systematic migration of the nomads, and through this indirectly that
military and political organization which has given the shepherd races
of the earth their great historical mission of political consolidation.
Agriculture, though underlying all permanent advance in civilization, is
handicapped by the lack of courage, mobility, enterprise and large
political outlook characterizing early tillers of the soil. All these
qualities the nomad possesses. Hence the union of these two elements,
imperious pastor superimposed upon peaceful tiller, has made the only
stable governments among savage and semi-civilized races.[1097] The
politically invertebrate peoples of dark Africa have secured the
back-bone to erect states only from nomad conquerors. The history of the
Sudan cannot be understood apart from a knowledge of the Sahara and its
peoples. All the Sudanese states were formed by invaders from the
northern desert, Hamitic or Semitic. [See map page 487.] The Galla or
Wahuma herdsmen of East Africa founded and maintained the relatively
stable states of Uganda, Kittara, Karague, and Uzinza in the equatorial
district; the conquerors remained herders while they lorded it over the
agricultural aborigines.[1098] In prehistoric times when the various
peoples of the Aryan linguistic family were spreading over Europe and
southern Asia, the superiority of the shepherd races must have been
especially marked, because in that era only the unobstructed surface of
the steppes permitted the concentration of men on a vast scale for
migration and conquest. Everywhere else regions of broken relief and
dense forests harbored small, isolated peoples, to whom both the idea
and the technique of combined movement were foreign.
[Sidenote: Scope of nomad conquests.]
The rapidity and wide scope of such conquests is explained largely by
the fact that nomads try to displace only the ruling classes in the
subjugated territory, leaving the mass of the population practically
undisturbed. Thus they spread themselves thin over a wide area. How
lasting are the results of such conquests depends upon the degree of
social evolution attained by the herdsmen. Genghis Khan and Tamerlane,
after the manner of overlords, organized their conquered nations, but
left them under the control of local princes,[1099] while their tribute
gatherers annually swept the country like typical nomad marauders. The
Turks are still only encamped in Europe. They too make taxation
despoliation. And though their dominion has produced no assimilation
between victor and vanquished, it has given political consolidation to a
large area occupied by varied peoples. The Hyksos conquest of Egypt
found the Nile Valley divided into several petty principalities under a
nominal king. The nomad conquerors possessed political capacity and gave
to Egypt a strong, centralized government, which laid the basis for the
power and glory of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The Tartars in 1279 A.D. and
the Manchus in 1664 conquered China, extended its boundaries, governed
the country as a ruling class, and left the established order of things
undisturbed. The Saracen conquest of North Africa and Spain showed for a
time organization and a permanence due to the advanced cultural status
of the sedentary Arabs drawn into the movement by religious enthusiasm.
The environment of Spain tended to conserve the knowledge of
agriculture, industry, architecture, and science which they brought in
and which might have cemented Spaniard and Moor, had it not been for the
intense religious antagonism existing between the two races.
The history of nomad conquerors shows that they become weakened by the
enervating climate and the effeminating luxury of the moist and fertile
lowlands. They lose eventually their warlike spirit, like the Fellatah
or Fulbe founders of the Sudanese states,[1100] and are either displaced
from their insecure thrones by other conquerors sprung from the same
nomad-breeding steppe, as the Aryan princes of India by the Mongol
Emperor, and the Saracen invaders of Mesopotamia by the victorious
Turkomans; or they are expelled in time by their conquered subjects, as
the Tartars were from Russia, the Moors from Spain, and the Turks from
the Danube Valley.
[Sidenote: Centralization versus decentralization in nomadism.]
Nomad hordes unite for concerted action to resist encroachment upon
their pastures, or for marauding expeditions, or for widespread
conquest; but such unions are from their nature temporary, though a
career of conquest may be sustained for decades. The geographically
determined mobility which facilitates such concentration favors also
dispersal, decentralization. This is the paradox in nomadism. Geographic
conditions in arid lands necessitate sparse distribution of population
and of herds. Pastoral life requires large spaces and small social
groups. When Abraham and Lot went to Canaan from Egypt, "the land was
not able to bear them that they might dwell together, for their
substance was great." Strife for the pasturage ensued between their
respective herdsmen, so the two sheiks separated, Lot taking the plains
of Jordan and Abraham the hill pastures of Hebron. Jacob and Esau
separated for the same reason. The encampment of the Kirghis shepherds
rarely averages over five or six tents, except on the best grazing
grounds at the best season of the year. The flow of spring, well or
stream also helps to regulate their size. The groups of Mongol yurts or
felt tents along the piedmont margin of the Gobi vary from four tents to
a large encampment, according to water and grass.[1101] Prevalsky mentions
a population of 70 families or 300 souls in the Lob Nor district
distributed in 11 villages, or less than 28 in each group.[1102] Barth
noticed the smallness of all the oasis towns of the Sahara, even those
occupying favorable locations for trade on the caravan routes.[1103]
[Sidenote: Spirit of independence among nomads.]
The nature-made necessity of scattering in small groups to seek
pasturage induces in the nomad a spirit of independence. The Bedouin is
personally free. The power of the sheik is only nominal,[1104] and depends
much upon his personal qualities. The gift of eloquence among the
ancient Arabs has been attributed to the necessity of persuading a
people to whom restraint was irksome.[1105] Political organization is
conspicuously lacking among the Tibbus of the Sahara[1106] and the
Turkoman tribes of the Trans-Caspian steppes. "We are a people without a
head," they say. The title of sheik is an empty one. Custom and usage
are their rulers.[1107] Though the temporary union of nomadic tribes forms
an effective army, the union is short-lived. Groups form, dissolve and
re-form, with little inner cohesion. The Boers in South African
grasslands showed the same development. The government of the Dutch East
India Company in Cape Colony found it difficult to control the wandering
cattlemen of the interior plateau. They loved independence and
isolation; their dissociative instincts, bred by the lonely life of the
thin-pastured veldt, were overcome only by the necessity of defense
against the Bushmen. Then they organized themselves into commandos and
sallied out on punitive expeditions, like the Cossack tribes of the Don
against marauding Tartars. Scattered over wide tracts of pasture land,
they were exempt from the control of either Dutch or English authority;
but when an energetic administration pursued them into their widespread
ranches, they eluded control by trekking.[1108] Here was the independent
spirit of the steppe, reinforced by the spirit of the frontier.
[Sidenote: Resistance to conquest.]
Though the desert and steppe have bred conquerors, they are the last
parts of the earth's surface to yield to conquest from without. The
untameable spirit of freedom in the shepherd tribes finds an ally
against aggression in the trackless sands, meager water and food supply
of their wilderness. Pursuit of the retreating tribesmen is dangerous
and often futile. They need only to burn off the pasture and fill up or
pollute the water-holes to cripple the transportation and commissariat
of the invading army. This is the way the Damaras have fought the German
subjugation of Southwest Africa.[1109] Moreover, the paucity of economic
and political possibilities in deserts and grasslands discourages
conquest. Conquest pays only where it is a police measure to check
depredations on the bordering agricultural lands, or where such barren
areas are transit lands to a desirable territory beyond. It is chiefly
the "Gates of Herat" and the lure of India which have drawn Russian
dominion across the scorched plains of Turkestan. France has assumed the
big task of controlling the Sahara to secure a safe passway between
French Tunisia and the rich Niger basin of the French Sudan. The recent
British-Egyptian expansion southward across the Nubian steppes had for
its objective the better watered districts of the upper Nile above
Khartum. This desert advance is essentially a latter day phenomenon, the
outcome of modern territorial standards; it is attended or secured by
the railroad. To this fact the projected Trans-Saharan line is the
strongest witness.
Nature everywhere postpones, obstructs, jeopardizes the political
conquest of arid lands. The unstable, fanatical tribesmen of the
Egyptian Sudan, temporarily but effectively united under the Mahdi, made
it necessary for Kitchener to do again in 1898 the work of subjugation
which Gordon had done thirty years before. The body of the Arabian
people is still free. The Turkish sovereignty over them to-day is
nominal, rather an alliance with a people whom it is dangerous to
provoke and difficult to attack. Only the coast provinces of Hejaz,
Yemen and Hasa are subject to Turkey, while the tribes of the interior
and of the southeastern seaboard are wholly independent.[1110] The
Turkoman tribes of Trans-Caspia have been subordinated to Russia largely
by a process of extermination.[1111] China is satisfied with a nominal
dominion over the roaming populations of Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan.
The French pacification and control of Northwest Africa meets a peculiar
problem, due to the extreme restlessness and restiveness of the dominant
Arab race. The whole population is unstable as water; a disturbance or
movement in one tribe is soon communicated to the whole mass.[1112]
[Sidenote: Curtailment of nomadism.]
The steppe or desert policy for the curtailment of nomadism, and the
reclamation of both land and people is to encourage or enforce
sedentary life. The French, to settle the wandering tribes on the Atlas
border of the Sahara, have opened a vast number of artesian wells
through the agency of skillful engineers, and thus created oases in
which the fecund sands support abundant date-palm groves.[1113] The method
pursued energetically by the Russians is to compress the tribes into
ever narrowing limits of territory, taking away their area of plunder
and then so restricting their pasture lands, that they are forced to the
drudgery of irrigation and tillage. In this way the Yomuts and Goklans
occupying the Caspian border of Trans-Caspia have been compelled to
abandon their old marauding, nomadic life and become to some extent
agriculturists.[1114] The method of the Chinese is to push forward the
frontier of agricultural settlement into the grasslands, dislodging the
shepherd tribes into poorer pastures. They have thus reclaimed for grain
and poppy fields considerable parts of the Ordos country in the great
northern bend of the Hoangho, which used to be a nursery for nomadic
invaders. A similar substitution of agriculture for pastoral nomadism of
another type has in recent decades taken place in the semi-arid plains
of the American West. Sheep-grazing on open range was with difficulty
dislodged from the San Joaquin Valley of California by expanding farms
in the sixties. More recently "dry farming" and scientific agriculture
adapted to semi-arid conditions have "pushed the desert off the map" in
Kansas, and advanced the frontier of tillage across the previous domain
of natural pastures to the western border of the state.
Pastoral nomadism has been gradually dislodged from Europe, except in
the salt steppes of the Caspian depression, where a vast tract, 300,000
square miles in area and wholly unfit for agriculture, still harbors a
sparse population of Asiatic Kalmuck and Kirghis hordes, leading the
life of the Asiatic steppes.[1115] In Asia, too, the regions of pastoral
nomadism have been curtailed, but in Africa they still maintain for the
most part the growing, expanding geographical forms which they once
showed in Europe, when nomadism prevailed as far as the Alps and the
Rhine. In Africa shepherd tribes cover not only the natural grasslands,
but lap over into many districts destined by nature for agriculture.
Hence it is safe to predict that a conspicuous part of the future
economic and cultural history of the Dark Continent will consist in the
release of agricultural regions from nomad occupancy and dominion.
[Sidenote: Supplementary agriculture of pastoral nomads.]
Though agriculture is regarded with contempt and aversion by pastoral
nomads and is resorted to for a livelihood only when they lose their
herds by a pest or robbery, or find their pasture lands seriously
curtailed, nevertheless nomadism yields such a precarious and monotonous
subsistence that it is not infrequently combined with a primitive,
shifting tillage. The Kalmucks of the Russian steppes employ men to
harvest hay for the winter feeding. The Nogai Tartars practice a little
haphazard tillage on the alluvial hem of the steppe streams.[1116] Certain
Arab tribes living east of the Atbara and Gash Rivers resort with their
herds during the dry season to the fruitful region of Cassala, which is
inundated by the drainage streams from Abyssinia, and there they
cultivate dourra and other grains.[1117] The Bechuana tribes inhabiting
the rich, streamless grassland of the so-called Kalahari Desert rear
small herds of goats and cultivate melons and pumpkins; among the other
Bechuana tribes on the eastern margin of the desert, the men hunt, herd
the cattle and milk the cows, while the women raise dourra, maize,
pumpkins, melons, cucumbers and beans.[1118] [Compare maps pages 105,
487.]
Such supplementary agriculture usually shifts with the nomad group. But
where high mountains border rainless tracts, their piedmont districts
regularly develop permanent cultivation. Here periodic rains or melting
snows on the ranges fill the drainage streams, whose inundation often
converts their alluvial banks into ready-made fields. The reliability of
the water supply anchors here the winter villages of the nomads, which
become centers of a limited agriculture, while the pasture lands beyond
the irrigated strips support his flocks and herds. Where the piedmont of
the Kuen Lun Mountains draws a zone of vegetation around the southern
rim of the Takla Makan Desert, Mongol shepherds raise some wheat, maize
and melons as an adjunct to their cattle and sheep; but their tillage is
often rendered intermittent by the salinity of the irrigating
streams.[1119] Along the base of the Tian Shan Mountains, the felt yurt of
the Gobi nomad gives place to Turki houses with wheat and rice fields,
and orchards of various fruits; so that the whole piedmont highway from
Hami to Yarkand presents an alternation of desert and oasis
settlement.[1120] Even the heart of arid Arabia shows fertile oases under
cultivation where the lofty Nejd Plateau, with its rain-gathering peaks
over five thousand feet high, varies its wide pastures with well tilled
valleys abounding in grain fields and date-palm groves.[1121] Along the
whole Saharan slope of the Atlas piedmont a series of parallel wadis
and, farther out in the desert, a zone of artesian wells, sunk to the
underground bed of hidden drainage streams from the same range, form
oases which are the seat of permanent agriculture and more or less
settled populations. The Saharan highlands of Tibesti, whose mountains
rise to 8,300 feet, condense a little rain and permit the Tibbus to
raise some grain and dates in the narrow valleys.[1122]
[Sidenote: Irrigation and horticulture.]
The few and limited spots where the desert or steppe affords water for
cultivation require artificial irrigation, the importation of plants,
and careful tillage, to make the limited area support even a small
social group. Hence they could have been utilized by man only after he
had made considerable progress in civilization.[1123] Oasis agriculture is
predominantly intensive. Gardens and orchards tend to prevail over field
tillage. The restricted soil and water must be forced to yield their
utmost. While on the rainy or northern slope of the Atlas in Algiers and
Tunis farms abound, on the Saharan piedmont are chiefly plantations of
vegetables, orchards and palm groves.[1124] In Fezzan at the oasis of
Ghat, Barth found kitchen gardens of considerable extent, large palm
groves, but limited fields of grain, all raised by irrigation; and in
the flat hollow basin forming the oasis of Murzuk, he found also fig and
peach trees, vegetables, besides fields of wheat and barley cultivated
with much labor.[1125] In northern Fezzan, where the mountains back of
Tripoli provide a supply of water, saffron and olive trees are the
staple articles of tillage. The slopes are terraced and irrigated, laid
out in orchards of figs, pomegranates, almonds and grapes, while fields
of wheat and barley border the lower courses of the wadis.[1126] In the
"cup oases" or depressions of the Sahara, the village is always built on
the slope, because the alluvial soil in the basin is too precious to be
used for house sites.[1127]
[Sidenote: Effect of diminishing water supply.]
The water supply in deserts and steppes, on which permanent agriculture
depends, is so scant that even a slight diminution causes the area of
tillage to shrink. Here a fluctuation of snowfall or rainfall that in a
moist region would be negligible, has conspicuous or even tragic
results. English engineers who examined the utilization of the Afghan
streams for irrigation reported that the natives had exploited their
water supply to the last drop; that irrigation converted the Kabul River
and the Heri-rud at certain seasons of the year into dry channels.[1128]
In the Turkoman steppes it has been observed that expanding tillage, by
the multiplication of irrigation canals, increased the loss of water by
evaporation, and hence diminished the supply. Facts like these reveal
the narrow margin between food and famine, which makes the uncertain
basis of life for the steppe agriculturist. Even slight desiccation
contracts the volume and shortens the course of interior drainage
streams; therefore it narrows the piedmont zone of vegetation and the
hem of tillage along the river banks. The previous frontier of field and
garden is marked by abandoned hamlets and sand-buried cities, like those
which border the dry beds of the shrunken Khotan rivers of the Tarim
basin.[1129] The steppe regions in the New World as well as the Old show
great numbers of these ruins. Barth found them in the northern Sahara,
dating from Roman days.[1130] They occur in such numbers in the Syrian
Desert, in the Sistan of Persia, in Baluchistan, the Gobi, Takla Makan
Desert, Turfan and the Lop Nor basin, that they indicate a marked but
irregular desiccation of central and western Asia during the historical
period.[1131]
[Sidenote: Scant diet of nomads.]
If a scant water supply places sedentary agriculture in arid lands upon
an insecure basis, it makes the nomad's sources of subsistence even more
precarious. It keeps him persistently on low rations, while the drought
that burns his pastures and dries up well and wadi brings him face to
face with famine. The daily food of the Bedouin is meal cooked in sour
camel's milk, to which bread and meat are added only when guests arrive.
His moderation in eating is so great that one meal of a European would
suffice for six Arabs.[1132] The daily food of the shepherd
agriculturists on the Kuen Lun margin of the Takla Makan Desert is bread
and milk; meat is indulged in only three or four times a month.[1133] The
Tartars, even in their days of widest conquest, showed the same habitual
frugality. "Their victuals are all things that may be eaten, for we saw
some of them eat lice." The flesh of all animals dying a natural death
is used as food; in summer it is sun-dried for winter use, because at
that time the Tartars live exclusively on mare's milk which is then
abundant. A cup or two of milk in the morning suffices till evening,
when each man has a little meat. One ram serves as a meal for fifty or a
hundred men. Bones are gnawed till they are burnished, "so that no whit
of their food may come to naught." Genghis Khan enacted that neither
blood nor entrails nor any other part of a beast which might be eaten
should be thrown away.[1134] Scarcity of food among the Tibetan and
Mongolian nomads is reflected in their habit of removing every particle
of meat from the bone when eating.[1135] A thin decoction of hot tea,
butter and flour is their staple food. Many Turkoman nomads, despite
outward appearance of wealth, eat only dried fish, and get bread only
once a month, while for the poor wheat is prohibited on account of its
cost.[1136] The Saharan Tibbus, usually on a starvation diet, eat the
skin and powdered bones of their dead animals.[1137]
The privations and hardships of life in the deserts and steppes
discourage obesity. The Koko-Nor Mongols of the high Tibetan plateau are
of slight build, never fat.[1138] The Bedouin's physical ideal of a man
is spare, sinewy, energetic and vigorous, "lean-sided and thin," as the
Arab poet expresses it.[1139] The nomadic tribesmen throughout the
Sahara, whether of Hamitic, Semitic or Negro race, show this type, and
retain it even after several generations of settlement in the river
valleys of the Sudan. The Bushmen, who inhabit the Kalahari Desert, have
thin wiry forms and are capable of great exertion and privations.[1140]
[Sidenote: Checks to population.]
Though the conquering propensities of nomadic tribes make large families
desirable, in order to increase the military strength of the horde, and
though shepherd folk acquiring new and rich pastures develop patriarchal
families, as did the Jews after the conquest of Canaan, nevertheless the
limited water and food supply of desert and grassland, as well as the
relatively low-grade economy of pastoral life, impose an iron-bound
restriction upon population, so that as a matter of fact patriarchal
families are rare. When natural increase finds no vent in emigration and
dispersal, marriage among nomads becomes less fruitful.[1141] Artificial
limitation of population occurs frequently among desert-dwellers. In the
Libyan oasis of Farafeah, the inhabitants never exceed eighty males, a
limit fixed by a certain Sheik Murzuk.[1142] Poverty of food supply
explains the small number of children in the typical Turkoman family.
Among the Koko-Nor Tibetans, monogamy is the rule, polygamy the
exception and confined to the few rich, while families never include
more than two or three children.[1143] According to Burckhardt, three
children constitute a large family among the Bedouins, much to the
regret of the Bedouins themselves. Mohammedans though they are, few
practice polygamy, while polyandry and female infanticide existed in
heathen times.[1144] Desert peoples seem to be naturally monogamous.[1145]
[Sidenote: Trade of nomads.]
The prevailing poverty, monotony and unreliability of subsistence in
desert and steppe, as well as the low industrial status, necessitate
trade with bordering agricultural lands. The Bedouins of Arabia buy
flour, barley for horse feed, coffee and clothing, paying for them
largely with butter and male colts. The northern tribes resort every
year to the confines of Syria, when they are visited by pedlers from
Damascus and Aleppo.[1146] The tribes from Hasa and the Nejd pasture land
bring horses, cattle and sheep to the city of Koweit at the head of the
Persian Gulf to barter for dates, clothing and firearms; and large
encampments of them are always to be seen near this town.[1147] Arabia
and the Desert of Kedar sold lambs, rams and goats to the markets of
ancient Tyre.[1148] The pastoral tribes of ancient Judea in times of
scarcity went to Egypt for grain, which they purchased either with money
or cattle. The picture of Jacob's sons returning from Egypt to Canaan
with their long lines of asses laden with sacks of corn is typical for
pastoral nomads; so is their ultimate settlement, owing to protracted
famine, in the delta land of Goshen. The Kirghis of the Russian and
Asiatic steppes barter horses and sheep for cereals, fine articles of
clothing, and coarse wooden utensils in the cities of Bukhara and the
border districts of Russia. Occasionally the land of the nomad yields
other products than those of the flocks and herds, which enter therefore
into their trade. Such is the salt of the Sahara, secured at Taudeni and
Bilma, the gums of the Indus desert, and balm of Gilead from the dry
plateau east of Jordan.
[Sidenote: Pastoral nomads as middlemen.]
The systematic migrations of nomads, their numerous beasts of burden,
and the paucity of desert and steppe products determine pastoral tribes
for the office of middlemen;[1149] and as such they appear in all parts
of the world. The contrast of products in arid regions and in the
bordering agricultural land, as also in the districts on opposite sides
of these vast barriers, stimulates exchanges. This contrast may rest on
a difference of geographic conditions, or of economic development, or
both. The reindeer Chukches of Arctic Siberia take Russian manufactured
wares from the fur stations on the Lena River to trade at the coast
markets on Bering Sea for Alaskan pelts. The sons of Jacob, pasturing
their flocks on the Judean plateau, saw "a company of Ishmaelites come
from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going
to carry it down to Egypt."[1150] This caravan of Arabian merchants
purchased Joseph as a slave, a characteristic commodity in desert
commerce from ancient times to the present. The predatory expeditions of
nomads provide them with abundant captives, only few of which can be
utilized as slaves in their pastoral economy. In the same way the
Kirghis manage the caravan trade between Russia and Bukhara, sometimes
adding captured travelers to their other wares. In ancient times Nubian
shepherd folk acted as migrant middlemen between Egypt and Meroe near
the junction of the Atbara River and the Nile, as did also the desert
tribe of the Nasamones between Carthage and interior Africa.[1151] From
remote ages an active caravan trade was carried on between the
productive districts of Arabia Felix and the cities of Mesopotamia,
Syria and Egypt. Mohammed himself was a caravan leader; in the faith
which he established religious pilgrimages and commercial ventures were
inextricably united, while to the mercantile spirit it gave a fresh and
vigorous impetus.[1152] The caravan trade of the Sahara was first
organized by Moorish and Arab tribes who dwelt on the northern margin of
the desert, rearing herds of camels. These they hired to merchants for
the journey between Morocco and Timbuctoo, in return for cereals and
clothing. Hence Morocco has been the chief customer of the great desert
town near the Niger, and sends thither numerous caravans from Tendouf
(Taredant) Morocco, Fez and Tafilet. Algiers dominates the less
important route via the oasis of Twat, and Tripolis that through
Ghadames to the busy towns in the Lake Chad basin.[1153]
[Sidenote: Desert markets.]
If the camel is "the ship of the desert," the market towns on the margin
of the sandy wastes are the ports of the desert. Their bazaars hold
everything that the nomad needs. Their suburbs are a shifting series of
shepherd encampments or extensive caravanseries for merchant and pack
animal, like the _abaradion_ of Timbuctoo, which receives annually from
fifty to sixty thousand camels.[1154] Their industries develop partly in
response to the demand of the desert or trans-desert population. The
fine blades of Damascus reflected the Bedouin's need of the best weapon.
Each city has its sphere of desert influence. The province of Nejd in
Central Arabia is commercially subservient to Bagdad, Busrah, Koweit and
Bahrein.[1155] The bazaars of Samarkand and Tashkent exist largely for
the scattered nomads of Turkestan. Ancient Gaza[1156] and Askelon
fattened on the Egyptian trade across the Desert of Shur, as Petra,
Bostra and Damascus on the thin but steady streams of nomad products
flowing in from the Syrian Desert.
[Sidenote: Nomad industries.]
The abundant leisure of nomadic life encourages the beginning of
industry, but rarely advances it beyond the household stage, owing to
the thin, family-wise dispersion of population which precludes division
of labor. Such industry as exists consists chiefly in working up the raw
materials yielded by the herds. Among the Bedouins, blacksmiths and
saddlers are the only professional artisans; these are regarded with
contempt and are never of Bedouin stock.[1157] In the ancient world,
industry reached its zero point in Arabia, and in modern times shows
meager development there. On the other hand the Saharan Arabs developed
an hereditary guild of expert well-makers, which seems to date back to
remote times, and is held in universal honor.[1158]
[Sidenote: Oriental rugs.]
It is to the tent-dwellers of the world, however, that we apparently owe
the oriental rug. This triumph of the weaver's art seems to have
originated among pastoral nomads, who developed it in working up the
wool and hair of their sheep, goats and camels; but it early became
localized as a specialized industry in the towns and villages of
irrigated districts on the borders of the grazing lands, where the
nomads had advanced to sedentary life. Therefore in the period of the
Caliphate, from 632 to 1258, we find these brilliant flowers of the
loom, blooming like the Persian gardens, in Persian Farsistan,
Khusistan, Kirman and Khorasan. We find them spreading the mediæval fame
of Shiraz, Tun, Meshed, Amul, Bukhara and Merv. The secret of this
preeminence lay partly in the weaver's inherited aptitude and artistic
sense for this textile work, derived from countless generations of
shepherd ancestors; partly in their proximity to the finest raw
materials, whose quality was equalled nowhere else, because it depended
upon the character of the pasturage, probably also upon the climatic
conditions affecting directly the flocks and herds.[1159]
A map showing the geographical distribution of Eastern rug-making
reveals the relation of the industry to semi-arid or saline pastures,
and makes the mind revert at once to the blankets of artistic design and
color, woven by the Navajo Indians of our own rainless Southwest. Rug
weaving in the Old World reached its finest development in countries
like Persia, Turkestan, western Afghanistan, Baluchistan, western India
and the plateau portions of Asia Minor, countries where the rainfall
varies from 10 to 20 inches or even less, [See map page 484.] where
nomadism claims a considerable part of the population, and where the
ancestry of all traces back to some of the great shepherd races, like
Turkomans and Tartars. These peoples are hereditary specialists in the
care, classification, and preparation of wools.[1160] Weavers of rugs
form an industrial class in the cities of Persia and Asia Minor, where
they obey largely the taste of the outside world in regard to design and
color;[1161] whereas the nomads, weaving for their own use, adhere
strictly to native colors and designs. Their patterns are tribal
property, each differing from that of the other; and though less
artistic than those of the urban workers, are nevertheless interesting
and consistent, while the nomad's intuitive sense of color is fine.[1162]
[Sidenote: Architecture of nomad conquerors.]
The principles of design and color which these tent-dwellers had
developed in their weaving, they applied, after their conquest of
agricultural lands, to stone and produced the mosaic, to architecture
and produced the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal.[1163] Whether Saracens of
Spain or Turkoman conquerors of India, they were ornamentists whose
contribution to architecture was decoration. Working in marble, stone,
metals or wood, they wrought always in the spirit of color and textile
design, rather than in the spirit of form. The walls of their mosques,
palaces and tombs reproduce the beauty of the rugs once screening the
doors of their felt tents. The gift of color they passed on to the West,
first through the Moors of Sicily and Spain, later through Venetian
commerce. Their influence can be seen in the exquisite mosaic decoration
in the cloister of Mont Reale of once Saracenic Palermo, and in the
Ducal Palace and St. Mark's Cathedral of beauty-loving Venice.[1164] This
has been almost their sole contribution to the art of the world.
Pastoral nomads can give political union to civilized peoples; they can
assimilate and spread ready-made elements of civilization, but to
originate or develop them they are powerless. Between the art,
philosophy and literature of China on the one side, and of the settled
districts of Persia on the other, lies the cultural sterility of the
Central Asia plateau. Its outpouring hordes have only in part acquired
the civilization of the superior agricultural peoples whom they have
conquered; from Kazan and Constantinople to Delhi, from Delhi to Peking
they have added almost nothing to the local culture.
[Sidenote: Arid lands as areas of arrested development.]
Deserts and steppes lay an arresting hand on progress. Their tribes do
not develop; neither do they grow old. They are the eternal children of
the world. Genuine nomadic peoples show no alteration in their manners,
customs or mode of life from millennium to millennium. The interior of
the Arabian desert reveals the same social and economic status,[1165]
whether we take the descriptions of Moses or Mohammed or Burckhardt or
more recent travelers. The Bedouins of the Nubian steppes adhere
strictly to all their ancient customs, and reproduce to-day the pastoral
nomadism of Abraham and Jacob.[1166] Genealogies were not more important
to the biblical house of David and stem of Jesse than they are for the
modern Kirghis tribesman, who as a little child learns to recite the
list of his ancestors back to the seventh generation. The account which
Herodotus gives of the nomads of the Russian steppes agrees in minute
details with that of Strabo written five centuries later,[1167] with that
of William de Rubruquis in 1253, and with modern descriptions of Kalmuck
and Kirghis life. The Gauchos or Indian pastoral halfbreeds of the
Argentine plains were found by Wappäus in 1870 to accord accurately with
Avara's description of them at the end of the eighteenth century.[1168]
The restless tenants of the grasslands come and go, but their type never
materially changes. Their culture is stationary amid persistent
movement. Only when here or there in some small and favored spot they
are forced to make the transition to agriculture, or when they learn by
long and close association with sedentary nations the lesson of drudgery
and progress, do the laws of social and economic development begin to
operate in them. As a rule, they must first escape partly or wholly the
environment of their pasture lands, either by emigration or by the
intrusion into their midst of alien tillers of the soil.
But while the migrant shepherd originates nothing, he plays an
historical rôle as a transmitter of civilization. Asiatic nomads have
sparsely disseminated the culture of China, Persia, Egypt and Yemen over
large areas of the world. The Semite shepherds of the Red Sea deserts,
through their merchants and conquerors, long gave to the dark Sudan the
only light of civilization which it received, Mohammed, a Bedouin of the
Ishmaelite tribe, caravan leader on the desert highways between Mecca
and Syria, borrowed from Jerusalem the simple tenets of a monotheistic
religion, and spread them through his militant followers over a large
part of Africa and Asia.
[Sidenote: Mental and moral qualities of nomads.]
The deserts and grasslands breed in their sons certain qualities and
characteristics-courage, hardihood, the stiff-necked pride of the
freeman, vigilance, wariness, sense of locality,[1169] keen powers of
observation stimulated by the monotonous, featureless environment, and
the consequent capacity to grasp every detail.[1170] Though robbery
abroad is honorable and marauder a term with which to crown a hero,
theft at home is summarily dealt with among most nomads. The property of
the unlocked tent and the far-ranging herd must be safeguarded.[1171] The
Tartars maintained a high standard of honesty among themselves and
punished theft with death.[1172] Wide dispersal in small groups is
reflected in the diversity of dialects among desert peoples;[1173] in the
practice of hospitality, whether among Bedouins of the Nejd, Kirghis of
the Central Asia plateau,[1174] or semi-nomadic Boers of South
Africa;[1175] in the persistence of feuds and of the duty of blood
revenge, which is sanctioned by the Koran.
Isolation tends to breed among nomads pride of race and a repugnance to
intermixture. The ideal of the pastoral Israelites was a pure ethnic
stock, protected by stern inhibition of intermarriage with other tribes.
Therefore, Moses enjoined upon them the duty of exterminating the
peoples of Canaan whom they dispossessed.[1176] While the urban Arabs
show a medley of breeds, dashed with a strain of negro blood, among the
nomad Bedouins, mixture is exceptional and is regarded as a
disgrace.[1177] The same thing is true among the nomad Arabs of Algeria,
and there it has placed a stumbling block in the way of the French
colonial administration, by preventing the appearance of half-breeds who
might bridge the gap between the colonials and natives. Where pastoral
Semites have settled in agricultural lands, intermixture on a wide scale
has followed, as in the Sudan from Niger to Nile; but even here, when a
tribe or clan has retained a strictly pastoral life in the grassland,
and has held itself aloof from the agricultural districts of the Negro
villages, relatively pure survivals are to be found, as among the Cow
or Bush Fulani of Bornu.[1178] On the other hand, the Hausa, a migrant
trading folk of mingled Arab and Negro blood, spread northward along the
trans-Saharan caravan route to the oasis of Air before the fourteenth
century, and there have infused into the local Berber stock a strong
Negro strain.[1179] Among the nomads of Central Asia, one wave of race
movement has so often followed and overtaken another, that it has
produced a confused blending of breeds. The mixtures are so numerous
that pure types are exceptional,[1180] and the exclusiveness of the
desert Semites disappears.
[Sidenote: Religion of pastoral nomads.]
Though all these desert-born characteristics and customs have a certain
interest for the sociologist, they possess only minor importance in
comparison with the religious spirit of pastoral nomads, which is always
fraught with far-reaching historical results. The evidence of history
shows us that there is such a thing as a desert-born genius for
religion. Huc and Gabin testify to the deeper religious feeling of the
Buddhist nomads of the Central Asia plateaus, as compared with the
lowland Chinese. The three great monotheistic religions of the world are
closely connected in their origin and development with the deserts of
Syria and Arabia. The area of Mohammedism embraces the steppe zone of
the Old World[1181] from Senegambia and Zanzibar in Africa to the Indus,
Tarim and the upper Obi, together with some well watered lands on its
margins. It comprises in this territory a variety of races--Negroes,
Hamites, Semites, Iranians, Indo-Aryans, and a long list of Mongoloid
tribes. Here is a psychological effect of environment. The dry, pure air
stimulates the faculties of the desert-dweller, but the featureless,
monotonous surroundings furnish them with little to work upon. The mind,
finding scant material for sustained logical deduction, falls back upon
contemplation. Intellectual activity is therefore restricted, narrow,
unproductive; while the imagination is unfettered but also unfed. First
and last, these shepherd folk receive from the immense monotony of their
environment the impression of unity.[1182] Therefore all of them, upon
outgrowing their primitive fetish and nature worship, gravitate
inevitably into monotheism. Their religion is in accord with their whole
mental make-up; it is a growth, a natural efflorescence. Therefore it
is strong. Its tenets form the warp of all their intellectual fabrics,
permeate their meager science and philosophy, animate their more
glorious poetry. It has moreover the fanaticism and intolerance
characterizing men of few ideas and restricted outlook upon life.
Therewith is bound up a spirit of propaganda. The victories of the Jews
in Palestine, Syria and Philistia were the victories of Jehovah; the
conquests of Saladin were the conquests of Allah; and the domain of the
Caliphate was the dominion of Islam.
[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF RELIGIONS IN THE OLD WORLD (World map
showing distribution of Christians, Mohammedans, Brahmans, Buddhists,
and Heathen).]
[Sidenote: Fanaticism as a force in nomad expansion.]
The desert everywhere, sooner or later, drives out its brood, ejects its
people and their ideas, like those exploding seed-pods which at a touch
cast their seed abroad. The religious fanaticism of the shepherd tribes
gives that touch; herein lies its historical importance. Mohammedism,
fierce and militant, conduced to those upheavals of migration and
conquest which since the seventh century have so often transformed the
political geography of the Old World. The vast empire of the Caliphate,
from its starting point in Arabia, spread in eighty years from the Oxus
River to the Atlantic Ocean.[1183] The rapid rise and spread between 1745
and 1803 of the Wahaby clan and sect, the Puritans of Islam, which
resulted for a time in their political and religious domination of much
of Arabia from their home in the Nejd, recalls the stormy conquests of
Mohammed's followers. Islam is to-day a persistent source of ferment in
Algeria, the Sahara, and the Sudan, On the other hand. Buddhism serves
to cement together the diverse nomadic tribes of the Central Asia
plateaus, and keep them in spiritual subjection to the Grand Lama of
Lhassa. The Chinese government makes political use of this fact by
dominating the Lama and employing him as a tool to secure quiet on its
long frontier of contact with its restless Mongol neighbors. Moreover
the religion of Buddha has restrained the warlike spirit of the nomads,
and by its institution of celibacy has helped keep down population below
the boiling-point. [Compare maps pages 484 and 513.]
[Sidenote: The faith of the desert.]
The faith of the desert tends to be stern, simple and austere. The
indulgence which Mohammed promised his followers in Paradise was only a
reflex of the deprivation under which they habitually suffered in the
scant pastures of Arabia. The lavish beauty of the Heavenly City
epitomized the ideals and dreams of the desert-stamped Jew. The active,
simple, uncramped life of the grasslands seems essential to the
preservation of the best virtues of the desert-bred. These disappear
largely in sedentary life. The Bedouin rots when he takes root. City
life contaminates, degrades him. His virile qualities and his religion
both lose their best when he leaves the desert. Contact with the cities
of Philistia and the fertile plains of the Canaanites, with their
sensual agricultural gods, demoralized the Israelites.[1184] The prophets
were always calling them back to the sterner code of morals and the
purer faith of their days of wandering. Jeremiah in despair holds up to
them as a standard of life the national injunction of the pastoral
Rechabites, "Neither shall ye build house nor sow corn nor plant
vineyard, but all your days ye shall dwell in tents."[1185] The ascent in
civilization made havoc with Hebrew morals and religion, because ethics
and religion are the finest and latest flower of each cultural stage.
Transition shows the breaking down of one code before the establishment
of another.
Judaism has always suffered from its narrow local base. Even when
transplanted to various parts of the earth, it has remained a distinctly
tribal religion. Intense conservatism in doctrine and ceremonial it
still bears as the heritage of its desert birth. Islam too shows the
limitations of its original environment. It embodies a powerful appeal
to the peoples of arid lands, and among these it has spread and survives
as an active principle. But it belongs to an arrested economic and
social development, lacks the germs of moral evolution which
Christianity, born in the old stronghold of Hebraic monotheism, but
impregnated by all the cosmopolitan influences of the Mediterranean
basin and the _Imperium Romanum_, amply possesses.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XIV
[1026] Figures taken from Albrecht Penck, _Morphologie der
Erdoberfläche_, Vol. I, p. 151. Stuttgart, 1894.
[1027] A.P. Brigham, Geographic Influences in American History, Chap.
IV. Boston, 1903.
[1028] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp.
65-69, 230, 288, 385. Boston, 1903.
[1029] _Ibid._, pp. 218, 221, 393.
[1030] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 127. New York, 1902.
[1031] Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. II, pp.
126-136. New York, 1871.
[1032] Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, pp. 191-192, 201.
Philadelphia, 1865.
[1033] J.H. Breasted, History of Egypt, pp. 142, 144, 261-265, 293-302,
513-517. New York, 1905.
[1034] _Ibid._, 6, 48, 93, 114, 119, 127, 134, 136, 163, 164, 182, 190,
191, 507.
[1035] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 340-343, map. New York, 1899.
[1036] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp.
57-60. New York, 1893.
[1037] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Maps, pp. 53 and 66. New York,
1899.
[1038] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, p. 130, map of
ancient distribution of Germans and Celts. New York, 1907.
[1039] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 216-218. New York, 1899.
[1040] _Ibid._, 344-347, 356, 365.
[1041] Elisée Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 309-310. New York, 1882.
[1042] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, p. 107. New
York, 1893.
[1043] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 220-222. New York, 1902.
[1044] Vidal-Lablache, _Atlas Général_, Maps pp. 63, 64, 93. Paris,
1909.
[1045] H.R. Mill, International Geography, 174, 177-182. New York, 1902.
[1046] Twelfth Census, Bulletin of Agriculture No. 181, p. 2, compared
with Eleventh Census, Statistics of Population, map of negro
distribution, p. XCVII. Washington, 1895.
[1047] Twelfth Census, Bulletin of Agriculture, No. 155, p. 2.
Washington, 1902.
[1048] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 353. New York, 1899.
[1049] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, p. 238.
London, 1907.
[1050] Haxthausen, _Studien_, Vol. I, p. 309. _Die ländliche Verfassung
Russlands_, pp. 3, 7. Leipzig, 1866.
[1051] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 79-83. London,
1896-1898. J. Wappäus, _Handbuch der Geographie und Statistik des
ehemaligen spanischen Mittel- und Sud-Amerika_, pp. 978-980, 1019.
Leipzig, 1863-1870.
[1052] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 206-208. London,
1896-1898.
[1053] Nordenskiold, Voyage of the Vega, pp. 60, 156, 452. New York,
1882. Alexander P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp.
291-295. London, 1899.
[1054] _Ibid._, pp. 83, 88-91.
[1055] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 166-167. London.
1896-1898.
[1056] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 107. New York, 1897.
[1057] Herodotus, Melpomene, 19, 46.
[1058] Thomas Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. I, p. 262. Oxford,
1892.
[1059] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 220. London, 1896-1898.
[1060] Genesis, XIII, 2, 5.
[1061] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 474. New York, 1897.
[1062] Eleventh Census, Indian Report, pp. 143-144. Washington, 1894.
[1063] Sven Hedin, Central Asia and Tibet, Vol. I, pp. 18-20. London and
New York, 1903.
[1064] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp.
32-33. London, 1831.
[1065] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp.
8-10. New York, 1897.
[1066] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, pp. 78-79.
New York, 1858.
[1067] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, p. 95. London, 1905.
[1068] Sir Samuel W. Baker, The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, pp. 88,
128, 129, 135. Hartford, 1868.
[1069] Journey of John de Carpini and William de Rubruquis in 1253, pp.
8, 217. Hakluyt Society, London, 1903.
[1070] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 107, 421. New York,
1897.
[1071] Wilhelm Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues_, p. 44.
Stuttgart, 1888.
[1072] A full discussion in Malthus, Principles of Population, Book I,
chap. 7.
[1073] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp.
133-144, 157-160. London, 1831. S.M. Zwemer, Arabia, The Cradle of
Islam, 155-157. New York, 1900.
[1074] Vambery, _Reise in Mittelasien_, pp. 285, 289-297. Leipzig, 1873.
[1075] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 127-129. New York, 1899.
[1076] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 174-175. London,
1896-1898.
[1077] Wallace, Russia, pp. 340-342. New York, 1904.
[1078] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 17, 63-66. London, 1905.
[1079] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 256, 324-325. Translated from the
French, New York, 1896.
[1080] Heinrich Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp.
287-288, 293, 305. New York, 1857.
[1081] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 133-134, 203, 206-207, 229, 232,
239-245. New York, 1896.
[1082] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 1-2, 6,
16-18, 80. London, 1907.
[1083] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman. Empire, Vol. V, p. 87. New
York, 1858.
[1084] Pliny, _Historia Naturalis_, V, 3.
[1085] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. II, p. 495.
New York, 1858.
[1086] Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, p. 340. Boston, 1907.
[1087] Pallas, Travels in the Southern Provinces of Russia in 1793-1794,
Vol. II, p. 4. London, 1812.
[1088] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 94, 256.
[1089] Genesis, XIII, 7-8; XXI, 25-30; XXVI, 15-22.
[1090] Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, p. 545. New
York, 1887.
[1091] Thucydides, Book II, 96.
[1092] Herodotus, IV, 46.
[1093] Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe, Chapter on Arab Courage. New
York, 1904.
[1094] Wilhelm Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues_, p. 44.
Stuttgart, 1888.
[1095] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp.
35-36. London, 1831.
[1096] John de Plano Carpini, Journey to the Northeast, pp. 114-117,
120-125. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904.
[1097] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 28. London, 1896-1898.
[1098] J.H. Speke, Discovery of the Source of the Nile, pp. 241-244. New
York, 1868.
[1099] Journey of William de Rubruquis, pp. 18-27, Hakluyt Society,
London, 1900.
[1100] Jerome Dowd, The Negro Races, Vol. I, pp. 225-232. New York,
1907.
[1101] Sir Francis Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 85-98.
London, 1904.
[1102] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 170. London, 1896-1898.
[1103] Heinrich Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp.
148, 152, 204, 210, 303. New York, 1857.
[1104] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp.
115-119, 284-286, 296-300. London, 1831.
[1105] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, pp. 85-87.
New York, 1857.
[1106] Jerome Dowd, The Negro Races, Vol. I, pp. 234-235. New York,1907.
[1107] Vambery, _Reise in Mittel Asien_, pp. 288-290. Leipzig, 1873.
[1108] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 108, 128, 129, 155,
199, 452-453. New York, 1897.
[1109] For vivid description of desert defensive warfare, see Gustav
Frensen, Peter Moore's Journey to Southwest Africa. Translated from the
German, 1908. Based upon interviews with hundreds of returning German
soldiers from the Damara campaign.
[1110] H.B. Mill, International Geography, p. 454. New York, 1902.
[1111] Henry Norman, All the Russias, p. 273. New York, 1902.
[1112] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 54-56. London, 1905.
[1113] _Ibid._, pp. 181-164.
[1114] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 177. London, 1896-1898.
[1115] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp.
29-30. New York, 1893.
[1116] Pallas, Travels through the Southern Provinces of Russia, Vol. I,
pp. 532-533. London, 1812.
[1117] Sir S.W. Baker, Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, p. 88. Hartford,
1868.
[1118] David Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 53-56, 169. New York,
1858.
[1119] Sven Hedin, Central Asia and Tibet, Vol. I, pp. 96, 136, 359, New
York and London, 1903. Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 193,
202, 212, 213. Boston, 1907.
[1120] Sir Francis Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 103, 104,
107, 112-116, 120, 125-128, 137, 138, 143. London, 1904.
[1121] S.W. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, pp. 147, 151. New York,
1900. D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 185, 195. 265. London, 1902.
[1122] Nachtigal, _Sahara und Sudan_, Vol. I, pp. 214-218, 267-269.
Berlin, 1879.
[1123] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 168. London, 1896-1898.
[1124] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 906, 914. New York, 1902.
[1125] H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp. 152,
207, 210, 211. New York, 1857.
[1126] _Ibid._, 41-44, 52, 61-64, 67, 76, 93, 95, 99, 103, 105.
[1127] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, p. 174. London, 1905.
[1128] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, pp. 91-93. London, 1905.
[1129] M.A. Stein, The Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan, pp. 275-324,
354-408. London, 1903.
[1130] H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, chap. III.
New York, 1857.
[1131] Ellsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 160-190, 209, 304,
309-310, 315, 367. Boston, 1907.
[1132] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp.
57-64, 238-242. London, 1831.
[1133] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 137-138. Boston, 1907.
[1134] John de Plano Carpini, Journey to the Northeast, pp. 109-111,
120. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904. Journey of William de Rubruquis, pp.
191-193, 203, 224. Hakluyt Society, London, 1903.
[1135] W.W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 80. New York, 1891.
[1136] Vambery, _Reise in Mittel Asien_, p. 295. Leipzig, 1873.
[1137] Nachtigal, _Sahara und Sudan_, Vol. I, pp. 257, 268. Berlin,
1879.
[1138] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, p. 74. Boston, 1907.
[1139] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 198-201. London, 1905.
[1140] D. Livingstone, Travels and Researches in South Africa, p. 55.
New York, 1859.
[1141] W. Roscher, _Grundlagen der Nationalökonomik_, Book VI, chap. II,
p. 244. Stuttgart, 1886.
[1142] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 170. London, 1896-98.
[1143] W.W. Rockhill, Land of the Lamas, p. 80. New York, 1891.
[1144] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp.
106, 187. London, 1831. S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, pp.
162, 268. New York, 1900.
[1145] Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 429, notes 2 and 5, p.
440, note 2, p. 507. London, 1891.
[1146] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp.
47, 48, 70, 71, 191-192, 239. London, 1831.
[1147] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 128. New York, 1900.
[1148] Ezekiel, Chap. XXVII, 21.
[1149] For economic principle, see W. Roscher, _Handel und
Gewerbefleiss_, pp. 141-147. Stuttgart, 1899.
[1150] Genesis, Chap. XXXVII, 25-28, 36.
[1151] W. Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues_, p. 39, Note 11.
Stuttgart, 1888.
[1152] S.P. Scott, History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, Vol. III, p.
616. Philadelphia, 1904.
[1153] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 251-252. New York, 1896.
[1154] _Ibid._, pp. 257-264.
[1155] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 151. New York, 1900.
[1156] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp.
182-184. New York, 1897.
[1157] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, p.
65. London, 1831.
[1158] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 130-134. London, 1903.
[1159] F.R. Martin, A History of Oriental Carpets before 1800, pp. 9,
29, 69 et seq., 101, 121. Vienna, 1908. G. LeStrange, Land of the
Eastern Caliphates, pp. 37, 293-294, 353, 363, 471. Cambridge, 1905.
[1160] J.K. Mumford, Oriental Rugs, pp. 23-40, 100-111. New York, 1895.
[1161] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 197-198. London, 1902.
[1162] J.K. Mumford, Oriental Rugs, p. 61. New York, 1895.
[1163] J. Ferguson, History of Architecture, Vol. II, pp. 277-278, 499,
500. New York. J. Ferguson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture,
Vol. II, pp. 210-214. New York, 1891.
[1164] Wilhelm Bode, _Vorderasiatische Knüpfteppiche_, pp. 3-4. Leipzig.
[1165] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, p. 78. New
York, 1858.
[1166] Sir S.W. Baker, Exploration of the Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia,
pp. 148-152. Hartford, 1868.
[1167] Strabo, Book VII, chap. III, 7, 17; chap. IV, 6. Book XI, chap.
II, 1, 2, 3.
[1168] J. Wappäus, _Handbuch der Geographie und Statistik des chemaligen
spanischen Mittel- und Sud-Amerika_, p. 1019. Leipzig, 1863-1870.
[1169] Sir F. Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 72, 74.
London, 1904. Alfred Kirchoff, Man and Earth, pp. 58-71. London.
[1170] J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Vol. I, pp.
374-377. London, 1831. L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 98-100.
London, 1905.
[1171] Exodus, Chap. XXII, 1-4, 23.
[1172] John de Plano Carpini, Journey to the Northeast in 1246, pp. 110,
111, 113. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904.
[1173] Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, p. 89. New
York, 1858. H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, p.
144. New York, 1857.
[1174] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 121-123. Boston, 1907.
[1175] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 422. New York, 1897.
[1176] Deuteronomy, VII, 1-3.
[1177] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 184. London, 1896-1898.
[1178] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, pp. 190-197.
London, 1907.
[1179] H. Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, pp. 202,
277-281. New York, 1857.
[1180] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 173. London, 1896-1898.
[1181] _Ibid._, Vol. III, Chapter on Islam, pp. 195-204.
[1182] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp.
28-30. New York, 1897. L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 101-105.
London, 1905.
[1183] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, pp. 114-116.
London, 1882.
[1184] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp.
88-90. New York, 1897.
[1185] Jeremiah, Chap. XXXV, 6-14.
CHAPTER XV
MOUNTAIN BARRIERS AND THEIR PASSES
[Sidenote: Man as part of the mobile envelope of the earth.]
The important characteristic of plains is their power to facilitate every
phase of historical movement; that of mountains is their power to
retard, arrest, or deflect it. Man, as part of the mobile envelope of
the earth, like air and water feels always the pull of gravity. From
this he can never fully emancipate himself. By an output of energy he
may climb the steepest slope, but with every upward step the ascent
becomes more difficult, owing to the diminution of warmth and air and
the increasing tax upon the heart.[1186] Maintenance of life in high
altitudes is always a struggle. The decrease of food resources from
lower to higher levels makes the passage of a mountain system an ordeal
for every migrating people or marching army that has to live off the
country which it traverses. Mountains therefore repel population by
their inaccessibility and also by their harsh conditions of life, while
the lowlands attract it, both in migration and settlement. Historical
movement, when forced into the upheaved areas of the earth, avoids the
ridges and peaks, seeks the valleys and passes, where communication with
the lowlands is easiest.
[Sidenote: Inaccessibility of mountains.]
High massive mountain systems present the most effective barriers which
man meets on the land surface of the earth. To the spread of population
they offer a resistance which long serves to exclude settlers. The
difficulty of making roads up steep, rocky slopes and through the
forests usually covering their rain-drenched sides, is deterrent enough;
but in addition to this, general infertility, paucity of arable land,
harsh climatic conditions, and the practical lack of communication with
the outside world offer scant basis for subsistence. Hence, as a rule,
only when pressure of population in the lowlands becomes too great under
prevailing economic methods, do clearings and cabins begin to creep up
the slopes. Mountains are always regions of late occupation. Even in the
Stone Age, we find the long-headed race of Mediterranean stock, who
originally populated Europe, distributed over the continent close up to
the foot of the high Alps, but not in the mountains themselves, and only
scantily represented in the Auvergne Plateau of France. The inhospitable
highlands of Switzerland, the German Alps, and the Auvergne received
their first population later when the Alpine race began to occupy
western Europe.[1187] The _Mittelgebirge_ of Germany were not settled till
the Middle Ages. In the United States, the flood of population had
spread westward by 1840 to the ninety-fifth meridian and the north-south
course of the Missouri River; but out of this sea of settlement the
Adirondack Mountains, a few scattered spots in the Appalachians, and the
Ozark Highlands rose as so many islands of uninhabited wilderness, and
they remain to-day areas of sparser population. In 1800, the "bare
spots" in the eastern mountains were more pronounced. [See map page
156.] Great stretches of the Rocky Mountains, of the Laurentian
Highlands of Canada, like smaller patches in the Scandinavian and Swiss
Alps, are practically uninhabited.
[Sidenote: Mountains as transit regions.]
Mountain regions, like deserts and seas, become mere transit districts,
which man traverses as quickly as possible. Hence they often lie as
great inert areas in the midst of active historical lands, and first
appear upon the historical stage in minor rôles, when they are wanted by
the plains people as a passway to desirable regions beyond. Then, as a
rule, only their transit routes are secured, while the less accessible
regions are ignored. Cæsar makes no mention of the Alps, except to state
that he has crossed them, until some of the mountain tribes try to block
the passage of Roman merchants or armies; then they become important
enough to be conquered. It was not till after the Cimbri in 102 B.C.
invaded Italy by the Brenner route, that the Romans realized the value
of Rhaetia (Tyrol) as a thoroughfare from Italy to Germany, and began
its conquest in 36 B.C. This was the same value which the Tyrol so long
had for the old German Empire and later for Austria,--merely to secure
connection with the Po Valley. The need of land communication with the
Rhone Valley led the Romans to attack the Salyes, who inhabited the
Maritime Alps, and after eighty years of war to force from them the
concession of a narrow transit strip, twelve stadia or one and a half
miles wide, for the purpose of making a road to Massilia.[1188] The
necessity of controlling such transit lands has drawn British India into
the occupation of mountain Baluchistan, Kashmir and Sikkim, just as it
has caused the highlands of Afghanistan to figure actively in the
expansion policy of both India and Russia. The conquest of such transit
lands has always been attended by road building, from the construction
of the Roman highway through the Brenner Pass to the modern Russian
military road through the Pass of Dariel across the Caucasus, and the
yet more recent Indian railroad to Darjeeling, with the highway
extension beyond to the Tibetan frontier through Himalayan Sikkim.
Such mountain regions attain independent historical importance when
their population increases enough to form the nucleus of a state, and to
acquire additional territory about the highland base either by conquest
or voluntary union, while they utilize their naturally protected
location and their power to grant safe transit to their allies, as means
to secure their political autonomy. Therefore to mountain regions so
often falls the rôle of buffer states. Such were medieval Burgundy and
modern Savoy, which occupied part of the same territory, Navarre which
in the late Middle Ages controlled the important passway around the
western end of the Pyrenees, and Switzerland which commands the passes
of the central Alps. The position of such mountain states is, however,
always fraught with danger, owing to the weakness inherent in their
small area and yet smaller allowance of productive soil, to their
diverse ethnic elements, and the forces working against political
consolidation in their deeply dissected surface. Political solidarity
has a hard, slow birth in the mountains.
[Sidenote: Transition forms of relief between highlands and lowlands.]
In view of the barrier character of mountains, a fact of immense
importance to the distribution of man and his activities is the rarity
of abrupt, ungraded forms of relief on the earth's surface. The
physiographic cause lies in the elasticity of the earth's crust and the
leveling effect of weathering and denudation. Everywhere mountains are
worn down and rounded off, while valleys broaden and fill up to shallow
trough outlines. Transition forms of relief abound. Human intercourse
meets therefore few absolute barriers on the land; but these few reveal
the obstacles to historical movement in perpendicular reliefs. The
mile-high walls of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado are an insuperable
obstacle to intercourse for a stretch of three hundred miles. The
glacier-crowned ridge of the Bernese Alps is crossed by no wagon road
between the Grimsel Pass and the upper Rhone highway around their
western end, a distance of 100 kilometers (62 miles). The Pennine Alps
have no pass between the Great St. Bernard and the Simplon, a distance
of 90 kilometers (54 miles).
[Sidenote: Importance of transition slopes.]
Gentle transition slopes or terrace lands facilitate almost everywhere
access to the lowest, most habitable and therefore, from the human
standpoint, most important section of mountains. They combine the ease
of intercourse characteristic of plains with many advantages of the
mountains, and especially in warm climates they unite in a narrow zone
both tropical and temperate vegetation. The human value of these
transition slopes holds equally of single hills, massive mountain
systems, and continental reliefs. The earth as a whole owes much of its
habitability to these gently graded slopes. Continents and countries in
which they are meagerly developed suffer from difficulty of intercourse,
retarded development and poverty of the choicest habitable areas. This
is one disadvantage of South Africa, emphasized farther by a poor
coastline. The Pacific face of Australia would gain vastly in historical
importance, if the drop from the highlands to the ocean were stretched
out into a broad slope, like that which links our Atlantic coastal plain
with the Appalachian highlands. There each river valley shows three
characteristic anthropo-geographical sub-divisions--the active seaports
and tide-water tillage of its lower course, the contrasted agriculture
of its hilly course, the upland farms, waterpower industries and mines
of its headstream valleys, each landscape giving its population
distinctive characteristics. The same natural features, with the same
effect upon human activities and population, appear in the long seaward
slopes of France, Germany and northern Italy.
[Sidenote: Piedmont belts as boundary zones.]
At the base of the mountains themselves, where the bold relief begins,
is always a piedmont zone of hilly surface but gentler grade, at whose
inner or upland edge every phase of the historical movement receives a
marked check. Here is a typical geographical boundary, physical and
human. It shifts slightly in different periods, according to the growing
density of population in the plains below and improved technique in
industry and road-making. It is often both an ethnic and cultural
boundary, because at the rim of the mountains the geologic and economic
character of the country changes.[1189] The expanding peoples of the plains
spread over the piedmont so far as it offers familiar and comparatively
favorable geographic conditions, scatter their settlements along the
base of the mountains, and here fix their political frontier for a time,
though later they may advance it to the crest of the ridge, in order to
secure a more scientific boundary. The civilized population of the broad
Indus Valley spread westward up the western highlands, only so far as
the shelving slopes of the clay and conglomerate foothills, which
constitute the piedmont of the Suleiman and Kirthar Mountains, afforded
conditions for their crops. Thus from the Arabian Sea for 600 miles
north to the Gomal River, the political frontier of India was defined by
the line of relief dividing the limestone mountains from the alluvial
plain, the marauding Baluch and Afghan hill tribes from the patient
farmers of the Sind.[1190] This line remained the border of India from
pre-British days till the recent annexation of Baluchistan.
These piedmont boundaries are most clearly defined in point of race and
civilization, where superior peoples from the lowlands are found
expanding at the cost of retarded mountain folk. Romans and Rhaetians
once met along a line skirting the foot of the eastern Alps, as Russians
to-day along the base of the Caucasus adjoin the territories of the
heterogeneous tribes occupying that mountain area.[1191] [See map page
225.] The plains-loving Magyars of Hungary have pushed up to the rim of
mountainous Siebenburgen or Transylvania from Arad on the Maros River to
Sziget on the upper Theiss, while the highland region has a predominant
Roumanian population. A clearly defined linguistic and cultural boundary
of Indo-Aryan speech and religion, both Hindu and Mohammedan, follows
the piedmont edges of the Brahmaputra Valley, and separates the lowland
inhabitants from the pagans of Tibeto-Burman speech occupying the
Himalayan slope to the north and the Khasia Mountains to the south. The
highland race is Mongoloid, while the Bengali of an Aryan, Dravidian and
Mongoloid blend fill the river plain.[1192] Such piedmont boundary lines
tend to blur into bands or zones of ethnic intermixture and cultural
assimilation. The western Himalayan foothills show the blend of
Mongoloid and Aryan stocks, where the vigorous Rajputs of the plains
have encroached upon the mountaineer's land.[1193] Of almost every mountain
folk it can be assumed that they once occupied their highlands to the
outermost rim of the piedmont, and retired to the inner rim of this
intermediary slope only under compulsion from without.
[Sidenote: Density of population in piedmont belts.]
The piedmont boundary also divides two areas of contrasted density of
population. Mountain regions are, as a rule, more sparsely settled than
plains. The piedmont is normally a transition region in this respect;
but where high mountains rise as climatic islands of adequate water
supply out of desert and steppes, they concentrate on their lower slopes
all the sedentary population, making their piedmonts zones of greatest
density. Low mountains in arid regions become centers of population;
here their barrier nature vanishes. In the Sudanese state of Darfur, the
Marra Mountains are the district best watered and most thickly
populated. Nowhere higher than 6000 feet (1850 meters), they afford
running water at 4000 feet elevation and water pools in the sandy beds
of their wadis at 3200 feet. Below this, water disappears from the
surface, and can be found only in wells whose depth and scarcity
increase with distance from the central mountains.[1194] The neighboring
kingdom of Wadai shows similar conditions and effects.[1195] In the heart
of Australia, where utter desert reigns, the Macdonnell Ranges form the
nucleus of the northern area occupied by the Arunta tribe of natives;
farther north the Murchison Range, usually abounding in water-holes, is
the center and stronghold of the Warramunga tribe.[1196]
Mineral wealth or waterpower in the mountains serves to collect an urban
and industrial population along their rim, as we see it about the base
of the Erz Mountains in Saxony, the Riesen range in Silesia, the
coal-bearing Pennine Mountains of northwestern England, and the
highlands of southern Wales, all which piedmont zones show a density of
over 150 to the square kilometer (385 to the square mile). Hence the
original Swiss Confederation, which included only the mountain cantons
of Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden, was greatly strengthened by the
accession of the piedmont cantons of Lucerne, Zurich, Zug and Bern in
the early fourteenth century, as later by St. Gall, Aargau and Geneva.
These marginal cantons to-day show a density of population exceeding
385 to the square mile, and rising to 1356 in the canton of Geneva.
[Sidenote: Piedmont towns and roads.]
Piedmont belts tend strongly towards urban development, even where rural
settlement is sparse. Sparsity of population and paucity of towns within
the mountains cause main of traffic to keep outside the highlands, but
close enough to their base to tap their trade at every valley outlet. On
the alluvial fans or plains of these valley outlets, where mountain and
piedmont road intersect, towns grow up. Some of them develop into
cities, when they command transverse routes of communication quite
across the highlands. The ancient _Via Aemilia_ traced the northern base
of the Apennines from Ariminum on the Adriatic to Dertona at the foot of
the Ligurian range back of Genoa, and connected a long line of Roman
colonies. The modern railroad follows almost exactly the course of the
old Roman road,[1197] while a transverse line southward across the
Apennines, following an ancient highway over the Poretta Pass to the
Arno Valley, has maintained the old preëminence of Bologna. A line of
towns, connected by highways or railroads, according to the economic
development of the section, defines the bases of the Pyrenees, Alps,
Jura, Apennines, Harz, Vosges, Elburz and numerous other ranges. Along
the Elburz piedmont runs the imperial road of Persia from Tabriz through
Teheran to Meshed. In arid regions these piedmont roads are an unfailing
feature, but their towns shrink to rural settlements, except at the
junction of transmontane routes.
[Sidenote: Piedmont termini of transmontane routes.]
Piedmont cities draw their support from plain, mountain and transmontane
region, relying chiefly on the fertile soil of the level country to feed
their large populations. Sometimes they hug the foot of the mountains,
as Bologna, Verona, Bergamo, Zurich, Denver and Pittsburg do; sometimes,
like Milan, Turin, and Munich, they drop down into the plain, but keep
the mountains in sight. They flourish in proportion to their local
resources, in which mineral wealth is particularly important, and to the
number and practicability of their transmontane connections. Hence they
often receive their stamp from the mountains behind them as well as from
the bordering plain. The St. Gotthard route is flanked by Lucerne on the
north and Milan on the south. The Brenner has its urban outlets at
Munich and Verona. Narbonne and Barcelona form the termini of the route
over the eastern Pyrenees; Toulouse commands the less used central
passes, and Bayonne the western. Tiflis is situated in the great
mountain trough connecting the Black Sea and the Caspian; but over the
Caucasus by the Pass of Dariel come the influences which make it a
Russian town. Peshawar, situated in the mountain angle of the Punjab,
depends more upon the Khaibar Pass and its connections thereby with
Central Asia than upon the plains of the Indus; its population, in
appearance and composition nearly as much Central Asiatic as Indian, is
engaged in traffic between the Punjab and the whole trans-Hindu Kush
country.[1198]
Where a mountain system describes a semi-circular course, its transit
routes tend to converge on the inner side, and at their foci fix the
sites of busy commercial centers. Turin draws on a long series of Alpine
and Apennine routes from the Pass of Giovi (1548 feet or 472 meters)
leading up from Genoa on the south, to the Great St. Bernard on the
north. Milan gets immense support from the St. Gotthard and Simplon
railroads over the Alps, besides wagon routes over several minor passes.
Kulm, Balkh and Kunduz in the piedmont of northern Afghanistan are fed
by twenty or more passes over the Hindu Kush and Pamir. Bukhara is the
remoter focus of all these routes, and also of the valley highways of
the western Tian Shan. It therefore occupies a location which would make
it one of the great emporiums of the world, were it not for the expanse
of desert to the west and the scantiness of its local water supply,
which is tapped farther upstream for the irrigation of Samarkand. In its
bazaars are found drugs, dyes and teas from India; wool, skins and dried
fruit from Afghanistan; woven goods, arms, and books from Persia; and
Russian wares imported by rail and caravan. English goods, which
formerly came in by the Kabul route from India, have been excluded since
Russia established a protectorate over the province of Bukhara. Across
the highlands to the east, the cities of Kashgar and Yarkand, situated
in that piedmont zone of vegetation where mountain and desert meet, are
enclosed by a vast amphitheater formed by the Tian Shan, the Pamir
Highlands, and the Karakorum range. Stieler's atlas marks no less than
six trade routes over the passes of these mountains from Kashgar to the
headstreams of the Sir-daria and Oxus, and six from Yarkand to the Oxus
and Indus. Kashgar is a meeting ground of many nationalities. To its
bazaars come traders from China, India, Afghanistan, Bukhara, and
Russian Turkestan.[1199] The Russian railway up the Sir-daria to Andizhan
brings European goods within relatively easy reach of the Terek Davan
Pass, and makes serious competition for English wares entering by the
more difficult Karakorum Pass from India.[1200]
[Sidenote: Cities of coastal piedmonts.]
Where mountains drop off into a desert, as these Central Asiatic ranges
do, their piedmont cities are confined to a narrow zone between
mountains and arid waste. Bordering two transit regions of scant
population and through travel, they become natural outfitting points,
centers of exchange rather than production. Where mountains drop off
into the sea and the piedmont therefore becomes a coastal belt, again it
borders two transit regions; but here the ports of the desert are
replaced by maritime ports, which command the world thoroughfare of the
ocean. They therefore tend to concentrate population and commerce
wherever a good harbor coincides with the outlet of a transmontane
route, as in Genoa and Bombay.
[Sidenote: Piedmonts as colonial or backwoods frontiers.]
Since mountains are inhospitable to every phase of the historical
movement, they long remain regions of retardation. Hence to their
bordering plains they sustain the relation of young undeveloped lands,
so that life in their piedmont belts tends to show for a long time all
the characteristics of a new colonial frontier. The rim of the Southern
Appalachians abundantly illustrates this principle even to-day. During
the westward expansion of the American people from 1830 to 1850, the
eastern rim of the Rocky Mountains was dotted with trading posts like
that of the Missouri Fur Company at the forks of the Missouri River,
Forts Laramie and Platte on the North Fork of the Platte, Vrain's Fort
and Fort Lancaster on the South Fork, Bent's Fort at the mountain exit
of the Arkansas River, and Barclay's in the high Mora Valley of the
upper Canadian. These posts gathered in the rich pelts which formed the
one product of this highland area susceptible of bearing the cost of
transportation to the far away Missouri River. Though they developed
into way-stations on the overland trails, when the movement of
population to California and Oregon in the forties and fifties made the
Rocky Mountains a typical highland transit region, yet they long
remained frontier posts.[1201] Later the abundant water supply of this
piedmont district, as compared with the arid plains below, and the
mineral wealth of the mountains concentrated here an agricultural and
industrial population.
In Sze Chuan province of western China, the piedmont of a vast highland
hinterland shows a similar development. Here the towns of Matang,
Sungpan, Kuan Hsien, and even the capital Chengtu, situated in the high
Min Valley at the foot of the mountains walling them in on the west, are
emporiums for trade with the Tibetans, who bring hither furs, hides and
wool from their plateau pastures, and musk from the musk deer on the
Koko Nor plains.[1202] Just to the north, Sian (Singan), capital of the
highland province of Shensi, concentrates the fur trade of a large
mountain wilderness to the west. Several blocks on the main street form
a great fur market for the sale of mink and other skins used to line the
official robes of mandarins.[1203]
[Sidenote: Mountain carriers.]
Like seas, deserts, and other geographical transit regions, mountains
too under primitive conditions develop their professional carriers.
These collect in the piedmont, where highway and mule train cease, and
where the steep track admits only human beasts of burden, trained by
their environment to be climbers and packers. These mountain carriers
are found on the Pacific face of the coast ranges of North and South
America from the peninsula of Alaska to the Straits of Magellan. They
are able to pack from 100 to 160 pounds up a steep grade. The Chilkoot
Indians, men, women and children, did invaluable service on the White
Horse and Chilkoot passes during the early days of the Klondike rush.
They had devised a well-arranged harness, which enabled them better to
carry their loads. Farther south in British Columbia the piedmont tribes
had once a like importance; there they operated especially from the town
of Hope on the lower Frazer River as a distributing center. The Mexican
carrier is so efficient and so cheap that he enters into serious
competition with modern schemes to improve transportation, especially as
the rugged relief of this country makes those schemes expensive.[1204] The
Indians of the eastern slope of the Andes pack India rubber, in loads of
150 pounds each, from the upper Purus and Madeira rivers up to the
Andean plateau at a height of 15,000 feet, and there transfer their
burdens to mules for transport down to the Peruvian port of
Mollendo.[1205]
The retarded mountain peoples on the borders of the Central Asia plateau
employ the same primitive means of transportation. The roads leading
from the Sze Chuan province of western China over the mountain ranges to
Tibet are traversed by long lines of porters, men, women and children,
laden with bales of brick tea,[1206] the strongest of them shouldering 350
pounds. The Bhutia coolies of Sikkim act as carriers on military and
commercial expeditions on the track across the Himalayas between
Darjeeling and Shigatze. Colonel Younghusband found that these Bhutias,
who were paid by the job, would carry a pack of 250 to 300 pounds, or
three times the usual burden of a Central Asia carrier. Landon cites the
case of a Bhutia lady who was said to have carried a piano on her head
from the plains up to Darjeeling (7150 feet).[1207] In Nepal, women and
girls, less often men, have long been accustomed to carry travellers and
merchandise over the Himalayan ranges.[1208] In the marginal valleys of
the Himalayas, like Kashmir and Baltistan, the natives are regularly
impressed for _begar_ or carrier service on the English military roads
to strategic points on the high mountain frontier of the Indian
Empire.[1209] So the Igorots of the Luzon province of Benguet pack all
goods and supplies from Naguilian in the lowlands up 4000 feet in a
distance of 25 miles to their little capital of Baguio; for this service
they are now paid one peso (46 cents in 1901) a day with food, or ten
times as much as under the Spanish rule.[1210]
[Sidenote: Power of mountain barriers to block or deflect.]
If the historical movement slackens its pace at the piedmont slope,
higher up the mountain it comes to a halt. Only when human invention has
greatly improved communication across the barrier are its obstacles in
part overcome. The great highland wall stretching across southern Europe
from the Bay of Biscay to the Black Sea long cut off the solid mass of
the continent from the culture of the Mediterranean lands. Owing to
these mountains Central Europe came late into the foreground of history,
not till the Middle Ages. Even the penetrating civilization of Greece
reached it only by long detours around the ends of the mountain barrier;
by Massilia and the Rhone, by Istria and the Danube, Greek commerce
trickled through to the interior of the continent.
Where mountains fail to check, they deflect the historical movement. The
wall of the Carpathians, bulwark of Central Europe, split the westward
moving Slav hordes in the 6th century, diverting one southward up the
Danube Valley to the Eastern Alps, and turning one northward along the
German lowlands.[1211] The northward expansion of the Romans, rebuffed by
the high double wall of the Central Alps, was bent to the westward over
the Maritime, Cottine and Savoy Alps, where the barrier offered the
shortest and easiest transmontane routes. Hence Germany received the
elements of Mediterranean culture indirectly through Gaul, second-hand
and late. The ancient Helvetians, moving southward from northern
Switzerland into Gaul, took a route skirting the western base of the
Alps by the gap at Geneva, and thus threatened Roman Provincia. Cæsar's
campaigns into northern Gaul were given direction by the massive Central
Plateau of France.[1212] The rugged and infertile area of the Catskills
long retarded the westward movement in colonial New York and deflected
it northward through the Mohawk depression, which therefore had its long
thin line of settlements when the neighboring Catskills were still a
"bare spot."
[Sidenote: Significance of mountain valleys.]
In their valleys, mountains lose something of their barrier nature, and
approximate the level of the plains. Here they harbor oases of denser
population and easier intercourse. Valleys favor human settlement
through the milder climate of their lower elevation, the accumulation of
soil on their floors, their sheltered environment, and their command of
such routes of communication as the highlands afford. They are the
avenues into and within a mountain system, and therefore radically
influence its history by their direction and location. The Central
Plateau of France, through the valleys of the Alliers and upper Loire,
is most accessible from the north; therefore in that direction it has
maintained its most important historical connections,[1213] from the days
of Cæsar and Vercingetorix. The massive highland region of Transylvania,
which opens long accessible valleys westward toward the plains of the
Theiss and Danube, has since the eleventh century received thence
Hungarian immigration and political dominion.[1214] Its dominant Roumanian
population, however, seems to have fled thither from the Tartar-swept
plains to the southeast.
The anthropo-geography of mountain valleys depends upon the structure of
the highlands themselves, whether they are fold mountains, whose ranges
wall in longitudinal valleys, or dissected plateaus, whose valleys are
mostly transverse river channels leading from the hydrographic center
out to the rim of the highlands. Longitudinal valleys are not only long,
but also broad as a rule and often show a nearly level floor.[1215] They
therefore form districts of considerable size, fertility, and
individuality, and play distinct historical rôles in the history of
their respective highlands. Such are the upper Rhone Valley with its
long line of flourishing towns and villages, the Hither Rhine, the Inn
of the Tyrol and the Engadine, the fertile trough of the meandering
Isère above Grenoble,[1216] the broad Orontes-Leontes valley between the
Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon where Kadesh and Baalbec were once the glory of
northern Syria. Such is the central trough of the Appalachian Mountains,
known as the Great Appalachian Valley, seventy-five miles wide,
subdivided into constituent valleys of similar character by parallel,
even-crested ridges following the trend of the mountains. These are
drained by broad, leisurely rivers, bordered by fertile farms and
substantial towns. Transverse valleys, on the other hand, are generally
narrow, with steep slopes rising almost from the river's edge and
supporting only small villages and farms. A comparison of the spacious,
smooth-floored valley of Andermatt with the wild Reuss gorge, of the
fertile and populous Shenandoah Valley in the Southern Appalachians with
the canon of the Kanawha in the Cumberland Plateau, makes the contrast
striking enough.
[Sidenote: Longitudinal valleys.]
Longitudinal valleys, by reason of their length and their branching
lateral valleys, are the natural avenues of communication within the
mountains themselves. They therefore give a dominant direction to such
phases of the historical movement as succeed in passing the outer
barrier. The series of parallel ranges which strike off from the eastern
end of the Tibetan plateau southward into Farther India have directed
along their valleys the main streams of Mongolian migration and
expansion, heading them toward the river basins of Burma and Indo China,
and away from India itself.[1217] While Tibetan elements have during the
ages slowly welled over the high Himalayan brim and trickled down toward
the Gangetic plain, Burma has been deluged by floods of Mongolians
pouring down the runnels of the land. A carriage road follows the axis
of the Central Alps from Lake Geneva to Lake Constance by means of the
upper Rhone, Andermatt, and upper Rhine valleys, linked by the Furca and
Oberalp passes. The Roman and Medieval routes northward across the
Central Alps struck the upper Rhine Valley above Coire, (the ancient
Curia Rhaetorum); this natural groove gave them a northeastward
direction, and made them emerge from the mountains directly south of
Ulm, which thereby gained great importance. The trade routes from
Damascus and Palmyra which once entered the Orontes-Leontes trough in
the Lebanon system found their Mediterranean termini south near Tyre or
north near Antioch, and thus contributed to the greatness of those
ancient emporiums. The Great Appalachian Valley used to be a highway for
the Iroquois Indians, when they took the warpath against the Cherokee
tribes of Tennessee. Later it gave a distinct southwestward trend to
pioneer movements of population within the mountains, blending in its
common channel the Quakers, Germans and Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania,
with the English and Huguenot French of the more southern colonies. In
the Civil War its fertile fields were swept by marching armies, all the
way from Chattanooga to Gettysburg.
[Sidenote: Passes in mountain barriers.]
The barrier nature of mountains depends upon their height and structure,
whether they are massive, unbroken walls like the Scandinavian Alps and
the Great Smoky range; or, like the Welsh Highlands and the Blue Ridge,
are studded with low passes. The Pyrenees, Caucasus and Andes, owing to
the scarcity and great height of their passes, have always been serious
barriers. The Pyrenees divide Spain from France more sharply than the
Alps divide Italy from France; owing to their rampart character, they
form the best and most definite natural boundary in Europe.[1218] Epirus
and Aetolia, fenced in by the solid Pindus range, took little part in
the common life of ancient Greece; but the intermittent chains of
Thessaly offered a passway between Macedon and Hellas. The Alps have an
astonishing number of excellent passes, evenly distributed for the most
part. These, in conjunction with the great longitudinal valleys of the
system, offer transit routes from side to side in any direction. The
Appalachian system is some three hundred miles broad and thirteen
hundred miles long, but it has many easy gaps among its parallel ranges,
so that it offered natural though circuitous highways to the early
winners of the West. The long line (400 miles) of the Hindu Kush range,
high as it is, forms no strong natural boundary to India, because it is
riddled with passes at altitudes from 12,500 to 19,000 feet.[1219] The
easternmost group of these passes lead down to Kashmir, and therefore
lend this state peculiar importance as guardian of these northern
entrances to India.[1220] The Suleiman Mountains along the Indo-Afghan
frontier are an imperfect defence for the same reason. They are indented
by 289 passes capable of being traversed by camels. The mountain border
of Baluchistan contains 75 more, the most important of which focus their
roads upon Kandahar. Hence the importance to British India of Kandahar
and Afghanistan. Across this broken northwest barrier have come almost
all the floods of invasion and immigration that have contributed their
varied elements to the mixed population of India. Tradition, epic and
history tell of Asiatic highlanders ever sweeping down into the warm
valley of the Indus through these passes; Scythians, Aryans, Greeks,
Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Turks, Tartars, and Mongols have all
traveled these rocky roads, to rest in the enervating valleys of the
peninsula.[1221]
[Sidenote: Breadth of mountain barriers.]
Mountains folded into a succession of parallel ranges are greater
obstructions than a single range like the Erz, Black Forest, and
Vosges, or a narrow, compact system like the Western Alps, which can
be crossed by a single pass. Owing to this simple structure the
Western Alps were traversed by four established routes in the days of
the Roman Empire. These were: I. The _Via Aurelia_ between the
Maritime Alps and the sea, where now runs the Cornice Road. II. The
_Mons Matrona_ (Mont Genevre Pass, 6080 feet or 1854 meters
[Transcriber's Note: printer's error incorrectly printed as
kilometers.]) between the headstream of the Dora Riparia and that of
the Durance, which was the best highway for armies. III. The Little
St. Bernard (7075 feet or 2157 meters), from Aosta on the Dora Baltea
over to the Isère and down to Lugdunum (Lyons). IV. The Great St.
Bernard (8109 feet or 2472 meters) route, which led northward from
Aosta over the Pennine Alps to Octodurus at the elbow of the upper
Rhone, where Martigny now stands. Across the broad double rampart of
the Central Alps the Roman used chiefly the Brenner route, which by a
low saddle unites the deep reëntrant valleys of the Adige and Inn
rivers, and thus surmounts the barrier by a single pass. However, a
short cut northward over the Chalk Alps by the Fern Pass made closer
connection with Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg). The Romans seem to
have been ignorant of the St. Gotthard, which, though high, is the
summit of an unbroken ascent from Lake Maggiore up the valley of the
Ticino on one side, and from Lake Lucerne up the Reuss on the other.
Mountains which spread out on a broad base in a series of parallel
chains, and through which no long transverse valleys offer ready
transit, form serious barriers to every phase of intercourse. The lofty
boundary wall of the Pyrenees, a folded mountain system of sharp ranges
and difficult passes, has successfully separated Spain from continental
Europe; it has given the Iberian Peninsula, in the course of a long
history, closer relations with Morocco than with its land neighbor
France. It thus justifies the French saying that "Africa begins at the
Pyrenees." The Andalusian fold mountains stretching across southern
Spain in a double wall from Trafalgar to Cape Nao, accessible only by
narrow and easily defended passes, enabled the Moors of Granada to hold
their own for centuries against the Spaniard Christians. The high thin
ridges of the folded Jura system, poor in soil and sparsely populated,
broken by occasional "cluses" or narrow water-gaps admitting the rivers
from one elevated longitudinal valley to another, have always been a
serious hindrance to traffic.[1222]
[Sidenote: Circuitous routes through folded mountains.]
Such mountains can be crossed only by circuitous routes from pass to
pass, ascending and descending each range of the system. The Central
Alps, grooved by the longitudinal valleys of the upper Rhone, Rhine and
Inn, make transit travel a series of ups and downs. The northern range
must be crossed by some minor pass like the Gemmi, (7553 feet) or
Panixer (7907 feet) to the longitudinal valleys, and the southern range
again by the Simplon (6595 feet), San Bernadino (6768 feet), Splügen
(6946 feet) or Septimer (7582 feet) to the Po basin. Across the
corrugated highland of the Hindu Kush, lying between the plains of the
Indus and the Oxus, the caravans of western Asia seek the market of the
Punjab by a circuitous route through the Hajikhak Pass (12,188 feet) or
famous Gates of Bamian over the main range of the Hindu Kush, by the
Unai Pass over the Paghman Mountains to Kabul at 5740 feet, and then by
gorges of the Kabul River and the Khaibar Pass (6825 feet) down to
Peshawar. This road presents so many difficulties that caravans from
Turkestan to India prefer another route from Merv up the valley of the
Heri-Rud through the western hills of the Hindu Kush to Herat, thence
diagonally southeast across Afghanistan to Kandahar, and thence by the
Bolan Pass down to the Sind. The broad, low series of forested mountains
consisting of the Vindhyan and Kaimur Hills, reinforced by the Satpura,
Kalabet, Gawilgarh ranges, Mahadeo Hills, Maikal Range and Chutia Nagpur
Plateau as a secondary ridge to the south, forms a double barrier
across the base of peninsular India. It divides the Deccan from
Hindustan so effectually that it has sufficed to set limits to any Aryan
advance en masse southward. It kept southern India isolated, and
admitted only later Aryan influences which filtered through the barrier.
To people accustomed to treeless plains, these wide belts of wooded
hills were barrier enough. Even a few years ago their passes were
dreaded by cartmen; most of the carriage of the country was effected by
pack-bullocks. Even when roads were cleared through the forests, they
were likely to be rendered impassable by torrential rains.[1223]
[Sidenote: Dominant trans-montane routes.]
Where a broad, complex mountain system contracts to narrow compass, or
is cut by deep reentrant valleys leading up to a single pass, the
transmontane route here made by nature assumes great historical
Importance. The double chain of the mighty Caucasus, from 120 to 150
miles wide and 750 miles long, stretches an almost insuperable barrier
between the Black Sea and the Caspian. But nearly midway between these
two seas it is constricted to only 60 miles by a geographical and
geological gulf, which penetrates from the steppes of Russia almost to
the heart of the system.[1224] This gulf forms the high valley of the
Terek River, beyond whose headstream lies the Dariel defile (7503 feet
or 2379 meters), which continues the natural depression across to the
short southern slope. All the other passes of the Caucasus are 3000
meters or more high, lie above snow line and are therefore open only in
summer. The Dariel Pass alone is open all the year around.[1225] Here runs
the great military road from Vladicaucas to Tiflis, which the Russians
have built to control their turbulent mountaineer subjects; and here are
located the Ossetes, the only people among the variegated tribes of the
whole Caucasus who occupy both slopes. All the other tribes and
languages are confined to one side or the other.[1226] Moreover, the
Ossetes, occupying an exposed location in their highway habitat, lack
the courage of the other mountaineers, and yielded without resistance to
the Russians. In this respect they resemble the craven-spirited
Kashmiri, whose mountain-walled vale forms a passway from Central Asia
down to the Punjab.
[Sidenote: Brenner route.]
The Pass of Dariel, owing to its situation in a retarded Brenner corner
of Asia, has never attained the historical importance which attaches to
the deep saddle of the Brenner Pass (4470 feet) in the Central Alps.
Uniting the reëntrant valleys of the Inn and Adige rivers only 2760 feet
above the Inn's exit from the mountains upon the Bavarian plateau, it
forms a low, continuous line of communication across the Central Alps.
The Brenner was the route of the Cimbri invading the Po Valley, and
later of the Roman forces destined for frontier posts of the Empire on
the upper Danube. In the Middle Ages it was the route for the armies of
the German Emperors who came to make good their claim to Italy. By this
road came the artists and artisans of the whole north country to learn
the arts and crafts of beauty-loving Venice. From the Roman road-makers
to the modern railroad engineer, with the concomitant civilization of
each, the Brenner has seen the march of human progress.
[Sidenote: Pass of Belfort.]
Farther to the west, the wall of highlands stretching across southern
Europe is interrupted by a deep groove formed by the mountain-flanked
Rhone Valley and the Pass of Belfort, or Burgundian Gate, which lies
between the Vosges and Jura system, and connects the Rhone road with the
long rift valley of the middle Rhine. This pass, broad and low (350
meters or 1148 feet) marks the insignificant summit in the great
historic route of travel between the Mediterranean and the North Sea,
from the days of ancient Etruscan merchants to the present. This was the
route of the invading Teuton hordes which the Roman Marius defeated at
Aquae Sextiae, and later, of the Germans under Ariovistus, whom Cæsar
defeated near the present Mühlhausen. Four centuries afterward came the
Alamannians, Burgundians and other Teutonic stocks, who infused a tall
blond element into the population of the Rhone Valley.[1227] The Pass of
Belfort is the strategic key to Central Europe. Here Napoleon repeatedly
fixed his military base for the invasion of Austria, and hither was
directed one division of the German army in 1870 for the invasion of
France. The gap is traversed to-day by a canal connecting the Doubs and
the Rhine and by a railroad, just as formerly by the tracks of migrating
barbarians.
[Sidenote: Mohawk route.]
The natural depression of the Mohawk Valley, only 445 feet (136 meters)
above sea level, is the only decided break across the entire width of
the long Appalachian system. This fact, together with its ready
accessibility from the Hudson on the east and Lake Ontario on the west,
lent it importance in the early history of the colonies, as well as in
the later history of New York. It was an easy line of communication with
the Great Lakes, and gave the colonists access to the fur trade of the
Northwest, then in the hands of the French. So when French and English
fought for supremacy in the New World, the Mohawk and Hudson valleys
were their chief battleground; elsewhere the broad Appalachian barrier
held them apart. Again in the Revolution, control of the Mohawk-Hudson
route was the objective of the British armies mobilized on the Canadian
frontier, because it alone would enable them to co-operate with the
British fleet blockading the coast cities of the colonies. In the War of
1812, it was along this natural transmontane highway that supplies were
forwarded to the remote frontier, to support Perry's fight for control
of the Great Lakes. The war demonstrated the strategic necessity of a
protected, wholly American line of water communication between the
Hudson and our western frontier, while the commercial and political
advantage was obvious. Hence a decade after the conclusion of the war,
this depression was traced by the Erie Canal, through which passed long
lines of boats to build up the commercial greatness of New York City.
[Sidenote: Height in mountain barriers.]
Other structural features being the same, mountains are barriers also in
proportion to their height; for, with few exceptions, the various
anthropo-geographic effects of upheaved areas are intensified with
increase of elevation. Old, worn-down mountains, like the Appalachians
and the Ural, broad as they are, have been less effective obstacles than
the towering crests of the Alps and Caucasus. The form of the elevation
also counts. Easy slopes and flat or rounded summits make readier
transit regions than high, thin ridges with escarpment-like flanks.
Mountains of plateau form, though reaching a great altitude, may be
relatively hospitable to the historical movement and even have a regular
nomadic population in summer. The central and western Tian Shan system
is in reality a broad, high plateau, divided into a series of smoothly
floored basins and gently rolling ridges lying at an elevation of 10,000
to 12,000 feet above the sea. Its pamirs or plains of thick grass,
nourished by the relatively heavy precipitation of this high altitude,
and forming in summer an island of verdure in the surrounding sea of
sun-scorched waste, attract the pastoral nomads from all the bordering
steppes and deserts.[1228] Thus it is a meeting place for a seasonal
population, sparse and evanescent, but its uplifted mass holds asunder
the few sedentary peoples fringing its piedmont. The corrugated dome of
the Pamir highland, whose valley floors lie at an elevation of 11,000 to
13,000 feet, draws to its summer pastures Kirghis shepherds from north,
east and west; and their flocks in turn attract the raids of the
marauding mountaineers occupying the Hunza Valley to the south. The
Pamir, high but accessible, was a passway in the tenth century for
Chinese caravans bound from "Serica" or the "Land of Silk" to the Oxus
River and the Caspian. Here Marco Polo and many travelers after him
found fodder for their pack animals and food for themselves, because
they could always purchase meat from the visiting shepherds. The
possibilities of the Pamir as a transit region are apparent to Russia,
who in 1886 annexed most of it to the government of Bukhara.
[Sidenote: Contrasted accessibility of opposite slopes.]