Six Milestones

An Illustrated Booklet of Great Preludes and Pivots

in World History
by David W. Tollen

Illustrated by Neerajana Deb

Maps by Simeon Netchev

 Copyright © 2023 by David W. Tollen

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Created and written by David W. Tollen (U.S.A.), https://pintsofhistory.com/

Illustrations by Neerajana Deb (India), https://bio.site/youfoundneemo

Maps by Simeon Netchev (Switzerland), https://www.worldhistory.org/user/simeonnetchev/

Design by Simeon Netchev and David W. Tollen

Title Fonts: Cover page and Chap. 4: Roman Antique, by Dieter Steffmann. Chap. 1: Ancient Hellenic, by John
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Contents
Introduction
1. The Realm Of Zeus: From Ireland to Northern India
2. The Many Origins of the Israelites
3. Zhang Qian and the Start of World History
4. Nature vs. the Roman Empire
5. How William the Conqueror Broke Up the Domain of the North and Redirected World History
6. The End of Nomad Barbarian Power and the Start of Modern History
Introduction

To study history means submitting to chaos but nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
~ Herman Hesse

Not all histories are created equal. Every event shapes the future, but most only incrementally. A few,
however, lay foundations for great structures or redirect major roads. This booklet explores six histories of
the latter type, set mostly on the world’s largest connected landmass, Afro-Eurasia.

These six histories have something in common. They are seldom told. Some of the six address events
rarely described in popular literature or in the classroom, while others cover familiar events but offer
unfamiliar interpretations. In other words, though these preludes and pivots shape modern civilization, we
rarely think about them.

If you’d like to learn more please visit Pints of History (www.PintsofHistory.com).

1. THE REALM OF
ZEUS: FROM IRELAND
TO NORTHERN INDIA

Most people in India, Iran, and Europe

speak languages from the Indo-European
family. English, Hindi, Farsi, Russian,
Greek, German, Spanish, and many others
descend from a forgotten mother-tongue. A
prehistoric people spoke that Proto-Indo-
European language, possibly in or near
Armenia during the 3000s BCE. That lost
people, however, shaped the ancient world
more than most of us realize. Proto-Indo-
European culture, including religion, spread
alongside language. We remember Zeus, for
instance, as Greece’s ruling god, but he
probably reigned across half of Eurasia.

Linguists think the Proto-Indo-Europeans

worshipped a god called something like
Dyeus Pater,* meaning Sky Father. As the
prehistoric language and beliefs spread to
Greece, they evolved, and Dyeus Pater
became Zeus Pater or just Zeus. The name

*
Linguists “reconstructed” Dyeus Pater. They guessed the
Proto-Indo-European name, extrapolating from words in
daughter languages we know today. Linguists use various
symbols when they write these reconstructions – e.g.,
“*Dyḗus Ph₂tḗr.” This booklet leaves the symbols out.

Northern India’s Dyaus Pitr, Rome’s Jupiter, and Ireland’s The Dagda
SIX MILESTONES 1
also evolved in Italy among the Latins.
There, Dyeus Pater became the Roman god
Jovis Pater – or just Jupiter or Jove. The
Romans adopted many tales of Zeus into
their beliefs about Jupiter, so we often
assume they copied the Greek thunder god.
But it’s probably more accurate to say they
realized the Greeks worshipped the same
ruling god. So myths of Zeus were myths of
Jupiter.
In northern India, Dyeus Pater became
Dyaus Pitr, sky god and father god of the
ancient Vedic faith (a key source for
SIX MILESTONES
Hinduism). Thousands of miles to the west,
among the Proto-Celts, Dyeus Pater became
something like Dewos or Dago-dewos, who
evolved into the Irish father god The Dagda.
Dyeus Pater probably reigned over other
Indo-European speakers too, like the
ancient Slavs (Ukrainians, Poles, etc.) and
Latvians. And among Germanic-speakers,
he may have become Ziu and eventually
Tiw, the source of Tuesday (Tiw’s day).
Sky Father is not the only Proto-Indo-
European god shared among these distant
peoples. Other candidates include the sun
The Indo-European languages of Western Eurasia
goddess reconstructed as Sehul. She
probably evolved into goddesses like the
Celtic Sulis and the Germanic Sól or Sunna,
as well as male sun gods like the Greeks’
Helios, the Romans’ Sol, and the Vedic god
Surya. The Proto-Indo-Europeans probably
also worshipped a dawn goddess
reconstructed as Hausos, source of the
Greeks’ Eos and the Vedic Usas. Other
ancient gods share Proto-Indo-European
roots too. These divine beings shaped
cultures and beliefs across western Eurasia,
from Ireland to India.
2
2. THE MANY ORIGINS OF THE
ISRAELITES
The Bible’s Book of Exodus says Moses
freed 600,000 men from slavery in Egypt.
Then they and their families fled east to the
nearby Sinai Peninsula. But the former
slaves’ destiny lay beyond Sinai. Their
ancestors had once lived in Canaan: modern
Israel/Palestine. (See the map on page 5.) So
after forty years in Sinai, Moses’s people
moved east again (northeast, actually). They
invaded and conquered Canaan and
eventually set up their own kingdom.
Exodus recounts the origin of Moses’s
people, known as Israelites. It also provides
an indirect origin story for billions alive
today, since the Israelites’ descendants and
religious successors include today’s Jews,
Christians, and Muslims. But the Exodus
story has some problems.

Moses wouldn’t need to flee Egypt with

600,000 men. He could just crown himself
pharaoh, since he’d have the world’s largest
army. More importantly, archeologists have
found no evidence of an Egyptian slave
escape during the general period of Exodus:
the 1400s to the early 1200s BCE. Nor does
the evidence support a major invasion of Moses is an Egyptian name, and Exodus says he married Zipporah, from a Sinai herding community. That
could describe the birth of an Egyptian/Sinai tribe.

SIX MILESTONES 3
Canaan. History does record Israelites in
Canaan by 1200. But their origins don’t
seem to match the Bible. Historical and
archeological evidence suggests the
Israelite nation arose within Canaan, from
among the many tribes and peoples who
lived there, not from invaders.
That, however, doesn’t mean Exodus has
the history all wrong.
The Bible records twelve Israelite tribes in
Canaan, and other histories agree. So it’s
possible the nation began as an alliance of
separate peoples. It seems most of these
tribes came from Canaan. They’d lived
there for centuries. But multiple tribes could
mean multiple origins. If so, one of the
tribes could have come from Sinai. It’s even
possible that tribe included former slaves
from Egypt or at least their descendants.
Imagine a small slave escape from ancient
Egypt: maybe two dozen people – few
enough to leave no record. The slaves take
refuge among nomad herders in the Sinai
Peninsula. They become Sinai herders
themselves and intermarry with other
herders. After several generations, members
of this new tribe migrate into Canaan.
They’ve multiplied, so perhaps hundreds
*
The Hyksos rulers spoke a language from the Semitic family. Most of Canaan’s people spoke Semitic languages too, as did the people of nearby lands, including the nomadic herders of the Sinai
Peninsula. The Israelite language, Hebrew, comes from that family too.
SIX MILESTONES
make the trip. But they’re still too few to
disrupt local society much, and they still
leave no trace in the historical record.
Sometime later, this immigrant group joins
an alliance of local tribes. Our
Sinai/Egyptian group still treasures oral
tales of its ancestors’ escape from slavery.
As time goes by and the details grow fuzzy,
that story joins the other tribes’ myths and
legends to form a history for the whole
alliance – which by then has fused into the
Israelite nation.
It’s even possible our original runaway
slaves have some ancestral connection to
Canaan, just as the Bible suggests, or at least
to the lands nearby. A century or two before
Exodus, native Egyptians overthrew the
Hyksos: conquerors from those eastern
lands. (History remembers them as Egypt’s
15th Dynasty.) As the native Egyptians
regained power, they could have enslaved
supporters of the Hyksos who remained in
Egypt – like immigrants from Canaan.*
We have no support for that story except
the Bible. But archeology does support the
idea of widely different origins for the
Israelite tribes – by suggesting one of them
came from Greece. During the past decade,
researchers have unearthed Greek-style
artifacts in the Golan Heights, at Tell el-
Qadi: chief city of the ancient Israelite Tribe
of Dan. And some of the ancient city’s
pottery was fired in or near Greece,
according to chemical analysis. That
suggests the Tribe of Dan immigrated from
Greece to Canaan, or at least some of its
founders did, possibly in the 1300s BCE.
Even Dan’s name could come from across
the sea. Homer’s Iliad often calls the Greeks
Danaans. (The Bible’s Samson comes from
Dan, and he resembles the Greek’s Herakles
– a.k.a. Hercules. If the Dan/Danaan theory
has it right, the legendary musclemen could
have a common origin.)
If the Bible does gloss over the Israelites’
multiple origins, it’s not unusual. Many
nations arise from multiple earlier groups
but don’t realize it – and treasure legends of
a single origin.
4
3. Zhang Qian and the
Start of World History
During the mid-100s BCE, nomadic herders
called the Yuezhi conquered Bactria:
roughly modern Afghanistan. That small
power shift stands out as a major milestone,
though not for its own sake. It’s the first
event recorded on opposite ends of the
world’s largest continent, Eurasia: in both
Europe and China. The news reached
SIX MILESTONES
civilizations so far apart and so divided by
wilderness that they lived in separate worlds
– until a Chinese explorer blazed a trail and
changed history.
In 200 BCE, East Asians knew nothing of
Eurasia’s other great civilizations, in the
Middle East and India. Nor did they know
of the former’s European offshoot: Greek
and Roman civilization. And those societies
knew nothing of China or the other far-
eastern kingdoms. That’s thanks to
mountains, deserts, and empty plains
separating East Asia from the rest of the
continent. In 138 BCE, however, Chinese
Emperor Wudi sent an envoy into that
Eurasia and the Silk Road(s)
wilderness. The emperor told Zhan Qian to
find the nomadic Yuezhi people – renowned
horseback warriors – and propose an
alliance against another barbarian nation,
the Xiongnu. The emperor also wanted a
report on the lands to the west.
Zhang Qian led a hundred men into the
wildlands beyond China’s western frontier.
But the enemy Xiongnu riders soon
captured him and at least some of the
expedition – and held them for a decade.
Captivity on the grasslands wasn’t too
harsh, though. In fact, Zhang Qian married
a Xiongnu woman and fathered a son. Still,
he never gave up his mission. After ten
5
years a prisoner, he escaped with his wife
and son, as well as a Xiongnu-born guide
from the original expedition. He led this
much reduced expedition west, across
desert and plains. They finally reached the
Yuezhi in 127, just north of Bactria, on the
Central Asian plains of today’s Tajikistan
and Uzbekistan.

Zhang Qian could not convince the

Yuezhi king to aid China. But he did spend
a year with the Yuezhi and their neighbors.
He learned of lands near and far. And he
visited Bactria: a land shaped by three
distant civilizations. India had always
influenced the Bactrians (and vice versa).
But they had fallen under Persian rule
during the 500s BCE and then under
Alexander the Great’s Macedonian-Greek
empire, in the 320s. In fact, Alexander
married a Bactrian princess (Roxana). And
he left behind Greek warlords who ruled
until Bactria fell under Yuezhi power,
shortly before Zhang Qian arrived. In other
words, Bactria gave the Chinese envoy
knowledge of three great civilizations
formerly unknown to East Asians.

On his way back to China, Zhang Qian fell

into the Xiongnu’s hands once again. But
they spared his life out of respect for his
obvious courage. He spent another year a
prisoner but then escaped once more with
his wife, son, and guide. Zhang Qian
Zhang Qian reported on the Fergana horses, launching China’s many-century obsessions with these
“heavenly horses,” thought to sweat blood.
SIX MILESTONES 6
returned to China in 125 BCE, thirteen years Ideas travelled the Silk Road too. They
after he’d left, to the astonishment of the include Buddhism, which eventually
imperial court. crossed from India to East Asia, as well as
inventions like paper and gunpowder,
Zhang Qian’s report to the emperor which made their way west.
revealed the world beyond the wilderness
and its many riches and wonders. Around 100 BCE, Chinese historian Sima
Captivated, China turned its attention west. Qian recorded the Yuezhi conquest of
By the end of the 100s BCE, Emperor Wudi Bactria, thanks to Zhang Qian’s report. On
had conquered large swaths of Central Asia. the other side of Eurasia, the Greek
Those conquests and others turned East geographer Strabo and other European
Asia’s leading realm into an even greater scholars recorded the same event, thanks to
power: the Han Chinese Empire. Bactria’s Greek connection. World history
had begun.
Zhang Qian’s report also lured Chinese
merchants west, launching the Silk Road
trade routes. Soon, Chinese silk regularly
travelled those transcontinental caravan
trails. It passed from one trader to the next,
often across more than 6,400 km (4,000 mi.)
to the Mediterranean Sea. There, silk
became high fashion for the wealthy of the
Roman Empire. At the same time, western
Eurasia sent East Asia goods like wine,
honey, camels, and gold. But the Silk Road
did more than spread riches to the far ends
of Eurasia. Central Asians benefitted too.
That includes nomad herders: people who
shared the mobile lifestyles of the Yuezhi
and Xiongnu. They dominated the Eurasian
Steppe and so could tax the merchants
passing through.

SIX MILESTONES 7
4. NATURE VS. THE people. Yet the state and its people hardly
faltered during his reign. The Roman
restore the empire in the early 500s. But
Justinian failed, and his own realm soon
ROMAN EMPIRE Empire seemed unbreakable. declined into a rump state historians call the
Byzantine Empire. The “fall of the Roman
Still, the empire had its problems, and they Empire” was done by 550.
began to pile up during the late 100s CE. A
Historians have offered dozens of
long recession struck around 160, followed The paragraphs above summarize a well-
explanations for the fall of the Roman
by political instability. After the troubled known history. Recent scholars, however,
Empire. They include the decadence of
reign of Emperor Commodus,* who was have pieced together another story playing
latter-day Romans, barbarian migrations, a
strangled in 192, civil wars repeatedly out in the background. And that tale – that
bad system for choosing emperors, and the
shook the Roman world – and toppled natural history – offers its own explanation
loss of Roman valor due to Christianity. A
emperors. During the 200s, naked military for fall of the Roman Empire.†
newer line of thinking, however, pins the
might became the only real credential for a
blame mostly on nature: on climate change
ruler. So generals replaced senators as the The empire rose during an unusually
and disease.
top candidates for the imperial purple. And warm, wet period in the Mediterranean,
while the Romans killed each other in their ideal for farming. This Roman Climatic
The Roman Empire rose during the 200s
many struggles for power, barbarian Optimum (RCO) began around 250 BCE. In
and 100s BCE. By 30 BCE, it had
invasions surged – and the economy mid-100s CE, however, the
conquered all the lands around the
staggered. Mediterranean’s climate turned drier and
Mediterranean. From there, it had a long
colder. Farm outputs fell, leading to more
run, led by giants like Augustus Caesar,
A new soldier-emperor, Diocletian, led a regular famines and general food insecurity.
Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius. But the
massive reorganization and militarization of
empire also thrived under terrible leaders,
Roman society in the 280s and 290s CE. Reduced nutrition likely increased the
like the many corrupt consuls and governors
That saved the empire, for quite a while. But empire’s vulnerability to disease. The
of last century BCE. And it thrived under
the Roman world never recovered its old Antonine Plague – probably smallpox or
awful emperors, like Caligula, who ruled
peace, stability, or wealth. The civil wars, measles – struck in 165 CE. In the city of
during the next century, from 37 to 41 CE.
invasions, and other troubles mounted again Rome alone, two thousand people died per
The “mad emperor” allegedly declared
in the 300s and early 400s. The empire’s day at the epidemic’s height, according to
himself a living god, made the army collect
western half fell during the late 400s, taken ancient sources. The plague raged until 180.
seashells, planned to appoint his horse a
over by barbarian kings. An emperor still Then, in 249, the Plague of Cyprian struck
consul … and had a penchant for executing
ruled in the east, and he tried to reunite and – probably smallpox, measles, or some

*
In fiction, Commodus often shows up as the bad guy or the fool. Juaquin Phoenix played Commodus in Gladiator (2000), and so did Christopher Plummer in The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).
†
Much of the credit goes to Kyle Harper and his popular work, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire (Princeton University Press 2017). Harper has not escaped criticism, but
few deny nature’s significant role.

SIX MILESTONES 8
 version of hemorrhagic fever, like Ebola.
It’s hard to overstate the suffering.
According to Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage,
“as the strength of the body is dissolved, the
bowels dissipate in a flow; … a fire that
begins in the inmost depths burns up into
wounds in the throat; … the intestines are
shaken with continuous vomiting; [and] the
eyes are set on fire from the force of the
blood.” This epidemic continued until 262
and probably killed even faster than the
earlier plague. The two epidemics cut the
empire’s population and military
manpower, though no one knows how
much.

The cooler, drier weather continued

through the 200s, 300s, and beyond, and
probably so did pressure on the empire’s
food supplies. But worse was yet to come.
Temperatures fell much faster in the late
530s, probably thanks to volcanic eruptions
in the Americas or Southwest Pacific, which
spread a haze of ash that dimmed the sun.
This Late Antique Little Ice Age wasn’t a
true ice age, but it gave the northern
hemisphere 125 years of relatively cold
weather. Then, in the midst of that slow
disaster, plague struck yet again. In 541,
“pestilence swept through the whole known
world and notably the Roman Empire,
wiping out most of the farming community
and of necessity leaving a trail of
desolation.” (Procopius, Secret History, c.
The Pax Romana – nearly 200 years of relative peace – ended late in the 100s CE.

SIX MILESTONES 9
550.) This Plague of Justinian was Yersinia
pestis, the Black Death (which would strike
again in the Middle Ages). Some historians
estimate a quarter of the eastern empire
died. Instead of restoring Roman power, the
emperor Justinian and his people struggled
just to dispose of the corpses.

In other words, climate change and

disease struck the Roman Empire just when
history tells us it began to falter, in the late
100s. Both assaults continued into the next
century and beyond. And both struck even
harder in the early 500s, when the tottering
empire finally fell. Of course, we can’t rule
out human factors. The Romans could have
done any number of things better. But the
empire had shrugged off bad decision-
making before the climate shift and plagues
(e.g., Caligula and his horse). And it’s hard
to imagine any ancient empire surviving so
many thunderbolts thrown by Mother
Nature.

SIX MILESTONES 10
In January of 1066 CE, England’s King
Edward the Confessor died with no
children, and three men promptly claimed
his throne. Harold Godwinson was the
kingdom’s principle noble, and the Witan
(high council) chose him as king. Then the
other two claimants attacked. Harald
Hardrada, King of Norway, landed a large
army on England’s northeast coast in
September. But Harold Godwinson
defeated and killed the Norwegian king at
the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Then Harold
rushed south to face the third claimant:
William the Bastard, Duke of the French
province of Normandy. William invaded
southern England in late September, and the
two armies met on October 14 for the Battle
of Hastings. This time, the invaders won,
and King Harold was cut down. William the
Conqueror became King of England (after
the English nobles brushed aside a fourth
possible claimant, who was young and
lacked support). And world history pivoted.

King Harald Hardrada of Norway would not have been England’s first Scandinavian king if he’d won in
1066. The Danish royal family held the throne from 1016 to 1042.

SIX MILESTONES 11
 The Norman-French conquest pulled
England into post-Roman civilization: into
the community of kingdoms that had risen
from the ashes of the Roman Empire. We
tend to assume England always belonged to
that civilization. But before 1066,
Scandinavia held England’s attention more
than France and the other post-Roman
lands. For centuries before Hastings, the
English belonged to what I’ll call the
Domain of the North: the far-flung
community of Scandinavian-ruled lands. In
fact, if Harold Godwinson or Harald of
Norway had won in 1066, we might
consider England part of Scandinavia today.
The English, of course, went on to shape
and shake much of the globe. So if not for
the Norman conquest, we’d live in a very
different world.
Six hundred fifty years before the Battle of
Hastings, in the early 400s CE, the Roman
Empire lost control Britain. Barbarians
from northern Europe invaded soon after.
By the early 600s, they’d taken over most of
Roman Britain: the part we call England.
Trade and political contact with the other
post-Roman kingdoms plummeted. Even
religious contacts faded. Christianity
dominated post-Roman civilization, but
England’s invaders – Angles, Saxons, and
Jutes – were pagans.
SIX MILESTONES
Post-Roman civilization tried to reabsorb
England during the late 500s and 600s. The
Pope sent missionaries to the Anglo-
Saxons, and by 700 CE, most of England
had converted the Christianity. But in 865,
more barbarian pagans invaded, once again
from northern Europe. These were the
Danes and other Scandinavians, today
called Vikings. They raided post-Roman
lands too, but in England they conquered
and settled half the country.
Native Anglo-Saxon kings reconquered
most of England during the early 900s. But
they did not remove the Vikings. Rather, the
two peoples merged. The Anglo-Saxons
and Vikings were cousins, from
overlapping regions in northern Europe. So
their traditions grew out of the same
Germanic roots, and the merger came
naturally, particularly once England’s
Vikings converted to Christianity.
The cultural blend left an especially
visible mark on the English language.
Anglo-Saxon and old Danish were sister
languages, almost mutually
comprehensible, so English gradually
simplified for easier communication. Our
nouns, for instance, generally have no
gender and few case endings. That’s
because Danish-speakers had trouble
following all that complex grammar.
English also has many Scandinavian-born
words, and not just for new or exotic
concepts. They’re everyday terms, like arm,
husband, knot, law, mistake, same, sister,
want, and wrong. The Vikings also gave
England the noble title earl (originally jarl).
That’s why England has no counts and
originally had no dukes or barons. Those are
post-Roman titles.
Denmark and the other Scandinavian
lands eventually converted to Christianity,
particularly during the 1000s. English
missionaries get much of the credit. Trade
between Scandinavia and England grew,
and so did political connections, including
royal and noble marriages.
In other words, England’s attention turned
toward Scandinavia – not exclusively but
decisively.
The Vikings also conquered or settled
Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland,
Poland, Ukraine, and more. So during the
900s and 1000s, the Scandinavians presided
over a community of connected realms: the
Domain of the North. Its greatest kingdoms
were Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and –
largest and richest of all – England.
If not for William the Conqueror, the war
in 1066 would look like just another power
struggle among Anglo-Scandinavian rulers:
Harold Godwinson and Harald Hardrada.
12
 Medieval Northern Europe - including the Domain of the North

William’s reign set England on a new path.
His Norman-French barons soon displaced
England’s traditional nobles.* These
Normans imposed feudalism: the key
economic and military system of post-
Roman civilization. And the Normans’
language, French, became England’s
language of government and remained so
for centuries. Trade and diplomacy turned
south and east. England had entered the
orbit of France – and joined post-Roman
civilization.
The Scandinavian kingdoms gradually
followed England into post-Roman
civilization – into the network of trade and
diplomacy connecting most of Europe.
Many factors contributed, but if the Domain
of the North had kept England, its greatest
kingdom, England, it might have remained
strong: a real rival for post-Roman
civilization.
The English went on to conquer a quarter
of the globe, between 1600 and 1900. And
their influence stretches even further. What
if William the Conqueror had lost in 1066?
What if England had kept its close ties with
Scandinavia? Would it have grown so
strong without feudalism, French culture,
and other trappings of post-Roman
civilization? And if it had, would the British
Empire have spread Scandinavian culture
across the globe?

*
Ironically, William and the Normans descended from Vikings. The French king had given Normandy to their ancestors in 911.

SIX MILESTONES 13

6. The End of
Nomad Barbarian
Power and the Start of
Modern History
Historians have suggested several
launching points for the modern age. They
include Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the
Americas, the 1453 fall of Constantinople,
and the 1440s invention of the movable type
printing press. But another event may have
done as much or more to create the
conditions for modern life. For most of
history, agricultural civilization faced a
major rival and, in much of the world, a
constant menace. The threat came from
another lifestyle: nomadic herding, a.k.a.
pastoral nomadism. In the 1500s, that threat
faded away.
The herding lifestyle arose in the Neolithic
(New Stone Age), probably soon after
farming. The nomads lived off of goats,
sheep, cattle, horses, or other domestic
grazers, eating the animals’ meat and milk.
They often foraged too. They generally
didn’t farm, or at least they relied very little
on farming. They were mobile, migrating
from one grassland to another in broad, flat
regions like the Eurasian Steppe or the
SIX MILESTONES
plains of the Middle East. Thanks to that
mobility, they had no cities or towns. To
urban societies, they were barbarians.
The herders had smaller populations than
agricultural civilizations. But their mobility
gave them military advantages. They could
raid caravans and outlying villages and even
penetrate deep into settled kingdoms. Then
they’d retreat to the safety of distant
pastures once local forces got organized.
Nomads grew particularly deadly once they
domesticated the horse (and in some places
the camel). On grasslands like the vast
Eurasian Steppe, their lifestyle proved ideal
for raising horses – and for assembling
cavalry forces, armed with deadly bows.
Under the strongest chieftains, nomad
cavalry could conquer settled kingdoms
near the plains – and sometimes not so near.
So for most of history, much of agricultural
civilization lived in fear of nomad attack.
We’ve seen nomad herders’ impact in
almost every chapter above. Indo-
European-speaking nomads played a key
role in spreading the worship of Dyeus
Pater. Other nomads settled or conquered
much of the Fertile Crescent and gave rise
to Semitic-speaking societies. Those
include the Israelites’ likely ancestors in
Canaan, as well as the herders of Sinai (like
Moses’ wife, Zipporah). In the East, China
built its Great Wall to keep nomad
horsemen out. And Zhang Qian journeyed
into Central Asia to ask one nomad nation,
the Yuezhi, for help against another, the
Xiongnu. Some of the latter may have
joined an alliance that eventually became
the Huns: nomadic warriors who devastated
the teetering Roman Empire in the mid-400s
CE. Similar nomad nations controlled and
taxed long stretches of the Silk Road. And
in the 1200s, nomads built history’s largest
land-based empire. The Mongol Empire
stretched from China to Eastern Europe.
Then, the nomad herders’ power faded.
The last great nomad conqueror was Timur
(a.k.a. Tamerlane), who built a Turkic-
Mongol empire in Central Asia and the
Middle East shortly before 1400. After
Timur’s time, Eurasia’s nomads gradually
fell under the power of agricultural
kingdoms. Those kingdoms include the
Ottoman Empire, Safavid Persia, India’s
Mughal Empire, the Russian Empire, and
Qing China. In fact, the latter two divided
the Eurasian Steppe between them in 1689.
On the world’s greatest grasslands, the
nomads had become subjects of settled
kings. Herders around the world soon faced
the same fate. Africa’s Masai and Turkana
peoples, for instance, fell under British
control during the decades before and after
1900. North America’s Comanche and
Sioux fell to the United States around the
same time.
14
 What had happened to nomad power?
Bubonic plague may have reduced nomad
populations on the Eurasian Steppe after
Timur’s time. And those same nomads lost
economic power as trade declined on the
Silk Road, thanks to competition from
European oceangoing trade. But those
forces struck only the Eurasian Steppe. And
even there they probably did not deliver the
decisive blow. That blow came from a
Chinese invention, refined by Western
Europeans: the gun.

The nomads’ greatest empire sowed the

seeds of their decline. The Mongol Empire
aided the spread of technology across
Eurasia, and that included Chinese
gunpowder. Europeans paired gunpowder
with technical expertise of their own:
casting iron. That led to powerful cannons
and handheld guns, like harquebuses and
eventually muskets. By the 1400s, these
guns, particularly cannons, played an
important role on European battlefields.
And they soon spread to other agricultural
societies.

The First Battle of Panipat, in 1526,

witnessed one of the first truly effective
uses of artillery in Asia. Ironically, the
winning commander, Babur, descended
from the last great nomad warlord and also
from the mightiest. He traced his ancestry to
Timur and to Genghis Khan, founder of the
Russian gunners of the 1500s found they could resist nomad cavalry.

SIX MILESTONES 15
Mongol Empire. But Babur established an
agricultural domain, the Mughal Empire –
thanks in large part to intelligent use of
muskets and cannons at Panipat and other
battles. Rival empires soon followed
Babur’s example, particularly those
mentioned above. History remembers the
Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals as
gunpowder empires. The Russians and Qing
Chinese deserve that title too. Artillery gave
those empires and other settled kingdoms a
reliable defense against nomad cavalry.

Of course, the nomads adopted guns too.

But they couldn’t manufacture them. (Nor
could they drag cannons across the
grasslands while maintaining their
traditional advantage: lightning speed.) So
nomad armies brought few or no guns to the
battlefield. Over and over, their enemies’
muskets and cannons tore the nomads’
charging cavalry to shreds.

Nomads still herd livestock in many of

their old homelands. But they’ve lost their
old power and independence. (And many
face oppression at the hands of their new
overlords.) By 1600, agricultural
civilization had no rival. The modern age
had begun.

SIX MILESTONES 16