use for the horses the Chinese obtained from the nomads was infighting
against nomads (not necessarily the same ones the Chinese were trading with,
although this did happen). In wars among settled peoples, infantry usually
carried the day but woe unto such an army that did not have an adequate
cavalry but had to face nomads. In China there was little room for growing
grass since farmers had turned most available space into cropland, and
whatever horses the Chinese did raise could not begin to satisfy their needs.
While nomads were important as producers and consumers, their most
crucial role was as intermediaries between settled peoples in interregional
and transcontinental trade. Goods from China that ended up in India, Persia,
or Europe often had been passed from group to group in informal relay
networks as nomads made their seasonal rounds. Nomads also taxed the
professional merchants who traveled across their lands in return for providing
services like protection and sometimes guides and transport animals. The
liveliest trade often took place at ecotones, transition areas between adjacent
ecological regions as, for example, between desert and steppe, steppe and
river valley, or steppe and forest. East-to-west nomad networks not only
linked the settled societies, they also plugged into north-to-south routes,
bringing furs, walrus ivory, gold, and other metals from the Arctic, taiga
forest, and Siberian mountains.
Among the earliest horse-breeding steppe nomads that appear in the lit-
erature of settled peoples were the Scythians. The Greeks inhabiting the
cities on the northern rim of the Black Sea traded directly with the
Scythians, exchanging clothing, wine,“and the other things that belong to
civilized life,”according to Strabo, for slaves, hides,“and such other things
as nomads possess.”The Black Sea was the entryway into the Russian river
system, and Greek goods including, Athenian blackfigure ware and Ionian
wine jars, decorative pieces, mirrors, and weapons have been found in burial
tombs far into the interior. This represented a trade in very high-end goods
that included sable fur and gold.
The Scythian trade routes ran from the Don to the Volga River, then to
the Urals and further on to the Altai (“Golden”) Mountains, where most
Siberian gold originated. Herodotus indicates that at least some of this was
carried on by professional long-distance merchants. In sharing with his
readers where he got his information about a people called the Argippaei, he
notes that“Scythians sometimes reach these parts, as do Greeks from the
trading-center Borysthenes and from other trading-centers on the Euxini
[Black] Sea, and it is not hard to get information from them. The Scythians
who travel to these tribes conduct their business in seven languages, each
requiring its own translator.”The Argippaei may have lived in the Ural
foothills. Beyond this, Herodotus refers to a poem by a certain Aristeas, who
claimed to have traveled to an even more distant people, the Issedones. They
told Aristeas that farther on“lives a one-eyed race called the Arimaspians,
beyond them is the land of the gold-guarding griffins, and beyond them the
126 From the Jade Road to the Silk Road