Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

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СКАЧАТЬ to forest-steppe and then to steppes, which in turn gradually merge into deserts in the mid latitudes. The climate is extreme continental, with intensely cold winters and unbearably hot summers. High mountains, usually in ranges oriented east-west, dominate the distant landscapes. A particularly high knot extends from Tibet north through the Pamirs and Tianshan to the Altai; many peaks rise well over 20,000 feet. At the west and east ends, in Kazakhstan and China respectively, the steppes grade into farming areas. The deserts contain many linear oases, some very large, along the rivers that drain the high mountains. These linear oases have been the seats of great civilizations for the last two to two and a half millennia.

      Westerners tend to imagine a vast grassland stretching for thousands of miles. The truth is more complex. The vast grasslands are in the northern, northwestern, and northeastern borderlands of Central Asia proper and are broken by low mountain ranges and rivers. The vast empty spaces without mountains, lakes, or rivers occupy almost all of Kazakhstan—the true steppe nation—and a great deal of Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, as well as neighboring countries. These areas are much drier, ranging from extremely dry grassland to waterless desert. Outside Kazakhstan and northern Turkmenistan, however, they are broken at fairly frequent intervals by large river or lake valleys that drain the snow ranges to the south and east. These valleys permit intensive agriculture.

      Thus, the true picture of Central Asia is a rather coarse-grained mosaic. In the north and in the many mountain valleys and slopes of the east and south, there is good grazing, and here the famous nomads raised stock (Khazanov 1984; Vainstein 1980). In the river valleys, which are concentrated in the south, large-scale intensive agriculture is practiced today. An interesting feature of this agriculture throughout history, but apparently not in prehistoric times, is the extreme importance of tree and vine cropping. Apricots, mulberries, grapes, melons, almonds (in the far south of the region—they cannot take cold), and other such crops have been staple foods, not just minor dessert items. This sort of cultivation has not fared well in recent decades (and no doubt at many times in the past), due to escalating wars and scorched-earth policies; trees do not regrow fast enough.

      Civilization flourished here, especially after 500 BCE, reaching a climax in the centuries of the Silk Road. In between are vast deserts, almost worthless, providing major barriers to travel. The Takla Makan Desert of Chinese Central Asia is one of the world’s driest, with virtually no rain. Major travel routes followed the rivers whenever possible, thus keeping relatively close to the southern fringes of the region. There was, however, also a great deal of contact across the northern approaches, where grassland and forest-steppe permitted nomadic and forest-based livelihood. North of that, subarctic forest eventually became used for specialized reindeer herding.

      Agriculture spread to the western steppe-margins very early. At the opposite end of the steppes from China, the Tripolye and Cucuteni cultures, in modern Ukraine and Romania, built enormous towns with extremely elaborate and beautiful ceramics, at the same time as the Ubaid culture was developing rapidly toward urbanism in the Near East: roughly 5500–3000 BCE (Anthony 2007; Kohl 2007). The huge Tripolye and Cucuteni sites are not ancestral to any modern culture; they apparently were eclipsed by Indo-Europeans. They grew “emmer, einkorn, bread wheat, barley, peas, vetch, lentils, sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, buckwheat, millet (P. miliaceum), and both wild-type and domestic grapes” (Kohl 2007: 44). The Yamnaya cultural horizon, occurring in the same general area, may have involved early Indo-Europeans (Anthony 2007). Cities and writing arose in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3200 BCE, indirectly influencing the steppes through trade.

      Meanwhile, the first indications of contact with China are visible: panic millet turned up in Europe by 4000 BCE and was common by 5500 in the Linearbandkeramik and other cultures (Bellwood 2005: 21). (The Linearbandkeramik, or LBK, archaeological culture was the first agricultural manifestation in most of central Europe; it spread very rapidly from the east around 5500 BCE.) Millet probably spread from China, though domestication in Central Asia is also possible. It was a crop in Central Asia by 2200 (Frachetti 2012; Frachetti et al. 2010). A glass bead from the Near East at 2900 shows early contact in the other direction (Anthony 2007: 354).

      However, it seems likely that there were far earlier contacts between East and West. Pottery spread through Siberia to the West. The earliest European pottery looks very much like the much earlier Chinese ware. Later, the similarities in shape, color, size, and design between Tripolye, early Mesopotamian, and Yangshao pottery styles are so striking that they have long been noted (e.g., Andersson 1934, 1943). While denied by excessively cautious scholars who note slight differences in the designs, these similarities are so numerous, striking, and close that to ignore them is pedantic.

      Statuettes associated with trees and fertility, and stylistically close to Near Eastern analogues, appear around 3000 BCE. They may be connected with the cult of sacred trees that endures in Central Asia in spite of Islamic puritanism; ten-foot-thick plane trees, elms that ooze healing sap, and other wonderful trees are frequent and widely distributed there (Gorshunova 2012). Sacred trees are important to Uralic and Altaic peoples and to some settled Iranic-speakers. The cult is clearly continuous with Chinese reverence for trees; the same ideas and behaviors are visible.

      Agriculture flourishes in Ukraine and in river valleys and montane out-wash fans throughout inner Asia, but full steppe conditions are impossible for agriculture. They are, however, ideal for herding the hardier kinds of stock: sheep, goats, and horses. The riverine zones along the Tarim, Syr Darya, Amu Darya, and other rivers were once among the most agriculturally productive tracts of land on earth—grain, forage crops, fruit trees, vegetables, and other crops (including early cotton) flourished. In recent decades, however, pollution, salt buildup in the soil, monocropping (especially cotton), urban sprawl, and other features of extremely bad land management have ruined much of the land.

      The existence of extremely rich zones near vast tracts of nomadic herding country was an invitation for trouble. The steppe nomads could raise huge mobile forces and descend on the cities and farms, especially when warm and moist climatic periods allowed the nomads to increase both human and animal populations. Then the nomad leaders settle in the cities, succumb to luxury, lose their martial ability, and the whole cycle starts over again—as pointed out by the great Arab social scientist Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century.

      This sequence is complicated by the fact that steppe nomads were never independent of settled people (Barfield 1989; Khazanov 1984). They required grain to supplement the products of their herds. They produced felt and wool goods but depended on settled people for other fabrics. They needed more metal than they could produce themselves. Metal goods—especially gold—became major wealth and show items. (Stock-herders who could produce all their own food and everyday goods existed in Arabia and Africa, but could not do so in Central Asia, where at least some grain, clothing, metal, and the like had to be bought.)

      At the margins of the steppes, farming people encroached during warmer, moister periods. Since these are also the periods when steppe populations were increasing, tensions naturally arose. The infamous “barbarians” that harassed the Roman Empire rode out during such a time: the favorable climatic period in the early centuries of the Common Era. So did Mongol hordes during the Medieval Warm Period a few centuries later. Cold periods, by contrast, were deadly. Late winter and early spring storms dropped deep snow or, worse, ice over the young grass, starving the herds just when they needed feed the most. The old myth that “droughts” forced the nomads out on raids is long dead; droughts kept the nomads at home, scrabbling hard to survive, with no strength to raid. It was good times that made them raiders.

      The steppe world began to take shape around 4000 BCE with the coming of livestock to Central Asia. Sheep and goats slowly spread from their homes in the hospitable, pleasant Near East out onto the desolate, cold steppe and desert lands. The real dawn of steppe power, however, was the domestication of the horse. It apparently took place around 3500 BCE in what is now Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Horses are first known as tamed livestock from the Botai culture of the Ukraine area, around 3500–3000 (not 4000, as previously reported). Horses were apparently domesticated only once, СКАЧАТЬ