Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change: The Mongols and Their Eurasian Predecessors

Next, the eminent anthropologist Anatoly Khazanov directs attention to the emergence of the "Scythian" nomadic polity at the beginning of the first millennium b.c.e. Khazanov shows how the Scythians adopted influences from Greeks and others, and then transmitted these influences widely as they gave rise to the pastoral- nomadic political culture that spread across the Eurasian landmass. Building upon David Christian's work on "steppe roads," Honeychurch aims to illustrate how recent archeological discoveries pertaining to the Xiongnu during the third to first centuries b.c.e. elucidate ways in which nomadic political economies at the time facilitated the later rise of the fabled Silk Road trade network. 5 Isenbike Togan follows this with an incisive analysis of Chinese sociopolitical terminology of nomadic peoples in the eastern steppe between the fifth and eighth centuries.