THE STEPPE, THE STEPPE
Welcome to Cosmographia — a newsletter uncovering the deep roots of a turbulent world. For the full map of posts, see here.
Consider this a trial of a new post format — a short dose of geohistory, featuring a map I’ve made myself and a few hundred words of explanation. Let me know what you think.
There were none among the wild peoples of the steppe who did not worship the sky. Such was and is the implacable vastness of the heavens that smother the roiling hills that run from Hungary to Manchuria that one cannot help but feel the weight of the cosmos press down upon your back. Perhaps that’s why those who for centuries rode nomadic across the spine of the world galloped out of the terra incognita of their vast inland sea to wash like waves upon the settled civilisations of Europe, China, and Persia. Perhaps like toothpaste in a tube the weight of the sky above simply squeezed them forth.
Greek Zeus, Norse Thor, Vedic Indra, Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda — all began life as a storm god of the steppe sky. There is no shelter from their lightning bolts upon the plains, no mountains or trees to break the winds. The summer months see black storms of incalculable fury sweep across the land. Winter is little better. Freezing winds and whipping blizzards turn the desert of grass white and the eyes of men blind.
The soil is thin and poor. It cannot support agriculture. All that grows are coarse grasses, milkwort, wild hemp. In the spring small flowers can turn the hills momentarily white, red, or purple. But most often the steppe is a featureless green or ruddy brown, blank and bare.
Upon this pasture feasts gazelles, marmots, and antelope; hunting them are wolves, wild cats, and the Corsac fox. Hawks, falcons, and enormous eagle-owls wheel about the skies searching for the shrews, voles, jerboas, and great gerbils that hide in the grass. Upon the backs of these rodents are fleas that have for centuries carried Yersinia pestis — the plague bacterium responsible for the Black Death. But the animal that we most associate with this biome is of course the fleet-footed horse.
It’s hard to fathom the sheer vastness of the Great Eurasian Steppe. Its rolling hills of temperate grassland tumble across two continents, seven nations, and 8000 kilometres; it covers 7% of the world’s entire land surface; if it were a country it would be second only to Russia in size.
Its influence on history is hard to overstate. Half the world today speaks a language of the first true steppe nomads - the Yamnaya of the Pontic Steppe, who fifty centuries ago abandoned their ploughs to rust in the black soils of Ukraine and turned instead to the open plains of Eurasia. They were the first steppe people to leave their mark, but far from the last. The Scythians traded and warred with the Persians and Greeks; the Huns overran Rome; the Magyars took Hungary; the Bulgars the Balkans; the Turks Constantinople. Onto the Persian plateau poured the Ghaznavids, the Seljuks, the Khwarazimians, the Timurids. Such was the terror of the Chinese of their steppe enemies, they built a wall over 13,000 miles long in attempt to keep them out. But still the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Göktürks, Jurchens, and Manchus poured through. And I have not even named the most notorious horde of all.
But the steppe was always more than just a staging ground for conquest. It has long functioned as Eurasia’s highway, along which passed ideas, theologies, music, alphabets, and technologies. The wheel, silk, paper, movable type, trousers, the magnetic compass, the stirrup, and gunpowder all flowed across the tangle of tracks that today we call the Silk Road.
The world would not be the same without the Great Steppe; I would not be the same. My patrilineal DNA shows that among my ancestors were the first nomads, those whose remains still lay strewn across half the world in kurgan burial mounds. If you have Eurasian heritage, the chances are you are their descendant too.
I picture him, the ancestral steppeman, a lone figure on horseback. He gazes out over a mirror of green. A soft wind makes the grass shimmer and dance before him. The last curling embers of the dying day begin to ignite the horizon. He has miles to go before he sleeps. Miles to go before he sleeps.
Russian literature idolized the theme of the steppe. It started with Pushkin and continued through modern literature. It is a theme of Freedom, Mother Russia, History, and even Philosophical Loneliness. Gogol sang his song to the steppe in Taras Bul'ba and Chekhov in his famous Steppe about the grandeur of the steppe. People created their folklore about the steppe, tragic and beautiful: Steppe and steppe is around./ My road is faraway,/ In that deaf steppe/ A coachman was dying. Many painters devoted their art to the steppe, also, as you showed in your essay.
In the sense of the agriculture, the steppe lands in Russia have always been considered as fertile and Khruschev masterd the virgin lands of the Kazachstan steppe, sending there a thousands of young people for developing them for wheat and rye.
I grew up in the steppe, a part of my childhood anyway. I remember the vastness, the amazing night skies, and horrendous roads in the spring and fall. Also, the cold. Great post.