Anthropology

by A. L. Kroeber

256. Central and Northern Asia

It has become a habit to regard central and northern Asia as a hive for humanity, as the area from which nations and races have chronically swarmed. Whenever the origin of a people remains obscure, be they Neandertals, Alpines, Sumerians, Chinese, Japanese, Aryans, or what not, some one propounds the convenient hypothesis of deriving them from this vast interior land, which in many cases amounts to an explanation of the half-known by the unknown. Of late there has been added the fashion of attributing the expansions to climatic drying-up of central Asia, which forced the population out. There appears to be considerable evidence of such progressive desiccation; but its degree, and still more the extent of its influence upon culture and emigration, remain to be ascertained.

A more balanced view would concede the recurrence and occasional destructiveness of the invasions out of central Asia, but would view them rather as transient and relatively superficial phenomena from the point of view of civilization; and on the other hand would recognize that under all the boiling of tribes and peoples, the growth and spread of culture went steadily on, even in the tracts which one is wont to associate only with the perpetual breeding of elusive and devastating nomads. In short, it is wise to guard against a natural overestimation of the sensational, cataclysmic aspects of the history of the interior Asiatic peoples. It is their spasmodic irruptions which the self-centered nations of the West, of India, and of China, have been chiefly concerned with. Their attempts at achieving stability, their increments to the world’s culture, their rôle as peaceful transmitters, have lain at home, largely out of vision of the peoples clustered about the foci of civilization.

It may be added that the temptation to the outsider to burst by force into the seats of wealth and splendor as soon as firmness of guard slackens, is not confined to Ural-Altaians, but is ever present in history. Amorites, Hebrews, Arabs, Æthiopians, Lybians, Greeks, Kelts, Germans, Hindus, and Malays have all played this part at one time or another. Semite, Hamite, and Aryan are no different in such regard from Ural-Altaian, except that in the short span conventionally known as history the former have happened more often to be the ins and haves, the central Asiatics the outs and have-nots. Further, the destructive effect of nomad migrations, even where accompanied by mass settlement of population, is everywhere transient so far as civilization is concerned. Hebrew and Hellenic, Arab and Germanic tribes did crash cities and empires before them, but they tore down only what was already moribund, and brought in new systems of thought, new methods of feeling and organization, which, however crude at first, soon added new qualities to culture. The chief distinction of the north Asiatics is that, excepting some terror-striking massacres, they were both less subversive and less constructive culturally than Semites and Indo-Europeans. They barely dented the civilization of the West as they barely dented that of India and China. If Russia is backward as compared with western Europe, it is not from having been Tatar-ruled a few centuries, but because Russia has long been peripheral to the Mediterranean focus of civilization and therefore chronically belated. It was the very thinness of her culture that made mediæval Russia succumb to the Mongol wave which pounded vainly against the more consolidated civilization of central Europe and quickly drew off.

To define the exact contribution of the North Asiatics to civilization is difficult: partly because of the comparative paucity of available archæological and historical records; partly because their habitat did not contain one of the greater hearths of civilization at which its most distinctive forms were sweated out. The area has always been relatively though not extremely peripheral. The horse, indeed, can be set down as one important gift of the Ural-Altaic peoples or their predecessors to general civilization. It is only in central Asia that a wild horse—not a tame breed that has run wild—is to be found; and it seems to have been from the north that soon after 2000 B.C. the animal was introduced into Mesopotamia and India. Biological considerations also point to interior Asia as the most likely area of first domestication of several of the earlier fundamental animals of culture, especially the sheep and goat. The comparatively advanced culture of Anau in Turkistan in the Neolithic and early Bronze periods is also significant, even though this site lies only just within the great steppe and plateau country. Some of the jade and jade-like stone used for tools and ornaments in the Swiss lake-dwellings appears to have come from inner Turkistan. The probability of the central Asiatic peoples having been the transmitters of metals, cattle, grains and other important groups of culture elements from the Near to the Far East has already been mentioned, as has the established trade between China and the Mediterranean world in Roman times (§ [251]). Indeed the very character of the country and cultural conditions which favored a considerable degree, though not an absolute prevalence, of nomadism in interior Asia, seem also to have fostered, in many periods, a longer range of trade than flourished elsewhere. Finally, it appears that the Turks and Mongols had at least a hand in the early use of gunpowder for firearms; and, as already mentioned, the first state paper money, that of China, was issued by a Mongol dynasty. It is scarcely rash to predict that the intensive study of the interior Asiatic peoples from both prehistoric and historic sources, without speculative bias or plunging of opinion, will prove one of the most illuminating contributions to the history of general civilization.

The original unity of the Ural-Altaians—with the Turks, Mongols, and Tungus-Manchu as the Altaic or definitely Asiatic group, Finno-Ugrians as Uralic or Eurasian, and Samoyeds as specifically Arctic representatives—is accepted on linguistic grounds by almost all authorities in the field. Yet the career of the several divisions has been diverse. The Finno-Ugrians have mainly been peaceful: the Finns definitely so for two thousand years: the Hungarian Magyars were exceptional when they terrorized central Europe a thousand years ago. Both these nations have long since become integrally absorbed into European culture. They are the only Ural-Altaic peoples with this experience. The remainder of the Finno-Ugrians have for some centuries become increasingly submerged under Russian civilization; much as in the Far East the Manchu-Tungus have gradually fallen more and more under either Chinese or, of late, Russian cultural influence. As between the Turks and Mongols, the greatest single conquest, that of Djengis Khan and his successors, falls to the record of the latter; but the Turks have been the more numerous, stable, and advanced people. They have frequently settled as well as invaded; and are the only known stock, as previously mentioned (§ [245]), that has ever seriously and permanently encroached on territory once held by Indo-Europeans—in Asia Minor and the Caspian region. The later so-called Mongol conquests, those of Tamerlane and the Indian Moguls, were made by armies mainly of Turks under dynasties tracing back to former Mongol leaders. The Turks in general have inclined to Mohammedanism on coming into contact with the world religions, the Mongols to Buddhism, although Christianity in its Nestorian form once made considerable numbers of converts among both.

Several important historic peoples cannot yet be assigned with certainty to one or the other of the Ural-Altaic divisions, or are variously classified: thus the Huns, most likely to have been Turks; the White Huns or Ephthalites; the Avars; and the ancient Bulgars.

In northern and eastern Siberia there live, besides the Samoyed, a series of non-Ural-Altaic peoples, truly peripheral and retarded in culture, who seem once to have occupied larger areas but to have shrunk or been partially absorbed before Ural-Altaic expansion. These include the tribes sometimes grouped as Yeniseian; the Yukaghir; the Kamchadal-Koryak-Chukchi group; a few Eskimo who have either failed to cross Behring strait or have come across it from America; and perhaps the Ainu of Japan and Sakhalien. These have been called the Palæo-Asiatic peoples, though their diverse languages render their community of origin dubious. How far they may be considered as following a positively similar culture, except in direct response to an extreme climate, is also doubtful. Their rigorously marginal position and depriving environment stamp their culture with a preponderance of negative traits. The possession of domesticated reindeer is common to several of these peoples as well as to the Tungus and the Finno-Ugric Lapps of northern Russia and Scandinavia. Reindeer-breeding among these groups appears to be due to a transmission, in the sense of being a reflex of contact, an imitation of the cattle or horse breeding of the more favorably situated nations to the south. It is also interesting and probably significant that the American Eskimos never domesticated the reindeer, although they depended largely upon its hunt.

Racially the array of north and central Asiatic peoples shades from pronounced Caucasian to extreme Mongoloid type. The Mongols have given name to their whole larger racial stock, and the Tungus-Manchu and northeast Siberian savages clearly form part thereof. The Turks in the main are rather Caucasian, although all intergradations occur according to region; as also among the Finno-Ugrians. The Hungarians to-day are not only Caucasians but Alpines; the Finns definite Nordics; the Lapps a strange partial graft of Nordic traits on broad faced and broad headed Mongolian physique.