Кочевники средневековья (поиски исторических закономерностей) - [55]

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SUMMARY

Nomads first appeared in the steppe towards the beginning of the 1st millennium В. C. and in the next 500 years completely replaced pastoral population. The European and Asian steppe and forest-steppe zone were thus for more than three thousand years turned into a nomad area.

Nomadism, according to modern ethnographers, is characterised by a producing economy based on extensive cattle-breeding, with most of the population roaming with their herds all year round. This definition, however, concerns only the economic aspect of nomadism, for nomadism is more than an economic system. It is a way of life, with its own material and spiritual culture and religious beliefs, social and political history.

A study of nomadism in its totality or of its individual aspects will reveal law-governed regularities equally applicable to any nomad community. We can thus group, for the purpose of comparison, different peoples and ethnoses which roamed the steppe at different periods.

The purpose of this book is to disclose these regularities and to construct, on their basis, certain socio-ethnic and cultural models of the different stages of economic development.

Ethnographers now identify three types of the nomad economy: complete nomad economy with no forms of agriculture or settled way of life; semi-nomad economy with permanent winter camps and partial stockpiling of fodder; semi-nomad economy, with parallel existence of agriculture and settled way of life. Each type had its own pattern of social relations: ail-communal social relations, and in the third, class relations.

Let us examine the complete nomad type, which may be called the tabor type, no longer extant in the Eurasian steppe. Yearround mobile pasturing remains an unavoidable form of cattle-breeding only in the especially arid Cicumcas-pian and Mongolian steppe and semi-deserts. There the cattle can be fed only by moving the herds from one meagre pasture to another.

In the Middle Ages lengthy droughts and frosty winters lorced the nomads to seek new pastures. The search was often a long and tortuous process, and in these conditions the tabor economy was the only possible choice.

The need for new territories for pasture and battue hunting made warriors of the nomads, for no people would cede their territory voluntarily. Nomad invasions were aimed at the seizure of a territory through the complete or partial annihilation of its population. In some cases part of the conquered people would be incorporated into the nomad community. The invasions involved the entire nomad population, men, women, children, old and young (young women joined the ranks of mounted warriors) with their herds and tents. At this stage termed «military democracy" by the classics of Marxism, the socio-political structure took the form of conglomerations of the tribal-union type, usually led by active members of influential and rich clans, one of which had initiated the invasion.

As a rule, the armed drive for new lands originated in a limited steppe region and was the result of events that made it inevitable. Most of the population mounted their horses or followed the warriors in covered carts, carrying with them their property and leading their herds. At the start, the population usually belonged to one ethnic and linguistic group compact enough to be considered an ethnic community, but one in a state of constant division into related ethnic groups.

Such detached groups began to roam the steppe on their own in search of «vacant» territory, i. е., occupied by a military weaker ethnos. The advancing hordes would, on their way, conquer, ruin and absorb parts of tribes and eth-noses. Thus, the prerequisites were created for the formation of a new ethnic community, and, above all, of a new socio-political conglomeration. The same applied to material culture: every group was a bearer of the «material cul-ture» which practically disappeared in the long and tortuous wanderings, hard-fought battles and cultural assimilation. Only military innovations which had brought victories to the conquerors remained unchanged.

A new syncretic culture was formed, a blend of many disparate cultures and influences.

What remains to the archaeologist of the early nomad culture? This multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-lingual conglomeration of tribes and hordes, tied into tribal and horde unions by their leaders, continuously roved the vast hostile steppe. They had neither permanent winter camps where cultural layers may be found nor permanent clan burial grounds. Usually they buried their dead in mounds, common in steppe, left over from previous epochs (the so-called secondary burials), or in thoroughly concealed ground burials. The custom of concealing burials was followed by the nomad nobility up to the 13th century. The tabor period has left the archaeologist single burials in the steppe, seldom intact, which one can come across only by chance, though precisely these burials yield interesting information: different burial rites testify to patchy ethnic patterns; «equal» burial complexes (with the exception of the gold-covered burials of chieftains) testify to the prevalence of the military democracy.