Sublime

deserts on their horses, to raid or conquer or exact tribute. The prophet Jeremiah was probably thinking of the Scythians, the first recorded nomadic warriors in history, and by any civilised standard they were a fearsome and barbaric

(nomads, contrary to current popular imagination, have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places; they are far from being the drifters and dharma bums that the word nomad often connotes nowadays).

Persistent raiding and warfare would have made fixed settlements a strategic liability. Raids by Slavic tribes caused the abandonment of all the Greek-Byzantine cities in this same region over the course of less than a hundred years in the sixth century CE. Crop failures exacerbated by warfare would have encouraged a shift to a more mobile economy.

Wagons and horseback riding made possible a new, more mobile form of pastoralism. With a wagon full of tents and supplies, herders could take their herds out of the river valleys and live for weeks or months out in the open steppes between the major rivers—the great majority of the Eurasian steppes. Land that had been open and wild became pasture t