14 chapter onesilk, agricultural and craft products, as well as various precious objects
(gold, silver, pieces of jewelry, etc.) from the sedentary world, given
that none of those things could be produced in the steppe or those that
could were in insuffi cient quantity. Such abilities were the key to the
maintaining of any ‘Steppe Empire’ for any longer period of time. Th e
alternative was, of course, the pastoralist economy, with its extensive
stock breeding strategies, but its resources were not suffi cient for estab-
lishing and maintaining a ‘Steppe Empire.’^2 For that reason, the elites
of the nomadic societies in the Eurasian steppe lands had nowhere else
to turn but southwards, to the sedentary societies. Meanwhile, such
societies were making every possible eff ort to mark and maintain the
boundaries—physical, as well as cultural—which separated them from
the northern nomads.
Such eff orts are best illustrated by special walls or lines of defense
erected on the borders of sedentary societies. In this way, the opposi-
tion between Self and Other was mapped onto that between inside
and outside in relation to the specifi c location of the walls and of the
fortresses built to defend the frontier. Th e frontier never was the locus
for any ‘nomadic identity’, but it distinctively marked the rejection
of (or at least an attempt at reducing) contacts between nomadic and
sedentary societies. Artifi cial barriers (walls, earthen ramparts, ditches,
etc.) thus mark the borders separating the Self from the Other, one’s
consecrated or sacred territory from the impure lands of the foreign-
ers. Depriving the space of the Other of any sacred quality was in the
pre-modern period a strategy of idealizing one’s own space by impos-
ing onto it the values of the Self.
Th e Chinese built up such a limes against the Xiongnu tribes as early
as the early Han dynasty (third century B.C.), while both Byzantines
and Sassanians began building fortifi ed frontiers against the fi ft h and
sixth-century nomads: Anastasius’ Wall in Constantinople, the three
defense lines built along the Danube limes during the reign of Justin-
ian I, and the forts in Derbend, the Caucasus Mountains, and Merv.^3
In the eighth century, the Arabs built long walls around the oases in
Maverranahr, the region between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers
in Central Asia.^4 Th e Great Wall of China begins in Manchuria, which
(^2) See more in, Khazanov 1994b, passim; Kradin 2001, 24.
(^3) Pletneva 1976, 17–18; Christian 1998, 253.
(^4) Khazanov 1994b, 222 f.