The Mongol Hordes: They’re Just Like Us
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/01/empires-of-the-steppes-the-nomadic-tribes-who-shaped-civilization-kenneth-harl-book-review
Scholars now argue that early nomadic empires were the architects of modernity. But do we have the right measure of their success?
Manvir Singh:
The people of the Yamnaya culture were the first to take advantage of the new technologies and dominate much of the steppe. Starting north of the Black Sea about 3000 B.C., they used horses and wheeled carts to traverse astounding distances; geneticists have found second cousins buried almost nine hundred miles away from each other. They and their descendants also spilled into Europe, India, the Near East, and western China, as Harl, a professor emeritus of history at Tulane, recounts at the beginning of “Empires of the Steppes.” The Yamnaya tongue is one of the earliest offshoots of Proto-Indo-European, and an ancestor of such languages as Greek, German, English, Spanish, Old Celtic, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Bengali. (Today, more than three billion people speak an Indo-European language.) Roughly seventy per cent of us have some Yamnaya ancestry in our DNA. More than the Greeks, the Romans, or the Chinese, it’s the nomadic Yamnaya whose legacy survives in our words and our bodies.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/01/empires-of-the-steppes-the-nomadic-tribes-who-shaped-civilization-kenneth-harl-book-review
Scholars now argue that early nomadic empires were the architects of modernity. But do we have the right measure of their success?
Manvir Singh:
The people of the Yamnaya culture were the first to take advantage of the new technologies and dominate much of the steppe. Starting north of the Black Sea about 3000 B.C., they used horses and wheeled carts to traverse astounding distances; geneticists have found second cousins buried almost nine hundred miles away from each other. They and their descendants also spilled into Europe, India, the Near East, and western China, as Harl, a professor emeritus of history at Tulane, recounts at the beginning of “Empires of the Steppes.” The Yamnaya tongue is one of the earliest offshoots of Proto-Indo-European, and an ancestor of such languages as Greek, German, English, Spanish, Old Celtic, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Bengali. (Today, more than three billion people speak an Indo-European language.) Roughly seventy per cent of us have some Yamnaya ancestry in our DNA. More than the Greeks, the Romans, or the Chinese, it’s the nomadic Yamnaya whose legacy survives in our words and our bodies.
