10/3/22, 7:08 PM Book review - The road to wisdom: Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony

e Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin - Telegraph India

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Sattin traces the relationship between the nomadic and the settled
in a chronological manner over a span of 12,000 years,
highlighting the myriad nomadic influences

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Priyank Patel
  |  
Published 30.09.22, 04:48 AM

Book: Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World

Author: Anthony Sattin

Publisher: John Murray

Price: ₹799

Anthony Sattin presents an alternative history to the usual depictions of

civilisation by the Global North that beholds its monuments and art as the
epitome of culture. The histories of nomadic people have been ignored by
their sedentary brethren. Nomadic oral traditions and their contributions to
fostering trade and multicultural diversity, the technological advancements,
knowledge dissemination as well as the cultural and political awakenings that
they induced make them key figures in global history. Sattin traces the
relationship between the nomadic and the settled in a chronological manner

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10/3/22, 7:08 PM Book review - The road to wisdom: Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin - Telegraph India

over a span of 12,000 years, highlighting the myriad nomadic influences and
condensing considerable information into brief accounts, thereby offering an
engaging path to tip-toe through history.

Sattin contends that human society has been on the move for most of its
history, embodied by the journeys of Noah, Moses, Buddha, Odysseus and
Rama. Nomads built the first monuments at Göbekli Tepe in southern
Anatolia, tamed the horse and invented chariots, fashioned the composite
bow, fought against and reshaped the Egyptian, Greek and Roman empires,
before establishing some of the greatest dominions themselves. They admired
story-telling and free thought, were tolerant of all beliefs, and accorded
women a high position in society. Their need for freedom of movement and
open markets changed the world, linking the East and the West, enabled the
Renaissance in Europe, while furthering artistic and cultural advances across
the globe.

The book first examines nomadic origins, the rise of Mesopotamian walled
city-states like the Uruk that altered a communal societal ethos into a more
hierarchical structure, and the perpetual tensions between settled and
nomadic people along with mutual benefits. This “Balancing Act” reveals how
wandering groups, be it the Hyksos, Huns, Xiongnu or Scythians and, later,
the Mongols and the Arabs, moving swiftly on horseback, affected kingdoms
across Asia, eastern Europe and North Africa, forcing them to regenerate and
advance their own civilisations. This cultural inter-mixing resulted in the
formulation of the Proto-Indo-European languages from the Pontic Steppes
that lend common ancestry to Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.

The “Imperial Act” describes the rise of nomadic power and the cyclical
churnings in their own realms. Nomads could create powerful movements
but not sustain them once they had settled. Sattin explains how shared
religious beliefs enabled nomadic Arabs to reconfigure West Asia’s political
landscape, challenge the Byzantine empire and establish Cairo and Baghdad.
The formulations of algebra and algorithms occurred thereafter, through the
continual exchange of ideas. This Islamic empire was subsumed by Genghis
Khan, whose Mongol– Uighur Alliance fashioned the largest pre-colonial
empire. Through its trade routes spread inventions like paper, gunpowder
and compass into the European realm while Chinese pottery decorated with
Persian cobalt-oxide was prized across Eurasia and influenced Dutch and
English craftsmen. The emergent riches of the Silk Route induced explorers
like Marco Polo to undertake momentous journeys and the nomadic
transformation from tent to palace became immortalised in Coleridge’s
memorable verse on Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome. After the
devastating Black Death, Timur refashioned the Central Asian nomadic realm
from Samarkand, linking Ming China with VenetianGenoese merchants in a
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10/3/22, 7:08 PM Book review - The road to wisdom: Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin - Telegraph India

golden age of trade. Their descendants, the Ottoman Turks, would conquer
Asia Minor while Neo-Mongols like Babur would establish the Mughal
dynasty in India. Although Sattin documents the horrors of the Hun, Mongol
and Timurid invasions, he stresses that the affected societies adapted and
reorganised to proceed on to greater heights.

The final section examines the state of nomads in the modern age. It
highlights Western scholarly insistence on dominion over nature and the
purported manifest destiny of the white man to subjugate other races in the
name of furthering civilisation and emancipating ‘barbarians’. This ideology
is imbued with prejudice against all who wander and enabled the coercive
colonisations in North America and Australia, with the original inhabitants
being herded into reservations. Sattin recounts how the Industrial Revolution
pushed nomads to the brink by creating factories, extending railroads,
furthering urbanisation and consolidating landholdings. Yet, this also gave
rise to the feeling that something integral to the human condition was being
lost by people having to subsist within urbanscapes without the freedom to
wander. This yearning for the outdoors echoes in Thoreau’s writings and was
central to the widespread acclaim bestowed on documentaries about Inuit
and Kurdish migrations.

Sattin’s  Nomads  stands out for its lucid portrayal of complex historical
threads and its factual, yet nostalgic, undertones. The great importance
placed by nomads on free movement is in stark contrast to present-day
political borders, the anti-immigration fervour and the occupation of the
original nomadic heartland by a superpower intent on expansionist
ideologies.  Nomads  is a reminder that our world was profoundly shaped by
people who lived unencumbered, in balance with the natural environment,
and that modern society would be wellplaced to follow their guiding
principles of tolerance, equality and companionship.

Book Review
Nomad
Culture
History

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