and widespread ruin that Ibn Khaldun set out to do what no one before had done, to describe how humans organised themselves. Unlike Western histories, the Muqaddimah presents nomads not as barbarians riding in to destroy what had been created, but as prime movers and king makers. In Ibn Khaldun’s world, the sons of Abel are catalysts and creators, and the prime agents of social renewal…Instead of there being an ‘ascent of man’, an upward or even a downward progression, he saw circularity in all things. As his wheel of fortune turns, as the cycle of the months, seasons and years spins, power waxes and wanes, empires rise and collapse, cities are founded and fall, people live and die, all of it dust to dust.

Whether with Berber or Bedouin, gaucho or Moken, conversation always seemed to settle on the same issues, on continuity, on pride in belonging, on being in harmony with their surroundings, respecting all that nature offers and on the difficulties of living a nomadic life when governments wanted them to settle.

Re-evaluating our wandering ‘other half’, hearing their stories, discovering the role they have played in ours, all this allows us to see what we settled people have learned from people who move. It shows how much we have gained from cooperation. It also lets us glimpse – in the way they live lightly, more freely, in the way they have learned to adapt and to be nimble and flexible in their thoughts and actions, and in the balance they have maintained with the natural world – another way of living, the way that the ‘other’ branch of humankind has chosen to go since the days when we all hunted as a single pack in the generous gardens of the deep past.

Nomads tell stories to keep alive their histories, myths and their sense of self. These stories try to make sense of the world and their place in it, perhaps while sitting around a fire, as the night fills with the sounds of wild animals and the sky sugars with stars.

Dopamine can also help us become alpha nomads. But even if that is not on your wish list, there are good reasons why you should be interested because the same variant gene that helps nomadic Ariaal in northern Kenya become the best-fed, most powerful members of their tribe also has an impact on our ability to learn….One in twenty of us, and one in five of our children, are said to suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD makes it hard for us to focus, to pay attention and control behaviour, especially to control hyperactivity. But Dr Eisenberg has another way of looking at it. For him, it is not a disease. It is ‘something with adaptive components’. In a nomadic setting, someone with this variant of the gene may be better at protecting herds against rustlers or finding food and water. ‘The same tendencies might not be as beneficial in settled pursuits such as focusing in school, farming or selling goods.’
For this reason, DRD4-7R has been called the ‘nomadic gene’ and although Dr Eisenberg finds the label unhelpful and unscientific, it does explain why some Ariaal are well-fed, successful nomads and some are not. It is also something you can blame on evolution because 12,000 years ago, before a group of us got together and started constructing monuments at Göbekli Tepe, we all lived a wandering life where this genetic variant, and the diverse set of thoughts and responses it seems to encourage, was useful, perhaps even essential for survival.



So if we are to escape from seeing history as a path through ruins, we must follow a string of stories, we must be prepared to shift from myth to legend to verifiable facts, and we must travel from deepest history into our own time. We must make a journey.

‘From the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two,’ the Swiss philosopher and walker Jean-Jacques Rousseau explained as he distilled into a single sentence humankind’s long fall out of grace and into the problems of agriculture, ‘equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow.’ Rousseau was in no doubt of the immense price that we have had to pay and will continue to pay for our reliance on agriculture: ‘Slavery and misery . . . germinate and grow up with the crops.’

[Siri Olsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deeply important and very moving (pun intended) exploration of nomadism and its influence on human history, dealing with such fundamental aspects of human nature as sense of belonging, sociality, expansion, empire, settlement and self-perception. The book traces the history of nomads from the time when no human stayed in the same place for long until the decline in nomadism associated with the rise of borders in the modern world. At the same time, the book explores what it means to be settled and what it means to be mobile, from a practical perspective and from a psychological perspective. Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World highlights many of history's most overlooked peoples and cultures, many of whom were fundamental in shaping the course of human history. The book is imbued with a nostalgic, melancholic longing for the wilderness which modern states have left behind, adding a poignant note to the telling of history. Highly recommended.

[Jenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the first two parts a lot, but found the part about more recent nomadism lacking. I felt it was really missing more about how the modern world sees the "crime" of vagrancy and trespassing on land/enclosure of the commons. The persecution and genocide of the Romani people was also completely left out, which was surprising to me - surely this is one of the biggest modern examples of settled vs mobile people? Because mobile people who primarily travel between settled places were excluded from the narrative, nomads are a bit reduced to a "in tune with nature" sort of thing.

[Maria Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not finish. Factual errors in the introduction (The Song Lines by Chadwin is set in Australia not Africa) that could have been caught by a simple google search paired with a forced overarching narrative leading to dubious claims unsupported by evidence made me lose complete faith in the author.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrical prose, if not always argued from the most data-driven starting points. Still, some great perspective on the history of humanity's varied migrations and how those peoples have impacted society at large.

[Shana Yates · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Nina Mischief · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say. It‘s a fantastic read, with fascinating tales about nomadic people and their ways through history. Though it may have some flaws, I‘m always someone to further reading and learning about nomadic ways, so five stars.

[Mick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very fun, very educational

[Cora · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author explains that much of the historical evidence is based upon the surmise of those studying the dark ages and that these folk never did leave much behind. Can't blame 'em. They were forever on the move, mostly by foot and I would think their priorities were beef and bedding.

Still, this is a jolly interesting read.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic and thought provoking book about nomads and what we have lost by being ‘civilized’.