Since the first millennium BCE, nomads of the Eurasian steppe have played a key role in world history and the development of adjacent sedentary regions, especially China, India, the Middle East, and Eastern and Central Europe. Although their more settled neighbors often saw them as an ongoing threat and imminent danger—“barbarians,” in fact—their impact on sedentary cultures was far more complex than the raiding, pillaging, and devastation with which they have long been associated in the popular imagination. The nomads were also facilitators and catalysts of social, demographic, economic, and cultural change, and nomadic culture had a significant influence on that of sedentary Eurasian civilizations, especially in cases when the nomads conquered and ruled over them. Not simply passive conveyors of ideas, beliefs, technologies, and physical artifacts, nomads were frequently active contributors to the process of cultural exchange and change. Their active choices and initiatives helped set the cultural and intellectual agenda of the lands they ruled and beyond. This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars from different disciplines and cultural specializations to explore how nomads played the role of “agents of cultural change.” The beginning chapters examine this phenomenon in both east and west Asia in ancient and early medieval times, while the bulk of the book is devoted to the far flung Mongol empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This comparative approach, encompassing both a lengthy time span and a vast region, enables a clearer understanding of the key role that Eurasian pastoral nomads played in the history of the Old World. It conveys a sense of the complex and engaging cultural dynamic that existed between nomads and their agricultural and urban neighbors, and highlights the non-military impact of nomadic culture on Eurasian history. Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change illuminates and complicates nomadic roles as active promoters of cultural exchange within a vast and varied region. It makes available important original scholarship on the new turn in the study of the Mongol empire and on relations between the nomadic and sedentary worlds.

In recent decades, there has been a new surge of interest in the history and legacies of the Silk Roads both within academic and public discourses. A field of Silk Roads Studies has come into its own. Consciously mirroring the temperament of its subject, the field has moved out of the narrow niches of particular disciplines to become a truly interdisciplinary endeavor. New research findings about the historical operations of the Silk Roads and interpretations of their legacies for the modern and contemporary world have broken down geographical and temporal divides that once demarcated the Silk Roads as primarily pre-modern and Old World-centered conduits of globalization. In light of these developments, the time is ripe to begin formulating a new definition of the contour of Silk Roads Studies and laying a new foundation for further work in this field. Silk Roads: From Local Realities to Global Narratives brings together leading scholars in multiple disciplines related to Silk Roads studies. It highlights the multiplicity of networks that constituted the Silk Roads, including land and maritime routes, and approaches the Silk Roads from Antiquity to China’s One Belt One Road Initiative from Afro-Eurasia to the Americas. This holistic approach to understanding ancient globalization, exchanges, transformations, and movements - and their continued relevance to the present - is in line with contemporary academic trends toward interdisciplinarity. Indeed, the Silk Roads is such an expansive topic that many approaches to its study must be included to represent accurately its many facets. The volume emphasizes exchange and transformation along the Silk Roads - moments of acculturation or hybridization that contributed to novel syncretic forms. It highlights the multiplicity of networks that constituted the Silk Roads, including land and maritime routes, and approaches to the Silk Roads from Antiquity to China’s One Belt One Road Initiative from Afro-Eurasia to the Americas.

This handbook examines human responses to climatic and environmental changes in the past,and their impacts on disease patterns, nutritional status, migration, and interpersonal violence. Bioarchaeology—the study of archaeological human skeletons—provides direct evidence of the human experience of past climate and environmental changes and serves as an important complement to paleoclimate, historical, and archaeological approaches to changes we may expect with global warming. Comprising 27 chapters from experts across a broad range of time periods and geographical regions, this book addresses hypotheses about how climate and environmental changes impact human health and well-being, factors that promote resilience, and circumstances that make migration or interpersonal violence a more likely outcome. The volume highlights the potential relevance of bioarchaeological analysis to contemporary challenges by organizing the chapters into a framework outlined by the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Planning for a warmer world requires knowledge about humans as biological organisms with a deep connection to Earth's ecosystems balanced by an appreciation of how historical and socio-cultural circumstances, socioeconomic inequality, degrees of urbanization, community mobility, and social institutions play a role in shaping long-term outcomes for human communities. Containing a wealth of nuanced perspectives about human-environmental relations, book is key reading for students of environmental archaeology, bioarchaeology, and the history of disease. By providing a longer view of contemporary challenges, it may also interest readers in public health, public policy, and planning.

The interaction between Eurasian pastoral nomads and the surrounding sedentary societies is a major theme in world history. This volume explores the mulitfarious nature of nomadic society and its relations with China, Russia and the Middle East from antiquity into the contemporary world with emphasis on the Mongol and Turkish peoples.

This book suggests a new theory on the origins and Urheimat of the Turks within the context of Central Eurasia and, more properly, the South Urals, by exploring the relations of the Turkic language with the Altaic, Uralic and Indo-European languages and by referring to historical, genetic and archaeological sources. The book shows that the elements that started the making of the Turkic ethno-linguistic entity were also shared by the regions where the later Hungarians would emerge, and that the consolidation of their identity seems to be related to the emergence and rise of the Sintashta culture. It argues that the fertile lands and suitable climatic conditions, together with the coming of agriculture likely at the end of the 3rd millennium BC, allowed them to increase their population.

From New York Times bestselling author of The Mosquito, the incredible story of how the horse shaped human history Timothy C. Winegard’s The Horse is an epic history unlike any other. Its story begins more than 5,500 years ago on the windswept grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe; when one human tamed one horse, an unbreakable bond was forged and the future of humanity was instantly rewritten, placing the reins of destiny firmly in human hands. Since that pivotal day, the horse has carried the history of civilizations on its powerful back. For millennia it was the primary mode of transportation, an essential farming machine, a steadfast companion, and a formidable weapon of war. Possessing a unique combination of size, speed, strength, and stamina, the horse dominated every facet of human life and shaped the very scope of human ambition. And we still live among its galloping shadows. Horses revolutionized the way we hunted, traded, traveled, farmed, fought, worshipped, and interacted. They fundamentally reshaped the human genome and the world’s linguistic map. They determined international borders, molded cultures, fueled economies, and built global superpowers. They decided the destinies of conquerors and empires. And they were vectors of lethal disease and contributed to lifesaving medical innovations. Horses even inspired architecture, invention, furniture, and fashion. From the thundering cavalry charges of Alexander the Great to the streets of New York during the Great Manure Crisis of 1894 and beyond, horses have shaped both the grand arc of history and our everyday lives. Driven by fascinating revelations and fast-paced storytelling, The Horse is a riveting narrative of this noble animal’s unrivaled and enduring reign across human history. To know the horse is to understand the world.