See the Resemblance

I first heard the term Nomadic Pastoralist in a book about horse behavior and their herd dynamics. The book was called, Power of the Herd by Linda Kohanov. In so few words, Kohanov gave me the most serious case of Deja Vu I’ve ever had. And every time I would open the book to continue reading, coincidentally, (or not!) the book fell open to the exact same page in which she introduces the nomadic pastoralists. Reading about their culture is like reliving a dream I once had. Ever since learning of their existence, I’ve devoured every shred of research I can find which relates to them as if I’m reminiscing my very distant family. In an interview in The Sun Magazine by Leath Tonino, Jack Turner said of his past,

In the mid-1970s I was an assistant philosophy professor at the University of Illinois. I was about thirty years old. I was very unhappy. One day I went to the Lincoln Park Zoo to sneak some meat to the snow leopards, as I did on occasion. It was a crappy day, cloudy and dim and snowing, and I thought to myself: I’m as trapped as these wild cats. I decided that I didn’t want to live my life working indoors. Since then, I’ve worked inside — a forty-hour-a-week, punch-the-time-clock type of job — for only two and a half years total. The rest of the time I’ve been working outside or writing in my cabin.

Turner began living the dream once he changed course and lived in a way that would fulfill his compass’ direction, that was always guiding him outside towards mountains and wilderness, and always guiding him inside to his cabin and his spirit.

We are all connected to the same hub of very ancient culture like the individual spokes on a wheel. Philip Shepherd said, “If you go back to the Indo-European roots of the English language, which date from the Neolithic, you find that the word for the hub of a wheel came from the word for navel.” The most tapped in roots of our inherited physical body are still joined with a very ancient culture of humans who we can strongly relate to in our guts even if we don’t see any resemblance.   To learn about ancient cultures is to brush off the dust on the mirror that reflects the deepest part of our ourselves. As the Buddhists say: “What happens upstream floats downstream.” In The Power of the Herd, Linda Kohanov explains in amazing detail, the history of a culture we have long forgotten about; a culture that embodied the sacred connection between humans and animals:

Nomadic Pastoralism, contrary to popular belief, was not a primitive condition. It was a specialization that developed out of settled farming communities requiring horses and skillful riding techniques. It required the wheel to allow populations to migrate with their herds by cart and wagon, leaders able to make quick decisions in an emergency, and a variety of craftsmen and specialists, far more than family subsistence farming did. The early horse tribes even managed to raise crops without becoming enslaved by them. They simply planted wheat in patches of fertile soil and returned to reap the benefits during seasonal migrations.

Recent archeological findings also suggest that women were equal to men in many of these tribes. Skeletons of warriors at first thought to be young boys later proved to be female. Over time, it was estimated that nearly 25 percent of warrior graves contained women dressed for battle, some of them obviously bowlegged from years spent on the back of a horse. Yet these wild-riding ladies mythologized as Amazons by the Greeks, were no less aware of their femininity. Their graves are filled with mirrors, scent bottles, and cosmetics of various colors. And like many women today, they loved to groom their horses. In burial mounds across Ukraine and Russia, up toward Tuva and the Altai Mountains, human and equine corpses lay side by side among a dazzling array of colorful saddle cloths depicting scenes from daily life. These in turn reveals a culture of decorative mane dressing and fantastic crested horse masks. Four-legged members of the tribe were dressed with as much enthusiasm as their two-legged counterparts…

Most impressive, however, are reports of the nomads’ behavior in battle, descriptions that have little in common with standardized legends of fierce barbarians out to vanquish the sacred innovations of the civilized world. Around 450 BCE, Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” wrote about a curious, highly frustrating encounter that King Darius I of Persia had with these tribes before deciding to take on a much easier project and invade Greece. Darius was chasing a group of Scythians who’d either attacked or offended him in some way, and he was apparently planning to punish them, for good. Gathering his troops together, he entered Eurasia for the first time in 512 BCE, but when he arrived at the edge of the steppes, none of his officers could figure out how to engage these so-called primitives in combat. Whenever the troops got too close, the Scythians simply dispersed, riding into the grasslands, leading the king’s rigidly disciplined military force farther and farther into the wilderness. The scythians were sleeping on horseback, drinking mare’s milk and playing games along the way, while Darius’s men were growing weak from starvation and exposure. Finally, the Persians were forced to turn around and march home as the Scythians cheered and chuckled in the distance. The horse tribes maintained their culture and their territory by acting like the horses they rode. Choosing flight over fight was not a cowardly act but an obvious, thoroughly natural way to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. The enemy was ultimately irrelevant because there were no cities to defend. Warrior riders of both sexes led the challengers away from women with young children and mares with foals (who were mobile, but undoubtedly slower). It was only when increasingly materialistic members of these tribes began trading profusely with city dwellers that they sacrificed centuries of freedom. The more possessions they craved and acquired, the more their belongings weighed them down, and the more sedentary they became. Greek gold and wine and decorative vases eventually lured the nomads into a gilded cage of cultural amnesia. The ones who refused to forget fled farther into the grasslands until civilizations developing to the east and west expanded and overlapped right over their graves.

The assumption that nomads were more violent than their “civilized” counterparts has begun to evaporate in light of new research. The Danish archaeologist Klavs Randsborg insists it wasn’t marauding hordes of barbarians that led to the fall of the Greco-Roman world. Rather, these societies destroyed their environment and, in desparation, moved out to incorporate the lands and cultures nearby – Celtic, Germanic, Thracian, Scythian – “which until then had led an effective and long-standing existence in harmony with nature.” Citizens of early cities were suffering from anxieties derived from the instability resulting from conspicuous consumption and unchecked population growth. Their only choice was to expand outward, taking over the territories of other peoples and transforming them into the slave labor needed to build new buildings and reap greater harvests. Randsborg and his colleagues insist that, after nearly a millennium of expansion to compensate for repeated economic failure, this process had borught city dwellers to the point at which they had devastated the whole natural and political world around them.

The greatest way to let go of ancient history is to embrace it, in the present.