in Eurasia c. 1200 and location of today's
Mongols in modern Mongolia, Russia and China
Scythia was a loose state or
federation covering most of the steppe, that originated as early as the 8th century BCE, composed mainly of people speaking
Scythian languages and usually regarded as the first of the
nomad empires. The
Scythians were
Iranic pastoralist tribes who dwelled the Eurasian Steppes from the
Tarim Basin and
Western Mongolia in Asia to as far as
Sarmatia in modern day
Ukraine and
Russia. The
Roman army hired
Sarmatians as elite cavalrymen.
Europe was exposed to several waves of invasions by horse people, including the
Cimmerians. The
Scythians and
Sarmatians enjoyed a long age of dominion in the 1st Millennium BCE, but at the start of 1st Millennium CE they were displaced by waves of immigrations of other people, to the East, in the steppes east of the
Caspian Sea. They were dislocated by the
Yuezhi people and were forced to assimilate into them, and many of these Eastern Scythians (
Saka) moved and settled in the Parthian Empire in the region later named as
Sakastan. The western Iranians, the Alans and Sarmatians, settled down and became the ruling elite of several eastern
Slavic tribes and some of these Iranians also assimilated into the Slavic cultures, while others retained their Iranian identity, and their languages are spoken today by the modern
Ossetian people. Various peoples also expanded and contracted later in history, including the
Magyars in the
Early Middle Ages, the
Mongols and
Seljuks in the
High Middle Ages, the
Kalmuks and the
Kyrgyz and later the
Kazakhs up to modern times. The earliest example of an invasion by a horse people may have been by the
Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves, following the
domestication of the horse in the
4th millennium BCE (see
Kurgan hypothesis). The Cimmerians were the earliest invading equestrian steppe nomads that are known in Eastern European sources. Their military strength was always based on
cavalry, and they were among the first to have developed true cavalry. Historically, areas to the north of China including
Manchuria,
Mongolia and
Xinjiang were inhabited by nomadic tribes. Early periods in Chinese history involved conflict with the nomadic peoples to the west of the
Wei valley. Texts from the
Zhou dynasty (c. 1050–256 BCE) compare the
Rong,
Di and
Qin dynasty to
wolves, describing them as cruel and greedy. Iron and bronze were supplied from China. An early theory proposed by
Owen Lattimore suggesting that the nomadic tribes could have been self-sufficient was criticized by later scholars, who questioned whether their raids may have been motivated by necessity rather than greed. Subsequent studies noted that nomadic demand for
grain,
textiles and
ironware exceeded China's demand for Steppe goods.
Anatoly Khazanov identified this imbalance in production as the cause of instability in the Steppe nomadic cultures. Later scholars argued that peace along China's northern border largely depended on whether the nomads could obtain the essential grains and textiles they needed through peaceful means such as trade or intermarriage. Several tribes organized to form the
Xiongnu, a tribal confederation that gave the nomadic tribes the upper hand in their dealings with the settled agricultural Chinese people. Nomadism persists in the steppe lands, though it has generally been disapproved of by modern regimes, who have often discouraged it with varying degrees of coercion. ==Culture==