Nomads, Past and Present

The “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. Their deeds still resonate today. Indeed, these nomads built long-lasting empires, facilitated the first global trade of the Silk Road and disseminated religions, technology, knowledge and goods of every description that enriched and changed the lives of so many across Europe, China and the Middle East. From a single region emerged a great many peoples—the Huns, the Mongols, the Magyars, the Turks, the Xiongnu, the Scythians, the Goths—all of whom went on to profoundly and irrevocably shape the modern world. Professor Kenneth W. Harl’s newest book Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization (Bloomsbury, 2023) vividly re-creates the lives and world of these often-forgotten peoples from their beginnings to the early modern age. Their brutal struggle to survive on the steppes bred a resilient, pragmatic people ever ready to learn from their more advanced neighbors. In warfare, they dominated the battlefield for over fifteen hundred years. Under charismatic rulers, they could topple empires and win their own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Secret History of the Mongols is one of the literary wonders of the world. Writing in the thirteenth century, the Secret Historian - whose identity remains unknown - combines insider history and verse to chronicle the life of Chingghis Khan and the empire he founded. In an evocative new translation, Chris Atwood brings to life for contemporary readers the world of the Mongol steppe, the Mongol conquests, and life within the tent cities of the Mongol empire. In this episode, Prof. Atwood joins me to discuss what we know about the identity of the Secret Historian; the circumstances of the epic’s creation, reception, and transmission; how Mongol identity is constructed and portrayed in The Secret History; and his work as a historian and translator.Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the second half of the 19th century, both professional and amateur archaeologists, surveyors, and explorers of the “periphery” of the Russian Empire became increasingly interested in the perceived ancient nomadic histories of Siberia, Central Asia, and Ukraine. Their excavations of “nomadic sites” associated with the Scythians or the Mongol Empire were aimed not just at scientific investigation and scholarly inquiry, but were also born out of and contributed to discourses around modernity, race, ethnicity, and nationhood during the later days of the Russian Empire’s colonial expansion. Ismael Biyashev’s PhD research (University of Illinois-Chicago, 2023) charts the emergence, historical development, and global networks of the field of “nomadic archaeology,” examining how members of the Russian intellectual elite perceived and presented a nomadic past as a means of articulating contemporary Russian identity and visions for the future.For further open-access reading on this topic, see Ismael’s “Peripheral Histories” blog post here.Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas Morton, an Associate Professor of History at Nottingham Trent University, discusses his research on Mongol nomadism and identity. He explores how nomadic life shaped the cultural traits of the Mongols and contributed to the empire's decline. Morton delves into the unification of diverse tribes under Genghis Khan, the strategic shifts in diplomacy during conquests, and the gradual conversion to various religions. He also examines the complex factors behind the Mongol Empire’s collapse, highlighting the interplay of local identities and governance challenges.

“New Babylon” is an architectural and urban planning project designed by the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys between 1959 and 1974 in response to certain economic and social conditions he perceived to exist in the modern city: its emphasis on work and the production of capital, its highly-planned, gridded spaces. “New Babylon” put forward an ideal city planning model in which people would be able to enter a state of what Constant called homo ludens, “men at play.” “New Babylonians” would be members of a leisure class, in constant movement in and between cities designed to be highly flexible, mobile, and to encourage a state of perpetual adventure and exploration. While “New Babylon” explicitly positioned nomadism as an ideal which should be embraced on a wider scale, the influence of an actual nomadic community on the design and conceptualization of the project has been largely overlooked. Namely, Constant drew heavily on interactions with and influence from Romani culture and heritage. In this episode, Jérémie McGowan, whose PhD dissertation at the University of Edinburgh analyzed the Romani influence on “New Babylon,” joins me to discuss the ideologies underlying “New Babylon;” how Romani influences manifest in the project; and how and under what circumstances nomads can be either culturally idealized or vilified.Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late 19th century, the Ottoman government sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as "empty." Both land and people were incorporated into territorially bounded grids of administrative law. Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2023) examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin in the Syrian interior engaged in these processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scales. Narrating the lives of Bedouin individuals involved in Ottoman administration, Nora Barakat brings this population to the center of modern state-making, from their involvement in the pilgrimage administration in the 18th century and their performance of land registration and taxation as the Ottoman bureaucracy expanded in the 19th, to their eventual rejection of Ottoman attempts to reallocate the “empty land” they inhabited in the 20th. In this episode, we discuss categories and definitions of “bureaucrat,” “tent-dwelling,” and “tribe” in this context; longue durée shifts in Ottoman forms of governance in the Syrian interior and the role of Bedouin elites within Ottoman administration; and both Bedouin participation in and resistance to Ottoman state-making projects.Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ben Hoffler is the co-founder of several hiking trails in the Middle East, including the Sinai Trail, the Red Sea Mountain Trail, the Wadi Rum Trail, and the Bedouin Trail, which aim to boost and promote sustainable tourism and help conserve the endangered heritage of the Bedouin tribes who historically live in these regions and manage the trails today. In this episode, we discuss tourism as heritage preservation, overcoming negative stereotypes of regions like the Sinai, and how historically-nomadic communities like the Bedouin can benefit from tourism initiatives.Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, Embracing Landscape: Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia (Berghahn Books, 2021), focuses on concepts of domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. Examining subsistence methods and lifestyle practices like hunting rituals and herding techniques in detail, Selcen Küçüküstel’s ethnographic account of contemporary lifeways and belief systems among the Dukha illuminates the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals. Her research centers the role of the landscape in mediating and shaping human-animal interactions and encounters, capturing how the Dukha experience the landscape of the taiga as both their ancestral home and as a place with its own more-than-human agency. In this episode, we discuss the history of the Dukha, practices of pastoralism and hunting in northern Mongolia, the effects of contemporary political and environmental change on the Dukha, and Selcen’s methodological approach to her research as both a journalist and anthropologist.Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his debut short story collection, Nomad, Nomad (Bound to Brew, 2021), Jonan Pilet explores the lives of Mongols and expats looking for a sense of home within the nomadic culture. Based on Jonan’s insights having grown up in Mongolia, the series of interlinked narratives capture the cultural turmoil Mongolia experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union, painting a vivid picture of Mongol landscapes, Western interactions, and the rise in cultural tensions.Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between 1956 and 1960, leaders in the Mongolian People’s Republic embarked on a collectivization campaign to change the way in which Mongolians interacted with animals and the environment. Collectivization in Mongolia, which followed the Soviet model, confiscated private livestock to create collectively-owned and -worked livestock herds, and was seen as one of the building blocks of a modern socialist state. In a society where nomadic herders represented a large segment of the population, however, the process of collectivizing livestock herds took a different form than it did in other socialist contexts, and, post-socialism, many former leaders and collective members remember fondly the state of herding during socialism compared to the uncertainty that followed during the transition to capitalism. In this episode, Dr. Kenny Linden joins me to share his research into the animal, cultural, and environmental history of livestock herding in socialist Mongolia and to discuss adaptations of pastoralism to socialist conditions.Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices