[Sidenote: Pastoral life.]

The grasslands of the old world developed historical importance only after the domestication of cattle, sheep, goats, asses, horses, camels and yaks. This step in progress resulted in the evolution of peoples who renounced the precarious subsistence of the chase and escaped the drudgery of agriculture, to devote themselves to pastoral life. It was possible only where domesticable animals were present, and where the intelligence of the native or the peculiar pressure exerted by environment suggested the change from a natural to an artificial basis of subsistence. Australia lacked the type of animal. Though North America had the reindeer and buffalo, and South America the guanaco, llama and alpaca, only the last two were domesticated in the Andean highlands; but as these were restricted to altitudes from 10,000 to 14,000 feet, where pasturage was limited, stock raising in primitive South America was merely an adjunct to the sedentary agriculture of the high intermontane valleys, and never became the basis for pastoral nomadism on the grassy plains. However, when the Spaniards introduced horses and cattle into South America, the Indians and half-breeds of the llanos and pampas became regular pastoral nomads, known as llaneros and gauchos. They are a race of horsemen, wielding javelin and lasso and bola, living on meat, often on horse-flesh like the ancient Huns, dwelling in leather tents made on a cane framework, like those of the modern Kirghis and medieval Tartars, dressed in cloaks of horsehide sewn together, and raiding the Argentinian frontier of white settlement for horses, sheep and cattle, with the true marauding instinct of all nomads.[1051]

[Sidenote: Pastoral nomads of Arctic plains.]

Aridity is not the only climatic condition condemning a people to nomadic life. Excessive cold, producing the tundra wastes of the far north, has the same effect. Therefore, throughout Arctic Eurasia, from the Lapp district of Norway to the Inland Chukches of eastern Siberia, we have a succession of Hyperborean peoples pasturing their herds of reindeer over the moss and lichen tundra, and supplementing their food supply with hunting and fishing. The reindeer Chukches once confined themselves to their peninsula, so long as the grazing grounds were unexhausted; but they now range as far west as Yakutsk on the Lena River, The Orochones of the Kolima River district in eastern Siberia, who live chiefly by their reindeer, have small herds. A well-to-do person will have 40 to 100 animals, and the wealthiest only 700, while the Chukches with herds of 10,000 often seek the pasture of the Kolima tundra.[1052] Farther west, the Samoyedes of northern Siberia and Russia and the Zirians of the Petchora River range with their large herds northward to the Yalmal Peninsula and Vaygats Isle in summer, and southward in winter. [See map pages 103, 225.] Here a herd of fifty head, which just suffices for the support of one family of four souls, requires 10 square versts, or 4.44 square miles of tundra pasturage.[1053] Hence population must forever remain too sparse ever to attain historical significance. [See map page 8.] The Russian Lapps, too, lead a semi-nomadic life. Each group has a particular summer and winter settlement. The winter village is located usually inland in the Kola Peninsula, where the forests lend shelter to the herds, and the summer one near the tundra of the coast, where fishing is accessible. In winter, like the nomads of the deserts, they add to their slender income by the transport of goods by their reindeer and by service at the post stations.[1054]

[Sidenote: Historical importance of steppe nomads.]

These nomads of the frozen north, scattered sparsely over the remote periphery of the habitable world, have lacked the historical importance which in all times has attached to the steppe nomads, owing to their central location. The broad belt of deserts and grasslands which crosses the old world diagonally between 10 deg. and 60 deg. North Latitude from the Atlantic in Africa to the Pacific in Asia, either borders or encompasses the old domains of culture found in river oases, alluvial lowlands or coastal plains of the Torrid and Temperate Zones. The restless, mobile, unbound shepherds of the arid lands have never long been contained by the country which bred them. They have constantly encroached upon the territory of their better placed neighbors, invading, conquering, appropriating their fields and cities, disturbing but at the same time acquiring their culture, lording it over the passive agriculturists, and at the same time putting iron into their weaker blood. It is the geographical contact between arid steppes and moist river valley, between land of poverty and land of plenty, that has made the history of the two inseparable.[1055]



[Sidenote: Mobility of pastoral nomads.]

Every aspect of human life in the steppes bears the stamp of mobility. The nomad tolerates no clog upon his movements. His dwelling is the tent of skin or felt as among Kalmucks and Kirghis, or the tent wagon of the modern Boer[1056] and the ancient Scythian as described by Herodotus.[1057] "This device has been contrived by them as the country is fit for it," he says,—level, grassy, treeless. The temporary settlement of shepherd tribes is the group of tents, or the ancient carrago camp of the nomadic Visigoths,[1058] or the laager of the pastoral Boers, both a circular barricade or corral of wagons.

[Sidenote: Tendency to trek.]

Constant movement reduces the impedimenta to a minimum. The Orochones, a Tunguse nomadic tribe of eastern Siberia, have no furniture in their tents, and keep their meager supply of clothing and utensils neatly packed on sledges, as if to start at a moment's notice.[1059] The only desirable form of capital is that which transports itself, namely, flocks and herds. Beyond that, wealth is limited to strictly portable forms, preferably silver, gold and jewels. It was in terms of these, besides their herds, that the riches of Abraham and Lot were rated in the Bible. That the Israelites when traveling through the wilderness should have had the gold to make the golden calf accords strictly with the verisimilitude of pastoral life.[1060] Moreover, that these enslaved descendants of the Sheik Abraham, with their traditions of pastoral life, should have simply trekked-ruptured the frail ties of recently acquired habit which bound them to the Nile soil, is also in keeping with their inborn nomadic spirit. Similar instances occur among modern peoples. The Great Trek of the South African Boers in 1836, by which they renounced not only their unwelcome allegiance to England, but also their land,[1061] was another exodus in accordance with the instinct of a pastoral people. They adopted no strange or difficult course, but traveled with their families as they were wont in their every day life of cattle-tenders, took all their chattels with them, and headed for the thin pastures of the far-reaching veldt. The Russian government has had to contend with a like fluidity in her Cossack tribes of the steppes, who have been up and off when imperial authority became oppressive. In the summer of 1878 West Siberia lost about 9000 Kirghis, who left the province Semipalatinsk to seek Mongolia.

[Sidenote: Seasonal migrations.]

Environment determines the nomadic habits of the dweller of desert and steppe. The distribution of pasture and water fixes the scope and the rate of his wandering; these in turn depend upon geographic conditions and vary with the season. The Papago Indians of southern Arizona range with their cattle over a territory 100 by 150 miles in extent, and wander across the border into Mexico. When their main water supply, derived from wells or artificial reservoirs near their summer villages, is exhausted, they migrate to the water-holes, springs or streams in the canons. There the cattle graze out on the plains and return to the canons to drink.[1062] Every Mongol tribe and clan has its seasonal migration. In winter the heavier precipitation and fuller streams enable them to collect in considerable groups in protected valleys; but the dry summer disperses them over the widest area possible, in order to utilize every water-hole and grass spot. The hotter regions of the plains are abandoned in summer for highlands, where the short period of warmth yields temporary pastures and where alone water can be found. The Kirghis of Russian Turkestan resort in summer to the slopes and high valleys of the Altai Mountains, where their auls or tent villages may be seen surrounded by big flocks of sheep, goats, camels, horses and cattle.[1063] The Pamir in the warm months is the gathering place for the nomads of Central Asia. The naked desert of Arabia yields a rare herbage during the rainy season, when the Bedouin tribes resort to it for pasturage;[1064] but during the succeeding drought they scatter to the hills of Yemen, Syria and Palestine,[1065] or migrate to the valley of the Nile and Euphrates.[1066] The Arabs of the northern Sahara, followed by small flocks of sheep and goats, vibrate between the summer pastures on the slopes of the Atlas Mountains and the scant, wiry grass tufts found in winter on the borders of the desert.[1067] When the equatorial rains begin in June, the Arabs of the Atbara River follow them north-westward into the Nubian desert, and let their camel herds graze on the delicate grass which the moisture has conjured up from the sandy soil. The country about Cassala, which is flooded during the monsoon rains by the rivers from the Abyssinian Mountains, is reserved for the dry season.[1068] In the same way the Tartar tribes of the Dnieper, Don, Volga and Ural Rivers in the thirteenth century moved down these rivers in winter to the sea coast, and in summer up-stream to the hills and mountains.[1069] So for the past hundred years the Boers of the South African grasslands have migrated in their tent wagons from the higher to the lower pastures, according to the season of the year, invading even the Karroo Desert after the short summer rains.[1070]

[Sidenote: Marauding expeditions.]

This systematic movement of nomads within their accepted boundaries leads, on slight provocation, to excursions beyond their own frontiers into neighboring territories. The growing herd alone necessitates the absorption of more land, more water-holes, because the grazed pastures renew their grass slowly under the prevailing conditions of drought. An area sufficient for the support of the tribe is inadequate for the sustenance of the herd, whose increase is a perennial expansive force. Soon the pastures become filled with the feeding flocks, and then herdsmen and herds spill over into other fields. Often a season of unusual drought, reducing the existing herbage which is scarcely adequate at best, gives rise to those irregular, temporary expansions which enlarge the geographical horizon of the horde, and eventuate in widespread conquest. Such incursions, like the seasonal movements of nomads, result from the helpless dependence of shepherd tribes upon variations of rainfall.

The nomad's basis of life is at best precarious. He and want are familiar friends. A pest among his herds, diminished pasturage, failing wells, all bring him face to face with famine, and drive him to robbery and pillage.[1071] Marauding tendencies are ingrained in all dwellers of the deserts and steppes.[1072] Since the days of Job, the Bedouins of Arabia have been a race of marauders; they have reduced robbery to a system. Predatory excursions figure conspicuously in the history of all the tribes. Robber is a title of honor.[1073] Pliny said that the Arabs were equally addicted to theft and trade. They pillaged caravans and held them for ransom, or gave them safe conduct across the desert for a price. Formerly the Turkoman tribes of the Trans-Caspian steppes levied on the bordering districts, notably the northern part of Khorasan, which belonged more to the Turkomans, Yomut and Goklan tribes of the adjoining steppe than to the resident Persians. The border districts of Herat, Khiva, Merv and Bukhara used to suffer in the same way from the raids of the Tekkes, till the Russians checked the evil.[1074] The Tekkes had depopulated whole districts, invaded Persian towns of considerable size, and carried off countless families into slavery. Both Turkomans and Kirghis tribes prior to 1873 raided caravans and carried off the travelers to the slave markets of Bukhara and Samarkand.[1075] [See map page 103.]

Among these tribes no young man commanded respect in his community till he had participated in a baranta or cattle-raising.[1076] For centuries the nomadic hordes of the Russian steppes systematically pillaged the peaceful agricultural Slavs, who were threatening to encroach upon their pasture lands. The sudden, swift descent and swift retreat of the mounted marauders with the booty into the pathless grasslands, whither pursuit was dangerous, their tendency to rob and conquer but never to colonize, involved Russia in a long struggle, which ceased only with the extension of Muscovite dominion over the steppes.[1077]

[Sidenote: Depredation and conquests of African nomads.]

All the Saharan tribes are marauders, whether Arabs, Berber Tuaregs, or Negroid Tibbus. The desert has made them so. The Tuaregs are chronic freebooters; they keep the Sahara and especially the caravan routes in constant insecurity. They stretch a cordon across these routes from Ghadames and Ghat in the east to the great oases of Insalah and Twat in the west; and from the oases and hills forming their headquarters they spread for pasturage and blackmail over the desert.[1078] They exact toll over and over again from a caravan, provide it with a military escort of their own tribesmen, and then pillage it on the way.[1079] This has been the experience of Barth[1080] and other explorers. Caravans have not been their only prey. The agricultural peoples in the Niger flood-plain, the commerce on the river, and the markets of Timbuctoo long suffered from the raids of the Tuaregs of the Sahara. They collected tribute in the form of grain, salt, garments, horses and gold, typical needs of a desert people, imposed tolls on caravans and on merchant fleets passing down the Niger to Timbuctoo. In 1770 they began to move from the desert and appropriate the fertile plains in the northern part of the Niger Valley, and in 1800 they conquered Timbuctoo; but soon they had to yield to another tribe of pastoral nomads, the Fulbes from the Senegal, who in 1813 established a short-lived but well organized empire on the ruins of the Tuareg dominion.[1081] [See map page 105.] The other agricultural states of the Sudan have had the same experience. The Tibbus, predatory nomads of the French Sahara just north of Lake Chad and the River Yo, mounted on camels and ponies, cross the shrunken river in the dry season and raid Bornu for cattle, carry off women and children to sell as slaves, pillage the weekly markets on the Yo, and plunder caravans of pilgrims moving eastward to Mecca.[1082] Nowhere can desert nomads and the civilized peoples of agricultural plains dwell side by side in peace. Raids, encroachments, reprisals, finally conquest from one side or the other is the formula for their history. [See map page 487.]

[Sidenote: Forms of defense against nomad depredations.]

The raided territory, if a modern civilized state, organizes its border communities into a native mounted police, as the English have done in Bornu, Sokoto and the Egyptian Sudan, and as the Russians did with their Cossack riders along the successive frontiers of Muscovite advance into the steppes; or it takes into its employ, as we have seen, the nearest nomad tribes to repress or punish every hostile movement beyond. Among the ancient states the method was generally different. Since the nomad invaders came with their flocks and herds, a barrier often sufficed to block their progress. For this purpose Sesostris built the long wall of 1500 stadia from Pelusium to Heliopolis as a barricade against the Arabians.[1083] Ancient Carthage constructed a ditch to check the depredations of the nomads of Numidia.[1084] The early kings of Assyria built a barrier across the plains of the Euphrates above Babylon to secure their dominion from the incursions of the desert Medes.[1085] In the fifth century of our era, the "Red Wall" was constructed near the northern frontier of Persia as a bulwark against the Huns. It stretched for a hundred and fifty miles from the Caspian Sea at the ancient port of Aboskun eastward to the mountains, and thus enclosed the populous valley of the Gurgen River.[1086] In remote ages the neck of the Crimean Peninsula was fortified by a wall against the irruptions of the Tauro-Scythians.[1087] The Russians early in their national history used the same means of defense against Tartar incursions. One wall was built from Pensa on the Sura River to Simbirsk on the Volga, just south of Kazan; another, further strengthened by a foss and palisades, extended from the fortress of Tsaritzin at the southern elbow of the Volga across the fifty-mile interval to the Don, and was still defended in 1794 by the Cossacks of the Don against the neighboring Kirghis hordes.[1088] The classic example of such fortifications against pastoral nomads, however, is the Great Wall of China.

[Sidenote: Pastoral life as a training for soldiers.]

The nomad is economically a herdsman, politically a conqueror, and chronically a fighter. Strife over pasturage and wells meets us in the typical history of Abraham, Lot and Isaac;[1089] it exists within and without the clan. The necessity of guarding the pastures, which are only intermittently occupied, involves a persistent military organization. The nation is a quiescent army, the army a mobilized nation.[1090] It carries with it a self-transporting commissariat in its flocks and herds. Constant practice in riding, scouting and the use of arms, physical endurance tested by centuries of exertion and hardship, make every nomad a soldier. Cavalry and camel corps add to the swiftness and vigor of their onslaught, make their military strategy that of sudden attack and swifter retreat, to be met only by wariness and extreme mobility. The ancient Scythians of the lower Danubian steppes were all horse archers, like the Parthians. "If the Scythians were united, there is no nation which could compare with them or would be capable of resisting them; I do not say in Europe, but even in Asia," said Thucydides.[1091] In this opinion Herodotus concurred.[1092] The nomad's whole existence breeds courage. The independent, hazardous life of the desert makes the Arab the bravest of mankind, but the settled, agricultural Arab of Egypt and Mohammedan Spain lost most of his fighting qualities.[1093]

[Sidenote: Military organization of nomads.]

The daily life of a nomad horde is a training school for military organization. In the evening the flocks and herds are distributed with system around the camp to prevent confusion. The difficult art of a well ordered march, of making and breaking camp, and of foraging is practiced almost daily in their constant migrations.[1094] The usual order of the Bedouin march could scarcely be surpassed by an army. In advance of the caravan moves a body of armed horsemen, five or seven kilometers ahead; then follows the main body of the tribesmen mounted on horses and camels, then the female camels, and after these the beasts of burden with the women and children. The encampment of tents with the places for men, arms and herds is also carefully regulated. More than this, the horde is organized into companies with their superior and subordinate leaders.[1095] John de Carpini describes Genghis Khan's military organization of his vast Tartar horde by tens, hundreds and thousands, his absolute dominion over his conquered subjects, and prompt absorption of them into his fighting force, by the compulsory enlistment of soldiers out of every freshly subjugated nation.[1096] In the same way the Hebrew tribes, when preparing for the conquest of Canaan, adopted from the desert Midianites the organization of the horde into tens, hundreds and thousands under judges, who were also military leaders in time of war.

[Sidenote: Capacity for conquest and political consolidation.]

Thus certain geographic conditions produce directly the habitual and systematic migration of the nomads, and through this indirectly that military and political organization which has given the shepherd races of the earth their great historical mission of political consolidation. Agriculture, though underlying all permanent advance in civilization, is handicapped by the lack of courage, mobility, enterprise and large political outlook characterizing early tillers of the soil. All these qualities the nomad possesses. Hence the union of these two elements, imperious pastor superimposed upon peaceful tiller, has made the only stable governments among savage and semi-civilized races.[1097] The politically invertebrate peoples of dark Africa have secured the back-bone to erect states only from nomad conquerors. The history of the Sudan cannot be understood apart from a knowledge of the Sahara and its peoples. All the Sudanese states were formed by invaders from the northern desert, Hamitic or Semitic. [See map page 487.] The Galla or Wahuma herdsmen of East Africa founded and maintained the relatively stable states of Uganda, Kittara, Karague, and Uzinza in the equatorial district; the conquerors remained herders while they lorded it over the agricultural aborigines.[1098] In prehistoric times when the various peoples of the Aryan linguistic family were spreading over Europe and southern Asia, the superiority of the shepherd races must have been especially marked, because in that era only the unobstructed surface of the steppes permitted the concentration of men on a vast scale for migration and conquest. Everywhere else regions of broken relief and dense forests harbored small, isolated peoples, to whom both the idea and the technique of combined movement were foreign.

[Sidenote: Scope of nomad conquests.]

The rapidity and wide scope of such conquests is explained largely by the fact that nomads try to displace only the ruling classes in the subjugated territory, leaving the mass of the population practically undisturbed. Thus they spread themselves thin over a wide area. How lasting are the results of such conquests depends upon the degree of social evolution attained by the herdsmen. Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, after the manner of overlords, organized their conquered nations, but left them under the control of local princes,[1099] while their tribute gatherers annually swept the country like typical nomad marauders. The Turks are still only encamped in Europe. They too make taxation despoliation. And though their dominion has produced no assimilation between victor and vanquished, it has given political consolidation to a large area occupied by varied peoples. The Hyksos conquest of Egypt found the Nile Valley divided into several petty principalities under a nominal king. The nomad conquerors possessed political capacity and gave to Egypt a strong, centralized government, which laid the basis for the power and glory of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The Tartars in 1279 A.D. and the Manchus in 1664 conquered China, extended its boundaries, governed the country as a ruling class, and left the established order of things undisturbed. The Saracen conquest of North Africa and Spain showed for a time organization and a permanence due to the advanced cultural status of the sedentary Arabs drawn into the movement by religious enthusiasm. The environment of Spain tended to conserve the knowledge of agriculture, industry, architecture, and science which they brought in and which might have cemented Spaniard and Moor, had it not been for the intense religious antagonism existing between the two races.

The history of nomad conquerors shows that they become weakened by the enervating climate and the effeminating luxury of the moist and fertile lowlands. They lose eventually their warlike spirit, like the Fellatah or Fulbe founders of the Sudanese states,[1100] and are either displaced from their insecure thrones by other conquerors sprung from the same nomad-breeding steppe, as the Aryan princes of India by the Mongol Emperor, and the Saracen invaders of Mesopotamia by the victorious Turkomans; or they are expelled in time by their conquered subjects, as the Tartars were from Russia, the Moors from Spain, and the Turks from the Danube Valley.

[Sidenote: Centralization versus decentralization in nomadism.]

Nomad hordes unite for concerted action to resist encroachment upon their pastures, or for marauding expeditions, or for widespread conquest; but such unions are from their nature temporary, though a career of conquest may be sustained for decades. The geographically determined mobility which facilitates such concentration favors also dispersal, decentralization. This is the paradox in nomadism. Geographic conditions in arid lands necessitate sparse distribution of population and of herds. Pastoral life requires large spaces and small social groups. When Abraham and Lot went to Canaan from Egypt, "the land was not able to bear them that they might dwell together, for their substance was great." Strife for the pasturage ensued between their respective herdsmen, so the two sheiks separated, Lot taking the plains of Jordan and Abraham the hill pastures of Hebron. Jacob and Esau separated for the same reason. The encampment of the Kirghis shepherds rarely averages over five or six tents, except on the best grazing grounds at the best season of the year. The flow of spring, well or stream also helps to regulate their size. The groups of Mongol yurts or felt tents along the piedmont margin of the Gobi vary from four tents to a large encampment, according to water and grass.[1101] Prevalsky mentions a population of 70 families or 300 souls in the Lob Nor district distributed in 11 villages, or less than 28 in each group.[1102] Barth noticed the smallness of all the oasis towns of the Sahara, even those occupying favorable locations for trade on the caravan routes.[1103]

[Sidenote: Spirit of independence among nomads.]

The nature-made necessity of scattering in small groups to seek pasturage induces in the nomad a spirit of independence. The Bedouin is personally free. The power of the sheik is only nominal,[1104] and depends much upon his personal qualities. The gift of eloquence among the ancient Arabs has been attributed to the necessity of persuading a people to whom restraint was irksome.[1105] Political organization is conspicuously lacking among the Tibbus of the Sahara[1106] and the Turkoman tribes of the Trans-Caspian steppes. "We are a people without a head," they say. The title of sheik is an empty one. Custom and usage are their rulers.[1107] Though the temporary union of nomadic tribes forms an effective army, the union is short-lived. Groups form, dissolve and re-form, with little inner cohesion. The Boers in South African grasslands showed the same development. The government of the Dutch East India Company in Cape Colony found it difficult to control the wandering cattlemen of the interior plateau. They loved independence and isolation; their dissociative instincts, bred by the lonely life of the thin-pastured veldt, were overcome only by the necessity of defense against the Bushmen. Then they organized themselves into commandos and sallied out on punitive expeditions, like the Cossack tribes of the Don against marauding Tartars. Scattered over wide tracts of pasture land, they were exempt from the control of either Dutch or English authority; but when an energetic administration pursued them into their widespread ranches, they eluded control by trekking.[1108] Here was the independent spirit of the steppe, reinforced by the spirit of the frontier.

[Sidenote: Resistance to conquest.]

Though the desert and steppe have bred conquerors, they are the last parts of the earth's surface to yield to conquest from without. The untameable spirit of freedom in the shepherd tribes finds an ally against aggression in the trackless sands, meager water and food supply of their wilderness. Pursuit of the retreating tribesmen is dangerous and often futile. They need only to burn off the pasture and fill up or pollute the water-holes to cripple the transportation and commissariat of the invading army. This is the way the Damaras have fought the German subjugation of Southwest Africa.[1109] Moreover, the paucity of economic and political possibilities in deserts and grasslands discourages conquest. Conquest pays only where it is a police measure to check depredations on the bordering agricultural lands, or where such barren areas are transit lands to a desirable territory beyond. It is chiefly the "Gates of Herat" and the lure of India which have drawn Russian dominion across the scorched plains of Turkestan. France has assumed the big task of controlling the Sahara to secure a safe passway between French Tunisia and the rich Niger basin of the French Sudan. The recent British-Egyptian expansion southward across the Nubian steppes had for its objective the better watered districts of the upper Nile above Khartum. This desert advance is essentially a latter day phenomenon, the outcome of modern territorial standards; it is attended or secured by the railroad. To this fact the projected Trans-Saharan line is the strongest witness.

Nature everywhere postpones, obstructs, jeopardizes the political conquest of arid lands. The unstable, fanatical tribesmen of the Egyptian Sudan, temporarily but effectively united under the Mahdi, made it necessary for Kitchener to do again in 1898 the work of subjugation which Gordon had done thirty years before. The body of the Arabian people is still free. The Turkish sovereignty over them to-day is nominal, rather an alliance with a people whom it is dangerous to provoke and difficult to attack. Only the coast provinces of Hejaz, Yemen and Hasa are subject to Turkey, while the tribes of the interior and of the southeastern seaboard are wholly independent.[1110] The Turkoman tribes of Trans-Caspia have been subordinated to Russia largely by a process of extermination.[1111] China is satisfied with a nominal dominion over the roaming populations of Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan. The French pacification and control of Northwest Africa meets a peculiar problem, due to the extreme restlessness and restiveness of the dominant Arab race. The whole population is unstable as water; a disturbance or movement in one tribe is soon communicated to the whole mass.[1112]

[Sidenote: Curtailment of nomadism.]

The steppe or desert policy for the curtailment of nomadism, and the reclamation of both land and people is to encourage or enforce sedentary life. The French, to settle the wandering tribes on the Atlas border of the Sahara, have opened a vast number of artesian wells through the agency of skillful engineers, and thus created oases in which the fecund sands support abundant date-palm groves.[1113] The method pursued energetically by the Russians is to compress the tribes into ever narrowing limits of territory, taking away their area of plunder and then so restricting their pasture lands, that they are forced to the drudgery of irrigation and tillage. In this way the Yomuts and Goklans occupying the Caspian border of Trans-Caspia have been compelled to abandon their old marauding, nomadic life and become to some extent agriculturists.[1114] The method of the Chinese is to push forward the frontier of agricultural settlement into the grasslands, dislodging the shepherd tribes into poorer pastures. They have thus reclaimed for grain and poppy fields considerable parts of the Ordos country in the great northern bend of the Hoangho, which used to be a nursery for nomadic invaders. A similar substitution of agriculture for pastoral nomadism of another type has in recent decades taken place in the semi-arid plains of the American West. Sheep-grazing on open range was with difficulty dislodged from the San Joaquin Valley of California by expanding farms in the sixties. More recently "dry farming" and scientific agriculture adapted to semi-arid conditions have "pushed the desert off the map" in Kansas, and advanced the frontier of tillage across the previous domain of natural pastures to the western border of the state.

Pastoral nomadism has been gradually dislodged from Europe, except in the salt steppes of the Caspian depression, where a vast tract, 300,000 square miles in area and wholly unfit for agriculture, still harbors a sparse population of Asiatic Kalmuck and Kirghis hordes, leading the life of the Asiatic steppes.[1115] In Asia, too, the regions of pastoral nomadism have been curtailed, but in Africa they still maintain for the most part the growing, expanding geographical forms which they once showed in Europe, when nomadism prevailed as far as the Alps and the Rhine. In Africa shepherd tribes cover not only the natural grasslands, but lap over into many districts destined by nature for agriculture. Hence it is safe to predict that a conspicuous part of the future economic and cultural history of the Dark Continent will consist in the release of agricultural regions from nomad occupancy and dominion.

[Sidenote: Supplementary agriculture of pastoral nomads.]

Though agriculture is regarded with contempt and aversion by pastoral nomads and is resorted to for a livelihood only when they lose their herds by a pest or robbery, or find their pasture lands seriously curtailed, nevertheless nomadism yields such a precarious and monotonous subsistence that it is not infrequently combined with a primitive, shifting tillage. The Kalmucks of the Russian steppes employ men to harvest hay for the winter feeding. The Nogai Tartars practice a little haphazard tillage on the alluvial hem of the steppe streams.[1116] Certain Arab tribes living east of the Atbara and Gash Rivers resort with their herds during the dry season to the fruitful region of Cassala, which is inundated by the drainage streams from Abyssinia, and there they cultivate dourra and other grains.[1117] The Bechuana tribes inhabiting the rich, streamless grassland of the so-called Kalahari Desert rear small herds of goats and cultivate melons and pumpkins; among the other Bechuana tribes on the eastern margin of the desert, the men hunt, herd the cattle and milk the cows, while the women raise dourra, maize, pumpkins, melons, cucumbers and beans.[1118] [Compare maps pages 105, 487.]

Such supplementary agriculture usually shifts with the nomad group. But where high mountains border rainless tracts, their piedmont districts regularly develop permanent cultivation. Here periodic rains or melting snows on the ranges fill the drainage streams, whose inundation often converts their alluvial banks into ready-made fields. The reliability of the water supply anchors here the winter villages of the nomads, which become centers of a limited agriculture, while the pasture lands beyond the irrigated strips support his flocks and herds. Where the piedmont of the Kuen Lun Mountains draws a zone of vegetation around the southern rim of the Takla Makan Desert, Mongol shepherds raise some wheat, maize and melons as an adjunct to their cattle and sheep; but their tillage is often rendered intermittent by the salinity of the irrigating streams.[1119] Along the base of the Tian Shan Mountains, the felt yurt of the Gobi nomad gives place to Turki houses with wheat and rice fields, and orchards of various fruits; so that the whole piedmont highway from Hami to Yarkand presents an alternation of desert and oasis settlement.[1120] Even the heart of arid Arabia shows fertile oases under cultivation where the lofty Nejd Plateau, with its rain-gathering peaks over five thousand feet high, varies its wide pastures with well tilled valleys abounding in grain fields and date-palm groves.[1121] Along the whole Saharan slope of the Atlas piedmont a series of parallel wadis and, farther out in the desert, a zone of artesian wells, sunk to the underground bed of hidden drainage streams from the same range, form oases which are the seat of permanent agriculture and more or less settled populations. The Saharan highlands of Tibesti, whose mountains rise to 8,300 feet, condense a little rain and permit the Tibbus to raise some grain and dates in the narrow valleys.[1122]

[Sidenote: Irrigation and horticulture.]

The few and limited spots where the desert or steppe affords water for cultivation require artificial irrigation, the importation of plants, and careful tillage, to make the limited area support even a small social group. Hence they could have been utilized by man only after he had made considerable progress in civilization.[1123] Oasis agriculture is predominantly intensive. Gardens and orchards tend to prevail over field tillage. The restricted soil and water must be forced to yield their utmost. While on the rainy or northern slope of the Atlas in Algiers and Tunis farms abound, on the Saharan piedmont are chiefly plantations of vegetables, orchards and palm groves.[1124] In Fezzan at the oasis of Ghat, Barth found kitchen gardens of considerable extent, large palm groves, but limited fields of grain, all raised by irrigation; and in the flat hollow basin forming the oasis of Murzuk, he found also fig and peach trees, vegetables, besides fields of wheat and barley cultivated with much labor.[1125] In northern Fezzan, where the mountains back of Tripoli provide a supply of water, saffron and olive trees are the staple articles of tillage. The slopes are terraced and irrigated, laid out in orchards of figs, pomegranates, almonds and grapes, while fields of wheat and barley border the lower courses of the wadis.[1126] In the "cup oases" or depressions of the Sahara, the village is always built on the slope, because the alluvial soil in the basin is too precious to be used for house sites.[1127]

[Sidenote: Effect of diminishing water supply.]

The water supply in deserts and steppes, on which permanent agriculture depends, is so scant that even a slight diminution causes the area of tillage to shrink. Here a fluctuation of snowfall or rainfall that in a moist region would be negligible, has conspicuous or even tragic results. English engineers who examined the utilization of the Afghan streams for irrigation reported that the natives had exploited their water supply to the last drop; that irrigation converted the Kabul River and the Heri-rud at certain seasons of the year into dry channels.[1128] In the Turkoman steppes it has been observed that expanding tillage, by the multiplication of irrigation canals, increased the loss of water by evaporation, and hence diminished the supply. Facts like these reveal the narrow margin between food and famine, which makes the uncertain basis of life for the steppe agriculturist. Even slight desiccation contracts the volume and shortens the course of interior drainage streams; therefore it narrows the piedmont zone of vegetation and the hem of tillage along the river banks. The previous frontier of field and garden is marked by abandoned hamlets and sand-buried cities, like those which border the dry beds of the shrunken Khotan rivers of the Tarim basin.[1129] The steppe regions in the New World as well as the Old show great numbers of these ruins. Barth found them in the northern Sahara, dating from Roman days.[1130] They occur in such numbers in the Syrian Desert, in the Sistan of Persia, in Baluchistan, the Gobi, Takla Makan Desert, Turfan and the Lop Nor basin, that they indicate a marked but irregular desiccation of central and western Asia during the historical period.[1131]

[Sidenote: Scant diet of nomads.]

If a scant water supply places sedentary agriculture in arid lands upon an insecure basis, it makes the nomad's sources of subsistence even more precarious. It keeps him persistently on low rations, while the drought that burns his pastures and dries up well and wadi brings him face to face with famine. The daily food of the Bedouin is meal cooked in sour camel's milk, to which bread and meat are added only when guests arrive. His moderation in eating is so great that one meal of a European would suffice for six Arabs.[1132] The daily food of the shepherd agriculturists on the Kuen Lun margin of the Takla Makan Desert is bread and milk; meat is indulged in only three or four times a month.[1133] The Tartars, even in their days of widest conquest, showed the same habitual frugality. "Their victuals are all things that may be eaten, for we saw some of them eat lice." The flesh of all animals dying a natural death is used as food; in summer it is sun-dried for winter use, because at that time the Tartars live exclusively on mare's milk which is then abundant. A cup or two of milk in the morning suffices till evening, when each man has a little meat. One ram serves as a meal for fifty or a hundred men. Bones are gnawed till they are burnished, "so that no whit of their food may come to naught." Genghis Khan enacted that neither blood nor entrails nor any other part of a beast which might be eaten should be thrown away.[1134] Scarcity of food among the Tibetan and Mongolian nomads is reflected in their habit of removing every particle of meat from the bone when eating.[1135] A thin decoction of hot tea, butter and flour is their staple food. Many Turkoman nomads, despite outward appearance of wealth, eat only dried fish, and get bread only once a month, while for the poor wheat is prohibited on account of its cost.[1136] The Saharan Tibbus, usually on a starvation diet, eat the skin and powdered bones of their dead animals.[1137]

The privations and hardships of life in the deserts and steppes discourage obesity. The Koko-Nor Mongols of the high Tibetan plateau are of slight build, never fat.[1138] The Bedouin's physical ideal of a man is spare, sinewy, energetic and vigorous, "lean-sided and thin," as the Arab poet expresses it.[1139] The nomadic tribesmen throughout the Sahara, whether of Hamitic, Semitic or Negro race, show this type, and retain it even after several generations of settlement in the river valleys of the Sudan. The Bushmen, who inhabit the Kalahari Desert, have thin wiry forms and are capable of great exertion and privations.[1140]

[Sidenote: Checks to population.]

Though the conquering propensities of nomadic tribes make large families desirable, in order to increase the military strength of the horde, and though shepherd folk acquiring new and rich pastures develop patriarchal families, as did the Jews after the conquest of Canaan, nevertheless the limited water and food supply of desert and grassland, as well as the relatively low-grade economy of pastoral life, impose an iron-bound restriction upon population, so that as a matter of fact patriarchal families are rare. When natural increase finds no vent in emigration and dispersal, marriage among nomads becomes less fruitful.[1141] Artificial limitation of population occurs frequently among desert-dwellers. In the Libyan oasis of Farafeah, the inhabitants never exceed eighty males, a limit fixed by a certain Sheik Murzuk.[1142] Poverty of food supply explains the small number of children in the typical Turkoman family. Among the Koko-Nor Tibetans, monogamy is the rule, polygamy the exception and confined to the few rich, while families never include more than two or three children.[1143] According to Burckhardt, three children constitute a large family among the Bedouins, much to the regret of the Bedouins themselves. Mohammedans though they are, few practice polygamy, while polyandry and female infanticide existed in heathen times.[1144] Desert peoples seem to be naturally monogamous.[1145]

[Sidenote: Trade of nomads.]

The prevailing poverty, monotony and unreliability of subsistence in desert and steppe, as well as the low industrial status, necessitate trade with bordering agricultural lands. The Bedouins of Arabia buy flour, barley for horse feed, coffee and clothing, paying for them largely with butter and male colts. The northern tribes resort every year to the confines of Syria, when they are visited by pedlers from Damascus and Aleppo.[1146] The tribes from Hasa and the Nejd pasture land bring horses, cattle and sheep to the city of Koweit at the head of the Persian Gulf to barter for dates, clothing and firearms; and large encampments of them are always to be seen near this town.[1147] Arabia and the Desert of Kedar sold lambs, rams and goats to the markets of ancient Tyre.[1148] The pastoral tribes of ancient Judea in times of scarcity went to Egypt for grain, which they purchased either with money or cattle. The picture of Jacob's sons returning from Egypt to Canaan with their long lines of asses laden with sacks of corn is typical for pastoral nomads; so is their ultimate settlement, owing to protracted famine, in the delta land of Goshen. The Kirghis of the Russian and Asiatic steppes barter horses and sheep for cereals, fine articles of clothing, and coarse wooden utensils in the cities of Bukhara and the border districts of Russia. Occasionally the land of the nomad yields other products than those of the flocks and herds, which enter therefore into their trade. Such is the salt of the Sahara, secured at Taudeni and Bilma, the gums of the Indus desert, and balm of Gilead from the dry plateau east of Jordan.

[Sidenote: Pastoral nomads as middlemen.]

The systematic migrations of nomads, their numerous beasts of burden, and the paucity of desert and steppe products determine pastoral tribes for the office of middlemen;[1149] and as such they appear in all parts of the world. The contrast of products in arid regions and in the bordering agricultural land, as also in the districts on opposite sides of these vast barriers, stimulates exchanges. This contrast may rest on a difference of geographic conditions, or of economic development, or both. The reindeer Chukches of Arctic Siberia take Russian manufactured wares from the fur stations on the Lena River to trade at the coast markets on Bering Sea for Alaskan pelts. The sons of Jacob, pasturing their flocks on the Judean plateau, saw "a company of Ishmaelites come from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt."[1150] This caravan of Arabian merchants purchased Joseph as a slave, a characteristic commodity in desert commerce from ancient times to the present. The predatory expeditions of nomads provide them with abundant captives, only few of which can be utilized as slaves in their pastoral economy. In the same way the Kirghis manage the caravan trade between Russia and Bukhara, sometimes adding captured travelers to their other wares. In ancient times Nubian shepherd folk acted as migrant middlemen between Egypt and Meroe near the junction of the Atbara River and the Nile, as did also the desert tribe of the Nasamones between Carthage and interior Africa.[1151] From remote ages an active caravan trade was carried on between the productive districts of Arabia Felix and the cities of Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt. Mohammed himself was a caravan leader; in the faith which he established religious pilgrimages and commercial ventures were inextricably united, while to the mercantile spirit it gave a fresh and vigorous impetus.[1152] The caravan trade of the Sahara was first organized by Moorish and Arab tribes who dwelt on the northern margin of the desert, rearing herds of camels. These they hired to merchants for the journey between Morocco and Timbuctoo, in return for cereals and clothing. Hence Morocco has been the chief customer of the great desert town near the Niger, and sends thither numerous caravans from Tendouf (Taredant) Morocco, Fez and Tafilet. Algiers dominates the less important route via the oasis of Twat, and Tripolis that through Ghadames to the busy towns in the Lake Chad basin.[1153]

[Sidenote: Desert markets.]

If the camel is "the ship of the desert," the market towns on the margin of the sandy wastes are the ports of the desert. Their bazaars hold everything that the nomad needs. Their suburbs are a shifting series of shepherd encampments or extensive caravanseries for merchant and pack animal, like the abaradion of Timbuctoo, which receives annually from fifty to sixty thousand camels.[1154] Their industries develop partly in response to the demand of the desert or trans-desert population. The fine blades of Damascus reflected the Bedouin's need of the best weapon. Each city has its sphere of desert influence. The province of Nejd in Central Arabia is commercially subservient to Bagdad, Busrah, Koweit and Bahrein.[1155] The bazaars of Samarkand and Tashkent exist largely for the scattered nomads of Turkestan. Ancient Gaza[1156] and Askelon fattened on the Egyptian trade across the Desert of Shur, as Petra, Bostra and Damascus on the thin but steady streams of nomad products flowing in from the Syrian Desert.

[Sidenote: Nomad industries.]

The abundant leisure of nomadic life encourages the beginning of industry, but rarely advances it beyond the household stage, owing to the thin, family-wise dispersion of population which precludes division of labor. Such industry as exists consists chiefly in working up the raw materials yielded by the herds. Among the Bedouins, blacksmiths and saddlers are the only professional artisans; these are regarded with contempt and are never of Bedouin stock.[1157] In the ancient world, industry reached its zero point in Arabia, and in modern times shows meager development there. On the other hand the Saharan Arabs developed an hereditary guild of expert well-makers, which seems to date back to remote times, and is held in universal honor.[1158]

[Sidenote: Oriental rugs.]

It is to the tent-dwellers of the world, however, that we apparently owe the oriental rug. This triumph of the weaver's art seems to have originated among pastoral nomads, who developed it in working up the wool and hair of their sheep, goats and camels; but it early became localized as a specialized industry in the towns and villages of irrigated districts on the borders of the grazing lands, where the nomads had advanced to sedentary life. Therefore in the period of the Caliphate, from 632 to 1258, we find these brilliant flowers of the loom, blooming like the Persian gardens, in Persian Farsistan, Khusistan, Kirman and Khorasan. We find them spreading the mediaeval fame of Shiraz, Tun, Meshed, Amul, Bukhara and Merv. The secret of this preeminence lay partly in the weaver's inherited aptitude and artistic sense for this textile work, derived from countless generations of shepherd ancestors; partly in their proximity to the finest raw materials, whose quality was equalled nowhere else, because it depended upon the character of the pasturage, probably also upon the climatic conditions affecting directly the flocks and herds.[1159]

A map showing the geographical distribution of Eastern rug-making reveals the relation of the industry to semi-arid or saline pastures, and makes the mind revert at once to the blankets of artistic design and color, woven by the Navajo Indians of our own rainless Southwest. Rug weaving in the Old World reached its finest development in countries like Persia, Turkestan, western Afghanistan, Baluchistan, western India and the plateau portions of Asia Minor, countries where the rainfall varies from 10 to 20 inches or even less, [See map page 484.] where nomadism claims a considerable part of the population, and where the ancestry of all traces back to some of the great shepherd races, like Turkomans and Tartars. These peoples are hereditary specialists in the care, classification, and preparation of wools.[1160] Weavers of rugs form an industrial class in the cities of Persia and Asia Minor, where they obey largely the taste of the outside world in regard to design and color;[1161] whereas the nomads, weaving for their own use, adhere strictly to native colors and designs. Their patterns are tribal property, each differing from that of the other; and though less artistic than those of the urban workers, are nevertheless interesting and consistent, while the nomad's intuitive sense of color is fine.[1162]

[Sidenote: Architecture of nomad conquerors.]

The principles of design and color which these tent-dwellers had developed in their weaving, they applied, after their conquest of agricultural lands, to stone and produced the mosaic, to architecture and produced the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal.[1163] Whether Saracens of Spain or Turkoman conquerors of India, they were ornamentists whose contribution to architecture was decoration. Working in marble, stone, metals or wood, they wrought always in the spirit of color and textile design, rather than in the spirit of form. The walls of their mosques, palaces and tombs reproduce the beauty of the rugs once screening the doors of their felt tents. The gift of color they passed on to the West, first through the Moors of Sicily and Spain, later through Venetian commerce. Their influence can be seen in the exquisite mosaic decoration in the cloister of Mont Reale of once Saracenic Palermo, and in the Ducal Palace and St. Mark's Cathedral of beauty-loving Venice.[1164] This has been almost their sole contribution to the art of the world.

Pastoral nomads can give political union to civilized peoples; they can assimilate and spread ready-made elements of civilization, but to originate or develop them they are powerless. Between the art, philosophy and literature of China on the one side, and of the settled districts of Persia on the other, lies the cultural sterility of the Central Asia plateau. Its outpouring hordes have only in part acquired the civilization of the superior agricultural peoples whom they have conquered; from Kazan and Constantinople to Delhi, from Delhi to Peking they have added almost nothing to the local culture.

[Sidenote: Arid lands as areas of arrested development.]

Deserts and steppes lay an arresting hand on progress. Their tribes do not develop; neither do they grow old. They are the eternal children of the world. Genuine nomadic peoples show no alteration in their manners, customs or mode of life from millennium to millennium. The interior of the Arabian desert reveals the same social and economic status,[1165] whether we take the descriptions of Moses or Mohammed or Burckhardt or more recent travelers. The Bedouins of the Nubian steppes adhere strictly to all their ancient customs, and reproduce to-day the pastoral nomadism of Abraham and Jacob.[1166] Genealogies were not more important to the biblical house of David and stem of Jesse than they are for the modern Kirghis tribesman, who as a little child learns to recite the list of his ancestors back to the seventh generation. The account which Herodotus gives of the nomads of the Russian steppes agrees in minute details with that of Strabo written five centuries later,[1167] with that of William de Rubruquis in 1253, and with modern descriptions of Kalmuck and Kirghis life. The Gauchos or Indian pastoral halfbreeds of the Argentine plains were found by Wappaeus in 1870 to accord accurately with Avara's description of them at the end of the eighteenth century.[1168] The restless tenants of the grasslands come and go, but their type never materially changes. Their culture is stationary amid persistent movement. Only when here or there in some small and favored spot they are forced to make the transition to agriculture, or when they learn by long and close association with sedentary nations the lesson of drudgery and progress, do the laws of social and economic development begin to operate in them. As a rule, they must first escape partly or wholly the environment of their pasture lands, either by emigration or by the intrusion into their midst of alien tillers of the soil.

But while the migrant shepherd originates nothing, he plays an historical role as a transmitter of civilization. Asiatic nomads have sparsely disseminated the culture of China, Persia, Egypt and Yemen over large areas of the world. The Semite shepherds of the Red Sea deserts, through their merchants and conquerors, long gave to the dark Sudan the only light of civilization which it received, Mohammed, a Bedouin of the Ishmaelite tribe, caravan leader on the desert highways between Mecca and Syria, borrowed from Jerusalem the simple tenets of a monotheistic religion, and spread them through his militant followers over a large part of Africa and Asia.

[Sidenote: Mental and moral qualities of nomads.]

The deserts and grasslands breed in their sons certain qualities and characteristics-courage, hardihood, the stiff-necked pride of the freeman, vigilance, wariness, sense of locality,[1169] keen powers of observation stimulated by the monotonous, featureless environment, and the consequent capacity to grasp every detail.[1170] Though robbery abroad is honorable and marauder a term with which to crown a hero, theft at home is summarily dealt with among most nomads. The property of the unlocked tent and the far-ranging herd must be safeguarded.[1171] The Tartars maintained a high standard of honesty among themselves and punished theft with death.[1172] Wide dispersal in small groups is reflected in the diversity of dialects among desert peoples;[1173] in the practice of hospitality, whether among Bedouins of the Nejd, Kirghis of the Central Asia plateau,[1174] or semi-nomadic Boers of South Africa;[1175] in the persistence of feuds and of the duty of blood revenge, which is sanctioned by the Koran.

Isolation tends to breed among nomads pride of race and a repugnance to intermixture. The ideal of the pastoral Israelites was a pure ethnic stock, protected by stern inhibition of intermarriage with other tribes. Therefore, Moses enjoined upon them the duty of exterminating the peoples of Canaan whom they dispossessed.[1176] While the urban Arabs show a medley of breeds, dashed with a strain of negro blood, among the nomad Bedouins, mixture is exceptional and is regarded as a disgrace.[1177] The same thing is true among the nomad Arabs of Algeria, and there it has placed a stumbling block in the way of the French colonial administration, by preventing the appearance of half-breeds who might bridge the gap between the colonials and natives. Where pastoral Semites have settled in agricultural lands, intermixture on a wide scale has followed, as in the Sudan from Niger to Nile; but even here, when a tribe or clan has retained a strictly pastoral life in the grassland, and has held itself aloof from the agricultural districts of the Negro villages, relatively pure survivals are to be found, as among the Cow or Bush Fulani of Bornu.[1178] On the other hand, the Hausa, a migrant trading folk of mingled Arab and Negro blood, spread northward along the trans-Saharan caravan route to the oasis of Air before the fourteenth century, and there have infused into the local Berber stock a strong Negro strain.[1179] Among the nomads of Central Asia, one wave of race movement has so often followed and overtaken another, that it has produced a confused blending of breeds. The mixtures are so numerous that pure types are exceptional,[1180] and the exclusiveness of the desert Semites disappears.

[Sidenote: Religion of pastoral nomads.]

Though all these desert-born characteristics and customs have a certain interest for the sociologist, they possess only minor importance in comparison with the religious spirit of pastoral nomads, which is always fraught with far-reaching historical results. The evidence of history shows us that there is such a thing as a desert-born genius for religion. Huc and Gabin testify to the deeper religious feeling of the Buddhist nomads of the Central Asia plateaus, as compared with the lowland Chinese. The three great monotheistic religions of the world are closely connected in their origin and development with the deserts of Syria and Arabia. The area of Mohammedism embraces the steppe zone of the Old World[1181] from Senegambia and Zanzibar in Africa to the Indus, Tarim and the upper Obi, together with some well watered lands on its margins. It comprises in this territory a variety of races—Negroes, Hamites, Semites, Iranians, Indo-Aryans, and a long list of Mongoloid tribes. Here is a psychological effect of environment. The dry, pure air stimulates the faculties of the desert-dweller, but the featureless, monotonous surroundings furnish them with little to work upon. The mind, finding scant material for sustained logical deduction, falls back upon contemplation. Intellectual activity is therefore restricted, narrow, unproductive; while the imagination is unfettered but also unfed. First and last, these shepherd folk receive from the immense monotony of their environment the impression of unity.[1182] Therefore all of them, upon outgrowing their primitive fetish and nature worship, gravitate inevitably into monotheism. Their religion is in accord with their whole mental make-up; it is a growth, a natural efflorescence. Therefore it is strong. Its tenets form the warp of all their intellectual fabrics, permeate their meager science and philosophy, animate their more glorious poetry. It has moreover the fanaticism and intolerance characterizing men of few ideas and restricted outlook upon life. Therewith is bound up a spirit of propaganda. The victories of the Jews in Palestine, Syria and Philistia were the victories of Jehovah; the conquests of Saladin were the conquests of Allah; and the domain of the Caliphate was the dominion of Islam.



[Sidenote: Fanaticism as a force in nomad expansion.]

The desert everywhere, sooner or later, drives out its brood, ejects its people and their ideas, like those exploding seed-pods which at a touch cast their seed abroad. The religious fanaticism of the shepherd tribes gives that touch; herein lies its historical importance. Mohammedism, fierce and militant, conduced to those upheavals of migration and conquest which since the seventh century have so often transformed the political geography of the Old World. The vast empire of the Caliphate, from its starting point in Arabia, spread in eighty years from the Oxus River to the Atlantic Ocean.[1183] The rapid rise and spread between 1745 and 1803 of the Wahaby clan and sect, the Puritans of Islam, which resulted for a time in their political and religious domination of much of Arabia from their home in the Nejd, recalls the stormy conquests of Mohammed's followers. Islam is to-day a persistent source of ferment in Algeria, the Sahara, and the Sudan, On the other hand. Buddhism serves to cement together the diverse nomadic tribes of the Central Asia plateaus, and keep them in spiritual subjection to the Grand Lama of Lhassa. The Chinese government makes political use of this fact by dominating the Lama and employing him as a tool to secure quiet on its long frontier of contact with its restless Mongol neighbors. Moreover the religion of Buddha has restrained the warlike spirit of the nomads, and by its institution of celibacy has helped keep down population below the boiling-point. [Compare maps pages 484 and 513.]

[Sidenote: The faith of the desert.]

The faith of the desert tends to be stern, simple and austere. The indulgence which Mohammed promised his followers in Paradise was only a reflex of the deprivation under which they habitually suffered in the scant pastures of Arabia. The lavish beauty of the Heavenly City epitomized the ideals and dreams of the desert-stamped Jew. The active, simple, uncramped life of the grasslands seems essential to the preservation of the best virtues of the desert-bred. These disappear largely in sedentary life. The Bedouin rots when he takes root. City life contaminates, degrades him. His virile qualities and his religion both lose their best when he leaves the desert. Contact with the cities of Philistia and the fertile plains of the Canaanites, with their sensual agricultural gods, demoralized the Israelites.[1184] The prophets were always calling them back to the sterner code of morals and the purer faith of their days of wandering. Jeremiah in despair holds up to them as a standard of life the national injunction of the pastoral Rechabites, "Neither shall ye build house nor sow corn nor plant vineyard, but all your days ye shall dwell in tents."[1185] The ascent in civilization made havoc with Hebrew morals and religion, because ethics and religion are the finest and latest flower of each cultural stage. Transition shows the breaking down of one code before the establishment of another.

Judaism has always suffered from its narrow local base. Even when transplanted to various parts of the earth, it has remained a distinctly tribal religion. Intense conservatism in doctrine and ceremonial it still bears as the heritage of its desert birth. Islam too shows the limitations of its original environment. It embodies a powerful appeal to the peoples of arid lands, and among these it has spread and survives as an active principle. But it belongs to an arrested economic and social development, lacks the germs of moral evolution which Christianity, born in the old stronghold of Hebraic monotheism, but impregnated by all the cosmopolitan influences of the Mediterranean basin and the Imperium Romanum, amply possesses.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XIV

[1026] Figures taken from Albrecht Penck, Morphologie der Erdoberflaeche, Vol. I, p. 151. Stuttgart, 1894.

[1027] A.P. Brigham, Geographic Influences in American History, Chap. IV. Boston, 1903.

[1028] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 65-69, 230, 288, 385. Boston, 1903.

[1029] Ibid., pp. 218, 221, 393.

[1030] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 127. New York, 1902.

[1031] Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. II, pp. 126-136. New York, 1871.

[1032] Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, pp. 191-192, 201. Philadelphia, 1865.

[1033] J.H. Breasted, History of Egypt, pp. 142, 144, 261-265, 293-302, 513-517. New York, 1905.

[1034] Ibid., 6, 48, 93, 114, 119, 127, 134, 136, 163, 164, 182, 190, 191, 507.

[1035] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 340-343, map. New York, 1899.

[1036] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 57-60. New York, 1893.

[1037] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Maps, pp. 53 and 66. New York, 1899.

[1038] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, p. 130, map of ancient distribution of Germans and Celts. New York, 1907.

[1039] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 216-218. New York, 1899.

[1040] Ibid., 344-347, 356, 365.

[1041] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 309-310. New York, 1882.

[1042] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, p. 107. New York, 1893.

[1043] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 220-222. New York, 1902.

[1044] Vidal-Lablache, Atlas General, Maps pp. 63, 64, 93. Paris, 1909.

[1045] H.R. Mill, International Geography, 174, 177-182. New York, 1902.

[1046] Twelfth Census, Bulletin of Agriculture No. 181, p. 2, compared with Eleventh Census, Statistics of Population, map of negro distribution, p. XCVII. Washington, 1895.

[1047] Twelfth Census, Bulletin of Agriculture, No. 155, p. 2. Washington, 1902.

[1048] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 353. New York, 1899.

[1049] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, p. 238. London, 1907.

[1050] Haxthausen, Studien, Vol. I, p. 309. Die laendliche Verfassung Russlands, pp. 3, 7. Leipzig, 1866.

[1051] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 79-83. London, 1896-1898. J. Wappaeus, Handbuch der Geographie und Statistik des ehemaligen spanischen Mittel- und Sud-Amerika, pp. 978-980, 1019. Leipzig, 1863-1870.

[1052] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 206-208. London, 1896-1898.

[1053] Nordenskiold, Voyage of the Vega, pp. 60, 156, 452. New York, 1882. Alexander P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp. 291-295. London, 1899.

[1054] Ibid., pp. 83, 88-91.

[1055] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 166-167. London. 1896-1898.

[1056] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 107. New York, 1897.

[1057] Herodotus, Melpomene, 19, 46.

[1058] Thomas Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. I, p. 262. Oxford, 1892.

[1059] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 220. London, 1896-1898.

[1060] Genesis, XIII, 2, 5.

[1061] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 474. New York, 1897.

[1062] Eleventh Census, Indian Report, pp. 143-144. Washington, 1894.

[1063] Sven Hedin, Central Asia and Tibet, Vol. I, pp. 18-20. London and New York, 1903.

[1064] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 32-33. London, 1831.

[1065] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 8-10. New York, 1897.

[1066] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, pp. 78-79. New York, 1858.

[1067] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, p. 95. London, 1905.

[1068] Sir Samuel W. Baker, The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, pp. 88, 128, 129, 135. Hartford, 1868.

[1069] Journey of John de Carpini and William de Rubruquis in 1253, pp. 8, 217. Hakluyt Society, London, 1903.

[1070] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 107, 421. New York, 1897.

[1071] Wilhelm Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 44. Stuttgart, 1888.

[1072] A full discussion in Malthus, Principles of Population, Book I, chap. 7.

[1073] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 133-144, 157-160. London, 1831. S.M. Zwemer, Arabia, The Cradle of Islam, 155-157. New York, 1900.

[1074] Vambery, Reise in Mittelasien, pp. 285, 289-297. Leipzig, 1873.

[1075] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 127-129. New York, 1899.

[1076] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 174-175. London, 1896-1898.

[1077] Wallace, Russia, pp. 340-342. New York, 1904.

[1078] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 17, 63-66. London, 1905.

[1079] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 256, 324-325. Translated from the French, New York, 1896.

[1080] Heinrich Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp. 287-288, 293, 305. New York, 1857.

[1081] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 133-134, 203, 206-207, 229, 232, 239-245. New York, 1896.

[1082] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 1-2, 6, 16-18, 80. London, 1907.

[1083] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman. Empire, Vol. V, p. 87. New York, 1858.

[1084] Pliny, Historia Naturalis, V, 3.

[1085] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. II, p. 495. New York, 1858.

[1086] Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, p. 340. Boston, 1907.

[1087] Pallas, Travels in the Southern Provinces of Russia in 1793-1794, Vol. II, p. 4. London, 1812.

[1088] Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 94, 256.

[1089] Genesis, XIII, 7-8; XXI, 25-30; XXVI, 15-22.

[1090] Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, p. 545. New York, 1887.

[1091] Thucydides, Book II, 96.

[1092] Herodotus, IV, 46.

[1093] Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe, Chapter on Arab Courage. New York, 1904.

[1094] Wilhelm Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 44. Stuttgart, 1888.

[1095] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 35-36. London, 1831.

[1096] John de Plano Carpini, Journey to the Northeast, pp. 114-117, 120-125. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904.

[1097] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 28. London, 1896-1898.

[1098] J.H. Speke, Discovery of the Source of the Nile, pp. 241-244. New York, 1868.

[1099] Journey of William de Rubruquis, pp. 18-27, Hakluyt Society, London, 1900.

[1100] Jerome Dowd, The Negro Races, Vol. I, pp. 225-232. New York, 1907.

[1101] Sir Francis Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 85-98. London, 1904.

[1102] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 170. London, 1896-1898.

[1103] Heinrich Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp. 148, 152, 204, 210, 303. New York, 1857.

[1104] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 115-119, 284-286, 296-300. London, 1831.

[1105] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, pp. 85-87. New York, 1857.

[1106] Jerome Dowd, The Negro Races, Vol. I, pp. 234-235. New York,1907.

[1107] Vambery, Reise in Mittel Asien, pp. 288-290. Leipzig, 1873.

[1108] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 108, 128, 129, 155, 199, 452-453. New York, 1897.

[1109] For vivid description of desert defensive warfare, see Gustav Frensen, Peter Moore's Journey to Southwest Africa. Translated from the German, 1908. Based upon interviews with hundreds of returning German soldiers from the Damara campaign.

[1110] H.B. Mill, International Geography, p. 454. New York, 1902.

[1111] Henry Norman, All the Russias, p. 273. New York, 1902.

[1112] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 54-56. London, 1905.

[1113] Ibid., pp. 181-164.

[1114] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 177. London, 1896-1898.

[1115] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 29-30. New York, 1893.

[1116] Pallas, Travels through the Southern Provinces of Russia, Vol. I, pp. 532-533. London, 1812.

[1117] Sir S.W. Baker, Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, p. 88. Hartford, 1868.

[1118] David Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 53-56, 169. New York, 1858.

[1119] Sven Hedin, Central Asia and Tibet, Vol. I, pp. 96, 136, 359, New York and London, 1903. Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 193, 202, 212, 213. Boston, 1907.

[1120] Sir Francis Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 103, 104, 107, 112-116, 120, 125-128, 137, 138, 143. London, 1904.

[1121] S.W. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, pp. 147, 151. New York, 1900. D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 185, 195. 265. London, 1902.

[1122] Nachtigal, Sahara und Sudan, Vol. I, pp. 214-218, 267-269. Berlin, 1879.

[1123] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 168. London, 1896-1898.

[1124] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 906, 914. New York, 1902.

[1125] H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp. 152, 207, 210, 211. New York, 1857.

[1126] Ibid., 41-44, 52, 61-64, 67, 76, 93, 95, 99, 103, 105.

[1127] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, p. 174. London, 1905.

[1128] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, pp. 91-93. London, 1905.

[1129] M.A. Stein, The Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan, pp. 275-324, 354-408. London, 1903.

[1130] H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, chap. III. New York, 1857.

[1131] Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 160-190, 209, 304, 309-310, 315, 367. Boston, 1907.

[1132] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 57-64, 238-242. London, 1831.

[1133] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 137-138. Boston, 1907.

[1134] John de Plano Carpini, Journey to the Northeast, pp. 109-111, 120. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904. Journey of William de Rubruquis, pp. 191-193, 203, 224. Hakluyt Society, London, 1903.

[1135] W.W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 80. New York, 1891.

[1136] Vambery, Reise in Mittel Asien, p. 295. Leipzig, 1873.

[1137] Nachtigal, Sahara und Sudan, Vol. I, pp. 257, 268. Berlin, 1879.

[1138] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, p. 74. Boston, 1907.

[1139] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 198-201. London, 1905.

[1140] D. Livingstone, Travels and Researches in South Africa, p. 55. New York, 1859.

[1141] W. Roscher, Grundlagen der Nationaloekonomik, Book VI, chap. II, p. 244. Stuttgart, 1886.

[1142] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 170. London, 1896-98.

[1143] W.W. Rockhill, Land of the Lamas, p. 80. New York, 1891.

[1144] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 106, 187. London, 1831. S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, pp. 162, 268. New York, 1900.

[1145] Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 429, notes 2 and 5, p. 440, note 2, p. 507. London, 1891.

[1146] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 47, 48, 70, 71, 191-192, 239. London, 1831.

[1147] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 128. New York, 1900.

[1148] Ezekiel, Chap. XXVII, 21.

[1149] For economic principle, see W. Roscher, Handel und Gewerbefleiss, pp. 141-147. Stuttgart, 1899.

[1150] Genesis, Chap. XXXVII, 25-28, 36.

[1151] W. Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 39, Note 11. Stuttgart, 1888.

[1152] S.P. Scott, History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, Vol. III, p. 616. Philadelphia, 1904.

[1153] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 251-252. New York, 1896.

[1154] Ibid., pp. 257-264.

[1155] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 151. New York, 1900.

[1156] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 182-184. New York, 1897.

[1157] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, p. 65. London, 1831.

[1158] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 130-134. London, 1903.

[1159] F.R. Martin, A History of Oriental Carpets before 1800, pp. 9, 29, 69 et seq., 101, 121. Vienna, 1908. G. LeStrange, Land of the Eastern Caliphates, pp. 37, 293-294, 353, 363, 471. Cambridge, 1905.

[1160] J.K. Mumford, Oriental Rugs, pp. 23-40, 100-111. New York, 1895.

[1161] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 197-198. London, 1902.

[1162] J.K. Mumford, Oriental Rugs, p. 61. New York, 1895.

[1163] J. Ferguson, History of Architecture, Vol. II, pp. 277-278, 499, 500. New York. J. Ferguson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, Vol. II, pp. 210-214. New York, 1891.

[1164] Wilhelm Bode, Vorderasiatische Knuepfteppiche, pp. 3-4. Leipzig.

[1165] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, p. 78. New York, 1858.

[1166] Sir S.W. Baker, Exploration of the Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, pp. 148-152. Hartford, 1868.

[1167] Strabo, Book VII, chap. III, 7, 17; chap. IV, 6. Book XI, chap. II, 1, 2, 3.

[1168] J. Wappaeus, Handbuch der Geographie und Statistik des chemaligen spanischen Mittel- und Sud-Amerika, p. 1019. Leipzig, 1863-1870.

[1169] Sir F. Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 72, 74. London, 1904. Alfred Kirchoff, Man and Earth, pp. 58-71. London.

[1170] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp. 374-377. London, 1831. L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 98-100. London, 1905.

[1171] Exodus, Chap. XXII, 1-4, 23.

[1172] John de Plano Carpini, Journey to the Northeast in 1246, pp. 110, 111, 113. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904.

[1173] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, p. 89. New York, 1858. H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, p. 144. New York, 1857.

[1174] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 121-123. Boston, 1907.

[1175] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 422. New York, 1897.

[1176] Deuteronomy, VII, 1-3.

[1177] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 184. London, 1896-1898.

[1178] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, pp. 190-197. London, 1907.

[1179] H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp. 202, 277-281. New York, 1857.

[1180] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 173. London, 1896-1898.

[1181] Ibid., Vol. III, Chapter on Islam, pp. 195-204.

[1182] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 28-30. New York, 1897. L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 101-105. London, 1905.

[1183] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, pp. 114-116. London, 1882.

[1184] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 88-90. New York, 1897.

[1185] Jeremiah, Chap. XXXV, 6-14.



CHAPTER XV

MOUNTAIN BARRIERS AND THEIR PASSES

[Sidenote: Man as part of the mobile envelope of the earth.]

The important characteristic of plains is their power to facilitate every phase of historical movement; that of mountains is their power to retard, arrest, or deflect it. Man, as part of the mobile envelope of the earth, like air and water feels always the pull of gravity. From this he can never fully emancipate himself. By an output of energy he may climb the steepest slope, but with every upward step the ascent becomes more difficult, owing to the diminution of warmth and air and the increasing tax upon the heart.[1186] Maintenance of life in high altitudes is always a struggle. The decrease of food resources from lower to higher levels makes the passage of a mountain system an ordeal for every migrating people or marching army that has to live off the country which it traverses. Mountains therefore repel population by their inaccessibility and also by their harsh conditions of life, while the lowlands attract it, both in migration and settlement. Historical movement, when forced into the upheaved areas of the earth, avoids the ridges and peaks, seeks the valleys and passes, where communication with the lowlands is easiest.

[Sidenote: Inaccessibility of mountains.]

High massive mountain systems present the most effective barriers which man meets on the land surface of the earth. To the spread of population they offer a resistance which long serves to exclude settlers. The difficulty of making roads up steep, rocky slopes and through the forests usually covering their rain-drenched sides, is deterrent enough; but in addition to this, general infertility, paucity of arable land, harsh climatic conditions, and the practical lack of communication with the outside world offer scant basis for subsistence. Hence, as a rule, only when pressure of population in the lowlands becomes too great under prevailing economic methods, do clearings and cabins begin to creep up the slopes. Mountains are always regions of late occupation. Even in the Stone Age, we find the long-headed race of Mediterranean stock, who originally populated Europe, distributed over the continent close up to the foot of the high Alps, but not in the mountains themselves, and only scantily represented in the Auvergne Plateau of France. The inhospitable highlands of Switzerland, the German Alps, and the Auvergne received their first population later when the Alpine race began to occupy western Europe.[1187] The Mittelgebirge of Germany were not settled till the Middle Ages. In the United States, the flood of population had spread westward by 1840 to the ninety-fifth meridian and the north-south course of the Missouri River; but out of this sea of settlement the Adirondack Mountains, a few scattered spots in the Appalachians, and the Ozark Highlands rose as so many islands of uninhabited wilderness, and they remain to-day areas of sparser population. In 1800, the "bare spots" in the eastern mountains were more pronounced. [See map page 156.] Great stretches of the Rocky Mountains, of the Laurentian Highlands of Canada, like smaller patches in the Scandinavian and Swiss Alps, are practically uninhabited.