THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 190

The Mixture of Races Among the Nomadic Tribes

12-17. The Mixture of Races Among the Nomadic Tribes

The steppes and deserts of Central Asia are an impassable barrier for the South Asiatics and the Aryans, but not for the North Asiatic, the Altaian; for him they are an open country providing him with the indispensable winter pastures. On the other hand, for the South Asiatic Aryan these deserts are an object of terror, and besides he is not impelled towards them, as he has winter pastures near at hand. It is this difference in the distance of summer and winter pastures that makes the North Asiatic Altaian an ever-wandering herdsman, and the grazing part of the Indo-European race cattle-rearers settled in limited districts. Thus, while the native Iranian must halt before the trackless region of steppes and deserts and cannot follow the well-mounted robber-nomad thither, Iran itself is the object of greatest longing to the nomadic Altaian. Here he can plunder and enslave to his heart's delight, and if he succeeds in maintaining himself for a considerable time among the Aryans, he learns the language of the subjugated people, and by mingling with them loses his Mongol characteristics more and more. If the Iranian is now fortunate enough to shake off the yoke, the dispossessed Iranised Altaian intruder inflicts himself upon other lands. So it was with the Scythians.

Leaving their families behind in the South Russian steppes, the Scythians invaded Media in B.C. 630 and advanced into Mesopotamia and Syria as far as Egypt. In Media they took Median wives and learned the Median language. After being driven out by Cyaxares, on their return some twenty-eight years later, they met with a new generation, the offspring of the wives and daughters whom they had left behind, and slaves of an alien race. A thorough mixture of race within a single generation is hardly conceivable. A hundred and fifty years later Hippocrates found them still so foreign, so Mongolian, that he could say that they were "very different from the rest of mankind, and only like themselves, as are also the Egyptians." He remarked their yellowish-red complexion, corpulence, smooth skins, and their consequent eunuch-like appearance — all typically Mongol characteristics. Hippocrates was the most celebrated physician and natural philosopher of the ancient world. His evidence is unshakable, and cannot be invalidated by the Aryan speech of the Scythians. Their Mongol type was innate in them, whereas their Iranian speech was acquired and is no refutation of Hippocrates' testimony. On the later Greek vases from South Russian excavations they already appear strongly demongolised and the Altaian is only suggested by their hair, which is as stiff as a horse's mane — hence Aristotle's epithet — the characteristic that survives longest among all Ural-Altaian hybrid peoples.

If a nomad army is obliged to take foreign non-nomadic wives, there occurs at once a dualism, corresponding to the two sexes, in the language and way of living of each individual household. The new wives cannot live in the saddle, they do not know how to take down the tent, load it on the beasts of burden, and set it up again, and yet they must share the restless life of the herdsman. Consequently, where the ground admits of it, as in South Russia, the tent is put on wheels and drawn by animals. Thus the Scythian women were hamaxobiotic (wagon-inhabiting), the men however remained true to their horse-riding life and taught their boys too, as soon as they could keep themselves in the saddle.

But the dualism in language could not maintain itself; the children held to the language of the mother, the more easily because even the fathers understood Medish, and so the Altaian Scythian people, with their language finally Iranised, became Iranian. But their mode of life remained unchanged: the consumption of horse-flesh, soured horse's milk (kumiz) and cheese of the same, the hemp vapour bath for men (the women bathed differently), singeing of the fleshy parts of the body as a cure for rheumatism, poisoning of the arrow-tips, wholesale human offerings, and slaughter of favourite wives at the burials of princes, the placing on horseback of the stuffed bodies of murdered warriors round the grave, etc. — all such customs as are found so well defined among the Mongols of the Middle Ages.

The modern Tartars of the Crimea, whose classical beauty sometimes rivals that of the Greeks and Romans, underwent, in the same land, the same change to the Aryan type.

The same is the case with the Magyars whose mounted nomadic mode of life and fury, and consequently their origin, was Turkish, but their language was a mixture of Ugrian and Turkish on an Ugrian basis. Evidently a Magyar army, Turkish in blood, formerly advanced far to the north where it subdued an Ugrian people and took Ugrian wives; the children then blended the Ugrian speech of their mothers with the Turkish speech of their fathers. But they must also once have dominated Indo-European peoples and mixed themselves very strongly with them, for Gardezi’s original source from the middle of the ninth century describes them as “handsome, stately men.” At that time they were leading the nomad existence in the Pontic Steppe — the old Scythia — whence they engaged in terrible slave-hunting among the neighbouring Slavs; and as they were notorious women-hunters, they must have assimilated much Slav, Alan, and Circassian blood, and thus became handsome, stately men. However the change did not end there. At the end of the ninth century their army, on its return from a predatory expedition, found their kindred at home totally exterminated by their deadly enemies, the Patzinaks, a related stock.

Consequently the whole body had again to take foreign wives, and they occupied the steppes of Hungary. Before this catastrophe the Magyars are said to have mustered 20,000 horsemen — an oriental exaggeration, for this would assume a nomad people of 100,000 souls. Consequently only a few thousand horsemen could have fled to Hungary. There they mixed themselves further with the medley race-conglomeration settled there, which had formed itself centuries before, and assimilated stragglers from the related Patzinak stock. By this absorption the Altaian type asserted itself so predominantly that the Frankish writers were never tired of depicting their ugliness and loathsomeness in the most horrifying colours. Their fury was so irresistible that in sixty-three years they were able with impunity to make thirty-two great predatory expeditions as far as the North Sea, and to France, Spain, Italy, and Byzantium.

Thus the modern Magyars are one of the most varied race-mixtures on the face of the earth, and one of the two chief Magyar types of to-day — traced to the Arpad era by tomb-findings — is dolichocephalic with a narrow visage. There we have before us Altaian origin, Ugrian speech, and Indo-European type combined.

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