Episode 4: The Historiographical Context

Today, we look at the historiography of the Eurasian steppe and address the complexities, problems, and major historical trends of academic research in this part of the world.  

Transcript

“When a Scythian kills his first man, he drinks his blood; of all those he kills in battle he carries the heads to the king.” Chapter 4, the History of Herodotus, a work dated to around 430 BCE. 

“Ever since the accession of the House of Han there have been constant irruptions of Tartar hordes, with more or less profit to the invaders. During one reign they twice fell upon Lung-hsi, besieging the city, slaughtering the people, and driving off cattle. On another occasion, they made a further raid, murdered the officials and garrison, and carried away everything upon which they could lay their hands.” Excerpt from “On War,” a Chinese text from the 2nd century BCE by Chao Tso.

“Then the Turks and Magharibah attacked [Ishaq bin Ismail], took him captive, seized his son ‘Amr, and brought them to Bugha. Bugha ordered that Ishaq be remanded to the Gate of Thrones, where he was decapitated. His head was brought to Bugha, and his body was suspended on a cross at the Kur [River].” From Volume 34 of the Histories of al-Tabari, describing the Caliphate of Ja’far al-Mutawakkil.

“In fact, the Scythians, who were countless in number and spread throughout the whole of the western provinces, continued to ravage everything, and nothing whatever of the mishaps that had befallen them checked their brazen audacity.” The Alexiad of Anna Komnene, book 8, written sometime in 1148 CE. 

“It is a little alarming to see a Mongol eat. He takes a piece of meat in his left hand, seizes it with his teeth, then cuts it off close to his lips… The configuration, too, of the Mongolian face makes this method of eating much safer for them than for us. A Mongol’s nose is not at all prominent, sometimes hardly projecting beyond the level of the cheeks, and the greater prominence of a foreigner’s nose lays him under a considerable disadvantage in dining after the Mongol fashion.” The recollections of James Gilmour, a Christian missionary in Mongolia, dated to 1870.

As you can see, there’s a big problem when trying to research the histories of the Eurasian steppe. When examining the historiography, the trajectory of historical writing, we can see a particular kind of author. Many primary and secondary sources about the Eurasian nomads come from outside writers, and this, my friends, is a really big issue. 

Welcome to the Nomads and Empires podcast, episode 4. Today, we’re talking about a very interesting, if perhaps academic subject: historiography. You see, the cultures and peoples of the Eurasian steppe are in many ways quite popular with modern audiences. The idea of hordes of barbarian horse archers raiding and burning both steppe and civilization is definitely a powerful one. The imagery that such a perception brings is exciting, fantastical, and really plays into a modern fascination with violence and bloodshed, though that sociocultural discussion is for a different kind of podcast or, better yet, a sociological paper. 

The problem with this modern popularity is that the history of the steppes is therefore marred by preconceived notions and preexisting ideals. Popular depictions mean that we have set expectations on how these groups should operate, and oftentimes that portrayal is blanketed onto the Eurasian steppe peoples as a whole. Consider for instance groups like the Wainriders of the Tolkien legendarium or, even more egregious, the Dothraki in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. There’s an amazing blog by historian Bret Devereaux on this very problem. In four fantastically written parts, he demonstrates how George R. R. Martin’s Dothraki were not an amalgamation of Mongol, Turkic, and Native American cultures, but rather an amalgamation of poor stereotypes of those cultures. I highly recommend giving this a read, as it’s incredibly enlightening on how warped modern perceptions of these groups can be. 

Now, I bring this up because what we should really understand is that these stereotypical depictions do have a historical origin, and this is where we get into the biggest issue of the historiographical nature of the steppe peoples. 

First, let’s define historiography. In its simplest, dictionary understanding, historiography is the study of historical writing. It is an assessment of historical scholarship, it’s methods, and it’s practices throughout history. The University of Rhode Island defines historiography as “the sum total of the interpretations of a specific topic written by past and current historians.” In a way, it is the meta of history, analyzing how authors write, what they actually wrote down, and why. To simplify, we’re basically examining the methodology of historians, the tools they used, and the lenses that they examined with. 

Historiography helps us identify trends and common currents, but it also illuminates some more problematic issues. Some of these scholarly trends can have colonial aspirations, looking to paint one group as being naturally subservient to another. Some historical methods have fixated far too much on single, oftentimes masculine, individuals, thereby ignoring the histories of women, minorities, and ordinary individuals. The 20th and 21st centuries have seen radical developments in historiography, with the advent of microhistory, such as the work of The Cheese and the Worm by Carlo Ginzburg, and perhaps even more significantly, Orientalism by Edward Said. In both of these cases, there is a serious attempt at wresting history away from older, more problematic perspectives in favor of understated and indigenous voices. In this current era, we’re seeing pushback against these older historical methods, with many current scholars emphasizing more global methods and anti-colonial history. 

And so, to really understand the problems of the Dothraki and indeed the problems of Eurasian steppe history more broadly, we need to assess this historiography. So, you may be asking, what exactly are these problems?

Let’s start with one of the largest issues that has affected academic research in this field since, well, Antiquity: the lack of primary sources written by steppe groups. It is fair to say that we have very limited records about the nomadic steppe peoples written by the nomadic steppe peoples. Instead, a disproportionately large portion of our “primary sources” come from outside individuals, and as we may know, these outside individuals had their own agendas in mind. Professor David Morgan in his work The Mongols tells us directly that to study the history of the Mongols, we should be ready to deal with sources in “Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Armenian, Georgian, Latin, and others.” 

You may be asking, “okay then, why not learn Mongolian or Turkic, seeing as that’s the language of these peoples”? Well, I would first say that we should add proto-Indo-European and Indo-Iranian into that list of languages, but on a less semantic note, the reality is that knowing either Mongolian or Turkic doesn’t really help us. As David Morgan puts it, “Mongolian was not a written language before the time of Chingiz Khan, and the only really capital Mongolian source is the extraordinary work known as the Secret History of the Mongols… The archives of the Mongol Empire, if they ever existed, have long since vanished: for Mongol history, we have no equivalent to the Vatican or the Public Record Office in London.” This phenomenon is consistent with most Eurasian steppe groups. For the Scythians, our sources mainly come from Greek speakers like Herodotus, as well as information from other groups like the Assyrians. For the Xiongnu, much of our information comes from the Chinese historian Sima Qian. In the introduction to this episode, I gave a sampling of sources that documented the steppe peoples, and in each of those examples, we have the same consistent trend. Outsiders writing about other groups. 

These outsiders like Herodotus would have had their own agendas and biases, as well as their own issues with historical research and accuracy. Herodotus is often critiqued for his fanciful descriptions, and much of his work is derived from second-hand accounts and interviews. In fact, the work of Herodotus may very well be the inception of the steppe barbarian archetype. We can see this in rather colorful depictions of the Scythians. For example, we have this line in book 4: “Many Scythians also take the right hands of their enemies when dead, stripping the skin off, nails and all, [and] make of them coverings for their arrow quivers.” According to historian Barry Cunliffe, Herodotus’s framing of the Scythians as barbarians may have been an attempt at establishing a sense of “Other,” to highlight the cultural supremacy of the Greeks. Such depictions would permeate throughout European historiography. 

Anna Komnene, as I mentioned in our introduction, was the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Komnenos, and in her historical work The Alexiad, she commonly uses the term Scythian as a blanket term for various Turkic peoples, and oftentimes, that connotation is a negative one. Indeed, as we get later on in time, it almost seems like we have this sense of titanic conflict between the steppe peoples and the “civilized peoples of Western civilization,” a phenomenon that we can see has its historical lineage through Herodotus. Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a great example of this. When talking about Atilla and the Huns, one of the first passages reads as follows: “In the reign of Atilla, the Huns again became the terror of the world; and I shall now describe the character and actions of that formidable barbarian, who alternatively insulted and invaded the East and the West, and urged the rapid downfall of the Roman Empire.”

A similar problem emerges in nonwestern sources. Chinese historians have throughout history framed the nomadic peoples of the eastern steppe in negative lights as well. Professor David Wright, in his work The History of China, explains that many Chinese historians have long-since framed the steppe peoples as barbarians and “less than fully human… Depictions of them by Chinese historians were often hostile and uncomplimentary.” And so we can see that in almost all of our primary sources, there is a clear and distinctive agenda. Authors were adamant in framing their particular cultures and civilizations against the barbarian invaders of the steppe. Whether intentional or not, this means that we must tread lightly on cultural depictions of these nomadic peoples. The words of Herodotus and Sima Qian may have some truth in it, but we must keep the historical context of these figures in mind. We simply cannot definitively state that the Gokturks believed in one thing, that the Mongols practiced another thing, and so on. 

Logically, this should mean that the primary sources about the steppe peoples by the steppe peoples should be rather accurate then. This is the particular group writing about their own histories and cultures and customs. Surely in this case there can’t be any possibility of bias or misrepresentation. No. That’s not correct. 

Even sources by the Mongols or the Dzungars or various others must be treated with the same critical eye. In many instances, we are dealing with oral histories that have only recently been written down. Many Kyrgyz epic stories have been recited for centuries, but our first instances of a hard recording come from the Soviet era. The Epic of Kojojash, for instance, was recorded in three separate instances by scholars. Once in 1924, another in 1949, and a third sometime after that. Each of these recordings have differences in plot points, character descriptions, and even vocabulary. Such oral traditions often don’t focus on recounting historical events as fact; rather, such traditions are based around describing present situations and legitimizing the status of current populations. Even textual records can be difficult to assess. The Secret History of the Mongols is essentially the only major, contemporary document about the Mongol Empire. While it was written by the Mongols, it is unclear how much of it is accurate, how much of it is pro-imperial propaganda, and how much it is completely fiction. I think David Morgan’s assessment about The Secret History of the Mongols is a good middle ground and can apply to many primary sources. He explains that “whatever hesitations historians may have about using the Secret History as a record of historical events as such, on one point there can be no doubt: as an insight into the way of life, patterns of thought and beliefs of the thirteenth-century Mongols, the Secret History is unique and authoritative.”

This is the big takeaway. Once we recognize the implicit biases of our sources, we can start to get a better understanding of history. Why did certain authors portray other groups in a particular manner? What does a founding myth or legend metaphorically represent to that particular tribe or culture? Why does this particular passage or description mean about cultural ties or bilateral relations between two polities? When we can dive a little deeper into our sources and move away from taking things literally, we can actually start to see a bigger picture of history. 

Many modern historians have embraced this viewpoint, and on that front, the historiographical trajectory of the Eurasian steppe has gone into a more nuanced direction. However, the more literal challenges we’ve expressed before raise their heads here. The number of different languages and varying sources mean that a total understanding of the Eurasian steppe can be difficult. The rise of archaeological evidence has also come with its own set of challenges and things to synthesize with the written record. The question we should pose is how do historians consider this challenge?

According to Professor David Morgan, there are two possible routes for modern historians. The first, and the one that Morgan believes to be more common, is the haute vulgarisation, which in his words means: “making little serious attempt to master the necessary languages, and producing synthesis based on secondary sources, in which they have drawn on what the specialists on China, Mongolia, the Islamic world or Europe have written. They have supplemented this with material from such original sources as those same specialists have translated into accessible languages.” Works in this category include Rene Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia, which I admit, is a pretty major source for this podcast. The other method that Morgan notes is the inverse: “Perhaps the only alternative to this approach is for a specialist in one part or other of the lands that made up the Mongol Empire to write a broader survey on the basis of his specialist knowledge, using the works of the experts on the other areas.” In short, you can have a generalist who approaches the Eurasian steppe by focusing one’s sources and research on the areas next to the steppe, or you can have a specialist of the steppe look outward. Today, modern scholarship is, in my view, fairly good at both of these methods, and we often get incredible surveys about the steppe’s impact on the world, and on the world’s impact on the steppes. 

Of course, there are a few other trends that I have major issues with. The first is I think more so about pophistory, and the second issue somewhat ties to that. Like I mentioned in the previous episode, we find pophistory channels like Kings and Generals and Crash Course World History having this problem. They really, really, really like the Mongols. It seems like in modern, popular perceptions of the steppe, there’s only ever one group and one half of the steppe mentioned. So often do we hear the phrase “the Mongols were the exceptions” that it’s basically been taken as a fact without any critical thought put to it. The reality is that the Mongols were perhaps not really an exception, in as much that any particular historical group is in some way an exception. This mass popularity of the Mongols in modern times has meant a near erasure of other steppe groups with equally important histories. For as impactful as the Mongol invasions have been, the various Turkic migrations have resulted in a mass proliferation of various Turkic groups across Eurasia, which includes modern populations like the Sakhas, the Bashkirs, the Kirghiz, Tuvans, Uzbeks, and many, many others. In many instances, ideas presented by the Mongols had origins with the various Turkic khanates and khaganates. 

This popularity of the Mongols in modern times, sadly, seems indicative of older conceptions of nomads and steppe groups. People seem fixated on the powerful, warring Mongol Empire, and so more videos, podcasts, and other forms of media are being produced focusing solely on this entity. The rest of the steppe, its thousands of kilometers and hundreds of other peoples, mostly ignored. 

The popularity of the Mongols, particularly in pophistory, has led to other issues. There seems to be a more recent development at revising some aspects of Mongol history, and therefore steppe history writ large. Such revisionist scholars may paint the Mongols and other groups as peaceful peoples that were more interested in mercantile activity and trading. Now, the relationship between the steppe nomads and commerce is quite strong, and it would be remiss to say that there was no commercial activity, but it would equally inaccurate to say that such groups were completely peaceful. The destruction and number of deaths caused by Genghis Khan and the Mongols cannot be understated or taken lightly. Their actions were, by modern moral standards and historical ones, horrid and inhumane. 

A particularly egregious example of this revisionism comes from the work of anthropologist Jack Weatherford, who in his work Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, ascribes a number of qualities to the Mongols. For instance, claiming that when compared to the Aztecs or Malians, “the Mongols trod lightly on the world they conquered. They brought no distinctive architectural style with them. Nor did they seek to impose their language and religion on the conquered since in most cases they forbad non-Mongols to learn their language. The Mongols did not force cultivation of an alien crop nor impose radical change on their subjects’ collective way of life.” Weatherford offers a wide swathe of improvements and benefits that heralded from the Mongols, even asserting that the Mongols were uniquely responsible for the emergence of the European Renaissance. I actually think Weatherford is right in many instances. Certainly, the Mongol Empire resulted in a wide array of different cultural, technological, and sociological developments, and I don’t think any of that can be discounted. However, this assessment must be framed with the other aspects contextualizing Mongol rule. For everything that they did to impact agriculture in China, one must remember the nearly realized attempts at completely razing such farmlands. For every “established House of Healing” in Iran, one must remember the literal thousands that were killed during the invasion of the Khwarezmian Empire. As I’ve said throughout this episode, a nuanced, keen eye that can discern the meanings behind our sources, both primary and secondary, will serve us well. If we don’t do so, we run the risk of embracing stereotypes, promoting bad history, and completely misunderstanding an entire people. People, that I may add, are essentially still here today, with their own voices and their own stories to tell.

And frankly, that’s it for today. Thanks again for tuning in and for listening. I know the discussion here was a bit more academic in nature, but I personally think this historiographical context is needed because the history we’re diving into is murky and oftentimes unclear. Next time, we’re going to dive into the even muddier waters of prehistory, where we’ll be charting the various cultures and archaeological groups that emerged after the Last Glacial Period. 

Otherwise, you can find me at Twitter at the handle @NomadEmpiresPod or you can reach out to my email nomadsandempires@gmail.com. For episode scripts, sources, book reviews, and other articles on historical topics that I may not cover on the podcast, I’d suggest you follow my Substack, NomadsandEmpires.substack.com. And that’s pretty much all of it. Thank you again for listening, and see you next time on the windy plains of the steppe.

Music:
Tibetan Chant 3 - djgriffin (Freesound)
Outro - Personal work