Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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The grasslands of the old world developed historical importance only after the domestication of cattle, sheep, goats, asses, horses, camels and yaks. This step in progress resulted in the evolution of peoples who renounced the precarious subsistence of the chase and escaped the drudgery of agriculture, to devote themselves to pastoral life. It was possible only where domesticable animals were present, and where the intelligence of the native or the peculiar pressure exerted by environment suggested the change from a natural to an artificial basis of subsistence. Australia lacked the type of animal. Though North America had the reindeer and buffalo, and South America the guanaco, llama and alpaca, only the last two were domesticated in the Andean highlands; but as these were restricted to altitudes from 10,000 to 14,000 feet, where pasturage was limited, stock raising in primitive South America was merely an adjunct to the sedentary agriculture of the high intermontane valleys, and never became the basis for pastoral nomadism on the grassy plains. However, when the Spaniards introduced horses and cattle into South America, the Indians and half-breeds of the llanos and pampas became regular pastoral nomads, known as llaneros and gauchos. They are a race of horsemen, wielding javelin and lasso and bola, living on meat, often on horse-flesh like the ancient Huns, dwelling in leather tents made on a cane framework, like those of the modern Kirghis and medieval Tartars, dressed in cloaks of horsehide sewn together, and raiding the Argentinian frontier of white settlement for horses, sheep and cattle, with the true marauding instinct of all nomads.1051
Aridity is not the only climatic condition condemning a people to nomadic life. Excessive cold, producing the tundra wastes of the far north, has the same effect. Therefore, throughout Arctic Eurasia, from the Lapp district of Norway to the Inland Chukches of eastern Siberia, we have a succession of Hyperborean peoples pasturing their herds of reindeer over the moss and lichen tundra, and supplementing their food supply with hunting and fishing. The reindeer Chukches once confined themselves to their peninsula, so long as the grazing grounds were unexhausted; but they now range as far west as Yakutsk on the Lena River, The Orochones of the Kolima River district in eastern Siberia, who live chiefly by their reindeer, have small herds. A well-to-do person will have 40 to 100 animals, and the wealthiest only 700, while the Chukches with herds of 10,000 often seek the pasture of the Kolima tundra.1052 Farther west, the Samoyedes of northern Siberia and Russia and the Zirians of the Petchora River range with their large herds northward to the Yalmal Peninsula and Vaygats Isle in summer, and southward in winter. [See map pages 103, 225.] Here a herd of fifty head, which just suffices for the support of one family of four souls, requires 10 square versts, or 4.44 square miles of tundra pasturage.1053 Hence population must forever remain too sparse ever to attain historical significance. [See map page 8.] The Russian Lapps, too, lead a semi-nomadic life. Each group has a particular summer and winter settlement. The winter village is located usually inland in the Kola Peninsula, where the forests lend shelter to the herds, and the summer one near the tundra of the coast, where fishing is accessible. In winter, like the nomads of the deserts, they add to their slender income by the transport of goods by their reindeer and by service at the post stations.1054
These nomads of the frozen north, scattered sparsely over the remote periphery of the habitable world, have lacked the historical importance which in all times has attached to the steppe nomads, owing to their central location. The broad belt of deserts and grasslands which crosses the old world diagonally between 10° and 60° North Latitude from the Atlantic in Africa to the Pacific in Asia, either borders or encompasses the old domains of culture found in river oases, alluvial lowlands or coastal plains of the Torrid and Temperate Zones. The restless, mobile, unbound shepherds of the arid lands have never long been contained by the country which bred them. They have constantly encroached upon the territory of their better placed neighbors, invading, conquering, appropriating their fields and cities, disturbing but at the same time acquiring their culture, lording it over the passive agriculturists, and at the same time putting iron into their weaker blood. It is the geographical contact between arid steppes and moist river valley, between land of poverty and land of plenty, that has made the history of the two inseparable.1055
Cultural Regions Of Africa And Arabia.
Cultural Regions Of Africa And Arabia.
Every aspect of human life in the steppes bears the stamp of mobility. The nomad tolerates no clog upon his movements. His dwelling is the tent of skin or felt as among Kalmucks and Kirghis, or the tent wagon of the modern Boer1056 and the ancient Scythian as described by Herodotus.1057 "This device has been contrived by them as the country is fit for it," he says,—level, grassy, treeless. The temporary settlement of shepherd tribes is the group of tents, or the ancient carrago camp of the nomadic Visigoths,1058 or the laager of the pastoral Boers, both a circular barricade or corral of wagons.
Constant movement reduces the impedimenta to a minimum. The Orochones, a Tunguse nomadic tribe of eastern Siberia, have no furniture in their tents, and keep their meager supply of clothing and utensils neatly packed on sledges, as if to start at a moment's notice.1059 The only desirable form of capital is that which transports itself, namely, flocks and herds. Beyond that, wealth is limited to strictly portable forms, preferably silver, gold and jewels. It was in terms of these, besides their herds, that the riches of Abraham and Lot were rated in the Bible. That the Israelites when traveling through the wilderness should have had the gold to make the golden calf accords strictly with the verisimilitude of pastoral life.1060 Moreover, that these enslaved descendants of the Sheik Abraham, with their traditions of pastoral life, should have simply trekked-ruptured the frail ties of recently acquired habit which bound them to the Nile soil, is also in keeping with their inborn nomadic spirit. Similar instances occur among modern peoples. The Great Trek of the South African Boers in 1836, by which they renounced not only their unwelcome allegiance to England, but also their land,1061 was another exodus in accordance with the instinct of a pastoral people. They adopted no strange or difficult course, but traveled with their families as they were wont in their every day life of cattle-tenders, took all their chattels with them, and headed for the thin pastures of the far-reaching veldt. The Russian government has had to contend with a like fluidity in her Cossack tribes of the steppes, who have been up and off when imperial authority became oppressive. In the summer of 1878 West Siberia lost about 9000 Kirghis, who left the province Semipalatinsk to seek Mongolia.
Environment determines the nomadic habits of the dweller of desert and steppe. The distribution of pasture and water fixes the scope and the rate of his wandering; these in turn depend upon geographic conditions and vary with the season. The Papago Indians of southern Arizona range with their cattle over a territory 100 by 150 miles in extent, and wander across the border into Mexico. When their main water supply, derived from wells or artificial reservoirs near their summer villages, is exhausted, they migrate to the water-holes, springs or streams in the cañons. There the cattle graze out on the plains and return to the cañons to drink.1062 Every Mongol tribe and clan has its seasonal migration. In winter the heavier precipitation and fuller streams enable them to collect in considerable groups in protected valleys; but the dry summer disperses them over the widest area possible, in order to utilize every water-hole and grass spot. The hotter regions of the plains are abandoned in summer for highlands, where the short period of warmth yields temporary pastures and where alone water can be found. The Kirghis of Russian Turkestan resort in summer to the slopes and high valleys of the Altai Mountains, where their auls or tent villages may be seen surrounded by big flocks of sheep, goats, camels, horses and cattle.1063 The Pamir in the warm months is the gathering place for the nomads of Central Asia. The naked desert of Arabia yields a rare herbage during the rainy season, when the Bedouin tribes resort to it for pasturage;1064 but during the succeeding drought they scatter to the hills of Yemen, Syria and Palestine,1065 or migrate to the valley of the Nile and Euphrates.1066 The Arabs of the northern Sahara, followed by small flocks of sheep and goats, vibrate between the summer pastures on the slopes of the Atlas Mountains and the scant, wiry grass tufts found in winter on the borders of the desert.1067 When the equatorial rains begin in June, the Arabs of the Atbara River follow them north-westward into the Nubian desert, and let their camel herds graze on the delicate grass which the moisture has conjured up from the sandy soil. The country about Cassala, which is flooded during the monsoon rains by the rivers from the Abyssinian Mountains, is reserved for the dry season.1068 In the same way the Tartar tribes of the Dnieper, Don, Volga and Ural Rivers in the thirteenth century moved down these rivers in winter to the sea coast, and in summer up-stream to the hills and mountains.1069 So for the past hundred years the Boers of the South African grasslands have migrated in their tent wagons from the higher to the lower pastures, according to the season of the year, invading even the Karroo Desert after the short summer rains.1070
This systematic movement of nomads within their accepted boundaries leads, on slight provocation, to excursions beyond their own frontiers into neighboring territories. The growing herd alone necessitates the absorption of more land, more water-holes, because the grazed pastures renew their grass slowly under the prevailing conditions of drought. An area sufficient for the support of the tribe is inadequate for the sustenance of the herd, whose increase is a perennial expansive force. Soon the pastures become filled with the feeding flocks, and then herdsmen and herds spill over into other fields. Often a season of unusual drought, reducing the existing herbage which is scarcely adequate at best, gives rise to those irregular, temporary expansions which enlarge the geographical horizon of the horde, and eventuate in widespread conquest. Such incursions, like the seasonal movements of nomads, result from the helpless dependence of shepherd tribes upon variations of rainfall.
The nomad's basis of life is at best precarious. He and want are familiar friends. A pest
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