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8-03-2015, 22:51

ANATOLY M. KHAZANOV, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

Despite a rather widespread opinion, pure pastoral nomadism, in all probability, was a rather late development in the Near east, and early pastoralists had to be quite different from their later counterparts. In fact, pastoralist economies embrace a large variety of different types and forms, ranging from a mixed economy to herdsman husbandry (often called tran-shumance in anthropological literature) and semi-sedentary pastoralism (agro-pastoralism), and ultimately to semi-nomadic pastoralism and pure pastoral nomadism as the most specialized form, which is characterized by the absence of agriculture, even as a supplementary and secondary activity (Khazanov 1994: 17-25). This is not an armchair classification. To a large extent, it is based on traditional criteria of pastoralists themselves. Thus, the Arabs differentiated between pure nomadic camel-breeders, sheep-breeders who were often semi-nomads, semi-sedentary pastoralists, and cultivators (Musil 1928: 44-45; Dickson 1951: 108-11; Coon 1976:198-99).



Inasmuch as pastoral nomadism still lacks a generally accepted definition, I have to start with arguing my own understanding of this form of pastoralism. Some scholars pay particular attention to mobility and use the term “nomadism” very broadly. They consider to be nomads such economically different groups as wandering hunters and gatherers, mounted hunters (the Great Plains Indians of North America), all kinds of pastoralists, some ethno-professional groups like the Roma (Gypsies), the “sea nomads” of Southeast Asia, and even certain categories of workers in contemporary societies (the so-called industrial mobility). Others perceive pastoral nomadism as a socio-economic system and write about “the pastoral mode of production.” Still others perceive it primarily in cultural terms of a specific way of living, lifestyle, world view, value system, et cetera.



These definitions, however, neglect or underestimate the economic side of nomadism which, in my opinion, is its most important aspect. Above all other characteristics, extensive mobile pastoralism is a specific type of food-producing economy that implies two opposites: between animal husbandry and cultivation, and between mobility and sedentism. The size and importance of cultivation in pastoralist societies, along with ecological factors, determines the degree of their mobility and may serve as a criterion for different varieties of pastoralism.



In this case, pastoral nomadism may be perceived as being based on the following main characteristics: (1) Pastoralism is the predominant form of economic activity; cultivation is either absent altogether or plays a very insignificant role. In the latter case it is small scale, occasional, and opportunistic. (2) Pastoralism has an extensive character connected with the maintenance of grazing or browsing herds all year round on natural pastures, without stables and without laying in fodder for livestock. (3) The pastoralist economy requires mobility within the boundaries of specific grazing territories, or else between such territories. (4) All, or at least the majority of the population, participates in these periodic migrations. (5) The




Traditional pastoralist economy was aimed at the requirements of subsistence. It was never profit oriented in a modern capitalist sense, although it was often considerably exchange-oriented. (6) social organization of pastoral nomads is based on kinship, and, in the case of the nomads of the Eurasian steppes and the Near and Middle East, also on various segmentary systems and genealogies, whether real or spurious. (7) Pastoral nomadism implies certain cultural characteristics connected with its mobile way of life, sociopolitical peculiarities, and some other factors.



Any specialization implies dependency, and pastoral nomadism is no exception. it was an innovative solution for assimilating certain, previously underexploited ecological zones. The emergence of pastoralism, and later of pastoral nomadism, was a crucial moment in the spreading of food-producing economies in the arid and semi-arid zones of the oikumene, because for a very long time they had an advantage there over all other types of economic activity.



However, the shortcomings of pastoral nomadism are also quite evident. first, its specialization was principally different from that of industrial and even of traditional farming and urban societies. since the internal division of labor within pastoral nomadic societies was undeveloped, their very existence implied division of labor between societies with different economies.



Second, unlike many types of farming which had the potential for diachronic technological development, in pastoral nomadism, once its formation was complete, the reproduction of similar and highly specialized forms prevailed. its ecological parameters significantly limited the capabilities for economic growth through technological innovation; they also placed very serious obstacles to the intensification of production. Thus, even temporary maximization of the number of livestock could be achieved mainly by increasing the production base through territorial expansion.



Third, pastoral nomadism as an economic system was characterized by constant instability. it was based on a balance between three variables: the availability of natural resources (such as vegetation and water), the number of livestock, and the size of the population, all of which were constantly oscillating. The situation was further complicated because these oscillations were not synchronic, as each of the variables was determined by factors both temporary and permanent, regular and irregular. The simplest and best-known case of temporary imbalance was periodic mass loss of livestock and consequent famine due to various natural calamities and epizootic diseases. in other cases, stock numbers sometimes outgrew the carrying capacities of available pastures. it was just such cyclical fluctuations that maintained the long-term balance in the pastoral nomadic economy, however ruinous they might be in the short run. in other words, the balance was not static but dynamic.



Under these conditions, pastoral nomadic economies were never self-sufficient and could never be so. An integral part of nomadic ideologies was the antithesis between nomadic and sedentary ways of life, which to some extent reflected the differences in actual conditions of existence. On a symbolic level this antithesis played an integrating function within nomadic societies and a differentiating one regarding the sedentary world. moreover, it created a negative view of the sedentary way of life. nevertheless, pastoral nomadic societies always needed sedentary farming and urban societies for their efficient functioning and their very existence. cereals and other farm products always formed an important part of their dietary systems. A diet of animal products alone, without any vegetable supplements, in principle cannot be healthy and balanced. Besides, meat is expensive, and its calorific yield is lower than that of grain; the near eastern pastoral nomads consume very little of it (marx 1992: 256). in addition, the nomads also procured a substantial part of their material culture from sedentary territories.



The dependence of pastoral nomadic societies on the sedentary ones was noticed already by Ibn Khaldun:



The desert civilization is inferior to urban civilization, because not all the necessities of civilization are to be found among the people of the desert While they [the Bedouin] need cities for their necessities of life, the urban population needs [the Bedouin] for convenience and luxuries. Thus, as long as they live in the desert and have not acquired royal authority and control of the cities, the Bedouin need the inhabitants of the latter (Ibn Khaldun 1967: 122).



Thus, pastoral nomads in the Near East, just like in other regions, always had to adapt not only to a specific natural environment but also to an external sociopolitical and cultural environment. The economic dependence of nomads on sedentary societies, and their various modes of adaptation to them, carried corresponding cultural implications. As the nomadic economy had to be supplemented with products of cultivation and crafts from external sources, so did nomadic culture need sedentary culture as a course, a component, and a model for comparison, borrowing, imitation, or rejection. Moreover, for efficient and long-term functioning pastoral nomads not only needed sedentary societies but complex and stratified ones capable of producing a regular surplus product and possessing mechanisms for its extraction, distribution, and redistribution.



The nomads understood very well certain social and military advantages of their way of life. At the same time, they also comprehended that their culture was less complex, rich, and refined than that of their sedentary counterparts. Their attitudes toward the latter had some similarities with the attitude toward the Western culture of many in the Third World: experiencing its irresistible glamor but, being outside its socioeconomic sphere, they reject it in principle, but strive to borrow and to benefit from some of its achievements. Interrelations of the pastoral nomads with sedentary societies ranged from direct exchange, trade mediation, and other related services, to becoming mercenaries, and to raiding, looting, blackmailing, occasional or more or less institutionalized subsidies and payments, regular tribute extraction, and direct conquests and subjugations.



It is no wonder then that pure nomads are recorded only in few regions of pastoralism (northern Eurasia, High Inner Asia, the Eurasian steppes, Arabia, the Sahara), and even in those regions pastoral nomadism usually co-existed with other forms of pastoralism. Seminomadic pastoralism was and is much more widespread throughout the world than pure pastoral nomadism. However, cultivation without irrigation is a risky endeavor in the dry zones and often results in overexploitation of productive ecosystems.



Be that as it may, not infrequently the paucity of the archaeological record and textual sources at our disposal poses many difficulties in the identification of exact historical and prehistorical pastoralist forms. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why archaeologists often prefer to use liberally generic terms like “pastoralism” or “pastoral nomadism,” although in and of themselves these terms are too imprecise and unspecific.



Thus, Cribb (1991: 16) insists that the search for a fully nomadic society should be abandoned in favor of an approach which recognizes nomadic tendencies manifested in varying degrees in a wide range of societies and communities. To make pastoral nomadism, or pastoralism in general, an all-encompassing and ill-defined category may be convenient for some scholars because of the nature of archaeological sources, but this will hardly advance a better understanding of prehistoric pastoralism. In this case, the difference between cultivat-




Ing and pastoralist societies, and specifics of the latter, become blurred. The elimination of the problem does not equal its solution.



Another danger is an excessive reliance on ethnographic models and analogies, because sometimes they may be misleading. archaeologists studying the pastoralists of the chalcolithic and Bronze ages in the Near East (and in the Eurasian steppes as well) sometimes perceive them in the image of pastoral nomads of the early Iron age and even of later historical periods. In the near east, they perceive them in the image of the Bedouin. This is a certain anachronism that does not take into account significant differences between those pastoralisms which cannot be reduced only to chronology. Ethnographic materials may serve as parallels and as comparative data in our models of prehistoric and early historic past, but they should not be taken as direct analogies for archaeological reconstructions. The application of ethnographic parallels and analogies to early pastoral systems requires particular care in the near and Middle east given the variety of systems found ethnographically even within the same environmental zones.



No wonder that the origin of specialized types of pastoralism, and especially of pastoral nomadism, is still one of the most difficult and disputed questions in the general study of mobile pastoralism. In most cases, scholars have to rely upon archaeological materials, which are often ambiguous and open to different interpretations. One can only hope that further investigations will be able to solve this question both by accumulating new data and by refining the methods of interpretation. Recently, some works pursuing this goal have been published, but these are still inconclusive (e. g., Bar-Yosef and Khazanov 1992; Barnard and Wendrich 2008; cribb 1991; Harris 1996; sadr 1991). As a result, while some scholars insist that pastoral nomadism in the ancient Near East emerged as early as the Neolithic (Cauvin 2000: 21-22), others, including myself, tend to view this hypothesis with skepticism.



Sherratt (1981, 1983) has provided serious arguments in support of his hypothesis that secondary products of sheep, goats, and cattle, including milk, hair, wool, traction, and pack transport, began to be utilized intensively only in the fifth and fourth millennia B. C. Only after that development could the early pastoralism begin to resemble the forms known to history, or used in ethnographic parallels. Still, this resemblance remained incomplete and sketchy.



Actually, many varieties of pastoralism were not completely divergent from cultivation, while pure pastoral nomadism without cultivation as a supplementary economic activity was not only a rare but also a late development. Attempts to prove its existence in the Eurasian steppes as early as the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age periods turned out to be unconvincing, and I strongly suspect that this is also true for the Near East. There is no reason to look upon the biblical Israelites, Amorites, Sutaeans, Arameans, and others as pure pastoral nomads, like the later Bedouin.



In my opinion, specialized forms of pastoral nomadism based on mounted animals (horses and camels) emerged only in the second half of the second and, especially, in the beginning of the first millennium B. C., although the use of those animals for traction and carrying loads, and as additional sources of meat and milk products had started much earlier (e. g., Sherrat 2003; Zarins 1989, and many others). In the Near East, horses were mainly used for military purposes: for chariot-driving and, later, for riding, and also for sports and hunting. Their possession had high prestige value, and they were important in military campaigns, but their meat and milk were not used for food. It was dromedaries that drastically increased the pasto-ralist mobility, opened new avenues of communication, including trade and natural resource exploitation, and allowed utilization of remote pastures, especially in the vast desert areas of the Arabian Peninsula and Sahara.



However, camel herds cannot be pastured together with small stock because they have a different pattern of movements and their feeding requirements are quite different from those of sheep and goats. A healthy camel’s diet needs desert plants rich in salt. The laws of ecology in this respect are more immutable than many human laws. This state of affairs in itself had determined many characteristics of pastoralism in the Near East. The boundaries between pure pastoral nomadism and other forms of mobile pastoralism there appear to be more clear-cut than in many other regions.



Therefore, grazing territories available to the early sheep and goat pastoralists were more limited (Levy, Adams, and Muniz 2004: 71). To the best of my knowledge, so far no detailed estimate of carrying capacity of the pastureland has been made with regard to particular regions of the Near East, such as the Negev, Sinai, or Syrian steppe. Were it done, we would have a better comprehension of the maximal number of stock that those pastoralists had been able to maintain, especially if climatic fluctuations were also taken into account. Still, it is indicative that in the beginning of the twentieth century the Bedouin population of the Negev did not exceed a few thousand people. Their population explosion after the establishment of the State of Israel was mainly connected with extra-pastoralist factors. There are simply not enough pastures in Southwest Asia to practice a large-scale pastoralist economy without longdistance migrations, which are impossible without camels and horses.



One can only surmise that the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age pastoralists were few in number. The only pack and transport, and, perhaps, also riding animals at their disposal might be donkeys. It is true that a donkey can carry up to 100 kilograms, which is two to three times less than a camel can carry, but camels move faster and need less frequent feeding and watering (Davis 1987: 166). Across the world donkeys are transport animals of cultivators and semisedentary or semi-nomadic groups, like the shawiyah of the Arabs, but never of pure pastoral nomads. Donkeys are ill-suited for long-distance migrations. True Bedouin, or other nomads, do not ride donkeys; in their societies donkeys have very low status. The only exception that 1 know are the Air Tuareg, who occasionally use donkeys in certain areas with rough terrain.



For these reasons, the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age pastoralists were hardly able to move more than thirty kilometers from sources of water. Even working camels can go as far as 1,000 kilometers without water during the cool season, and in the summer they can go without drinking for eight to ten days (Gauthier-Pilters and Dagg 1981: 50-53). However, sheep have to be watered every four to five days even in cold weather. This allows them to graze in a radius of 20 miles from the water source. 1n warm weather, they require water every day and can graze no more than 10 or 12 miles from a well or other water source (Mitchell 1971: 70).



Correspondingly, the size of herds of the early pastoralists should be smaller, too. Besides, there is no convincing evidence that the donkey became widespread throughout the Near and Middle East much earlier than by the third (Davis 1987: 152; Ovadia 1992; cf., however, Epstein 1985) or the fourth millennium B. C. (Eliot Braun, pers. comm.).



1 would also add that without riding animals and mounted warfare, the early pastoralists should lack a military advantage over their settled neighbors. Nomadic conquests and their consequences always attracted great attention. However, a related question has not been sufficiently addressed: why the pastoral nomads, with their limited human and economic resources, were, for centuries and even millennia, so strong in military respects? Each individual case certainly depended on many circumstances and deserves a special study, but in general terms the answer seems to be connected with the undeveloped division of labor and wide social participation, which provided the nomads with the edge in the military realm.




With but few exceptions, in sedentary states war was a specialized and professionalized sphere of activities. On the contrary, in pastoral nomadic societies, every male commoner was a warrior, most of them mounted ones. It is just these circumstances that allowed the nomads, despite their small number, to mobilize sufficiently large armies. Moreover, their specific way of life, among other things, implied the availability of a large number of horses and camels, and almost natural military training. in terms of individual skills, only the European knights and the middle eastern mamluks were a match to nomadic warriors; but the training and military equipment of the latter reflected many nomadic military traditions.



Things should be quite different in the chalcolithic and Bronze Ages. Pastoralists of those periods did not have any military advantage over sedentary populations. Besides, they were smaller in number. indeed, raiding and harassment cannot be excluded, but the cultivators could always reciprocate and do the same. Prior to the first millennium B. C., large-scale military invasions and conquests by pastoralists as explanatory hypotheses seem rather dubious. This circumstance should be taken into serious account in all discussions on the reasons for political changes in the ancient Near east, including the disintegration and collapse of some states and the ascent of others. in my opinion, the role of chalcolitic and Bronze age pastoralists in these processes should not be overestimated. in this regard they were also different from their later counterparts.



Remarkably, contrary to the Bedouin, in the early medieval period, contemporary writers disregarded small stock pastoralists even more than the rural population. Those pastoralists were always militarily weak and mostly dominated by sedentary people (Franz 2005: 65, 67). until recently, the situation remained basically the same. in the near and middle east, mobility has long been a distinguishing criterion in tribal ranking. The “noble” status of tribes was connected to their range of movement and mobility, and to raising camels in the interior of the deserts. The herding of sheep and goats was considered an activity carried out by “inferior” tribal groups that had to stay near agricultural lands (Chatty 1996: 195-96, n. 7; Eickelman 1998: 78).



In all, I suspect that there had been few, if any, pure pastoral nomads in the Near East until the first millennium B. C. The majority had to supplement stock-raising with cultivation, procurement of natural resources, specialized production of secondary products (such as wool-production in the Assyrian steppes from the third millennium B. C.), intermediary exchange and trade, or other occupations, even more so than pastoralists in later periods. Their dependence on sedentary agricultural and urban groups and societies should also be even greater than in the later periods.



Ethnographic data on the pastoral nomads in Southwest Asia indicate that a family of five needs thirty to fifty head of small stock, or even more, in addition to a few animals for transportation and riding, which are also used as milk animals. Only in that case would they be capable of regularly selling or exchanging some pastoral products for agricultural ones and to lead a relatively well-to-do life by local standards. These circumstances made early pastoralism even less self-sustainable than its latter varieties. One may also wonder whether the subsistence economy of early pastoralists was always capable of producing regular surplus for exchange and trade on a scale that would compensate for the disadvantages of their specialization. The frequent movements of pastoralists out of the dry zones might be dictated by the necessity to obtain food and other products in the areas of cultivation. Their presence within the settled zone is a well-established fact (Rowton 1974, 1977). Actually, the overlap of farming and pastoral zones and their joint utilization, which has been recorded by scholars in modern times (e. g., in the countries of the Fertile crescent, or in Arabia on the borders with Syria, and in Qasim) might be even more characteristic of the early pastoralism (Betts and Russel 2000: 31-32). These circumstances might also imply specific forms of political integration and socioeconomic structure; some of them could be quite different from those practiced since the first millennium B. C.



However, the migrations of pastoralists in the Near East in the third and second millennia B. C., as a rule, consisted of slow, gradual, and by no means centralized movement — sometimes infiltration, rather than rapid conquest — the more so because pastoralists there were the immediate neighbors of cultivated regions. One may assume that often not entire tribes (I use this term only tentatively because their existence cannot be taken for granted, and must be proven in any individual case), but their individual segments or other smaller groups were involved in such migrations (Klengel 1972: 37). in any case, migrations of pastoralists into cultivated areas might often result in their complete or partial sedentarization.



In many cases, we still cannot discriminate with certainty between seasonal camps, which were left by independent groups of mobile pastoralists, and those that belonged to groups who practiced a settlement-based transhumance (herdsman husbandry), in which only a part of the population carried out more or less specialized pastoral occupation. There is the risk that archaeological data on specialized segments of society (e. g., settlement-based transhumance and/or seasonally migrating shepherds) may be mistaken for a higher taxonomic unit, particularly if some cultural specifics are involved.



Many years ago, during my fieldwork among the groups that practiced transhumance in central Asia and the caucasus, i noticed that material culture of their shepherds, while they were away from permanent settlements, had many peculiarities in dwellings, dress, or utensils. at that time my knowledge of the early pastoralists in the near east was next to nothing. still, an idea crossed my mind that if future archaeologists, in addition to permanent settlements, study seasonal camps of those shepherds, without having any ethnographic information about them, they may well come to a conclusion that they are dealing with different ethno-cultural groups.



It is possible that in many cases chalcolithic and Bronze age pastoralist groups did not constitute separate societies, but rather were more or less specialized but integrated parts of larger agrarian-urban societies within a shared kinship idiom, sociopolitical organization, or other institutions. in any case, their interrelations with those societies might be quite different from interrelations maintained by the Bedouin in later historical periods. One may wonder whether even ideological opposition and symbolic dichotomy between nomadic and sedentary ways of life existed at that time at all.



 

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