Secret History #14: Legacy of the Steppes

Today we are going to discuss civilization versus the steppes. The steppes are the grasslands, and people often refer to their inhabitants as barbarians. In China, we refer to these people as barbarians. In school, you're taught that there are major differences between civilization and barbarians.

The first major difference is that in a civilization, you are allowed intellectual freedom because only by reading books, only by going to school, only by learning how to think can you be free to think. In contrast, we think of people from the steppes as emotional slaves. They are unpredictable and violent.

Second, we think of civilization as open and curious. We love knowledge and seek to gain more knowledge; therefore, we are innovative. The steppe people, on the other hand, are static because they are insular and close-minded.

The last thing is that we think civilization leads to wealth and prosperity. Only if you are civilized can you be truly happy and wealthy. We think that the steppe people are poor and therefore unhappy.

That is the general understanding of the difference between civilization and the barbarians. The problem is that this creates a misunderstanding, and we can't really explain why, throughout human history, the steppe people have been the greatest conquerors. The classic example is Genghis Khan. How is it that Genghis Khan was able to not only conquer China, which is considered one of the greatest civilizations in the world, but also Baghdad, another great civilization?

What's interesting is that throughout human history, this has been a consistent pattern where the barbarians conquered the civilized people. This is a problem. If civilization is so free, smart, open, curious, innovative, and prosperous, why does it keep losing out to the steppe people?

The answer is because your traditional understanding is completely wrong. I will show you that it's actually the complete opposite. It is the steppe people who are open, curious, and innovative. And it is the civilized people who are close-minded, static, and unhappy. That's my argument to you today.

The Rise and Fall of Civilized Empires

Let's discuss how civilization starts. A major river allows a city to develop. We come together for religious purposes, creating settlements in order to celebrate nature, celebrate God, and celebrate our religion and belief system. Over time, this system becomes unequal and hierarchical, and people leave. But some places are strategic for trade purposes, and people don't want to leave because you can generate a lot of wealth and prosperity. These places become major cities. The first city in world civilization is Uruk.

Over time, they become more prosperous. They build canals, learn farming, and develop their own mythology. As the population grows, they go off and colonize other places along the trade route, both upstream and downstream. These city-states are now in competition with each other. They have a system of competition called open cooperative competition.

This is a very important concept because this concept is what gives us innovation. If you have these three things in place—open, cooperation, competition—you'll be very innovative.

• Open just means that you want to learn and grow from others.
• Cooperation means that you are in contact with others so that you are learning the best practices from other people.
• Competition means that you'll be better than they are.

In this system of city-states, you have massive innovation, and we see this throughout human history. Think of China. When was China the most innovative? It was during the Spring and Autumn period (Chunqiu). That's where we're getting Confucius from, Laozi. All the great ideas came from this period. This is also true for Mesopotamia and for Egypt as well.

Eventually, these city-states all merge into an empire because, during this process of innovation, one city will be more innovative than the others and will conquer them. What's interesting is that it is often the city that is most disadvantaged that conquers the other cities because it is forced to be more innovative. In China, the classic example is the Qin. The Qin was in the mountains. They had a lower population, they were poorer, and they were more isolated. Therefore, they had to be more innovative than the Zhao, the Chu, and the Wei dynasties. This is true throughout human history.

So now you have an empire. At first, this empire is extremely innovative for three reasons:

1. Scale: It has size. Therefore, it's able to draw in more resources.
2. Standardization: Now you're using the same monetary system, the same laws, and the same communications network. That allows for better use of resources.
3. Centralization: You have one place controlling all activities elsewhere. That allows you to build canals, temples, and undertake massive public works projects.

In the beginning of an empire, there's a massive consolidation of innovation which leads to tremendous results. But over time, the empire becomes the opposite of an open cooperative competition system. It becomes insular, secretive, and a monopoly. That's what a bureaucracy is. When an empire reaches a certain point of growth, it becomes a bureaucracy and therefore kills all innovation. So this idea that civilization leads to innovation is wrong. Civilization leads ultimately to corruption.

Now, even though this is a general rule of human development, it's not always true. There are exceptions. For example, one civilization that we know did not work out like this is the Indus Valley civilization, which is in modern-day Pakistan. Even though they had a city-state system, they were actually peaceful, egalitarian, and artistic. They didn't go to war with each other, create a hierarchy, or create a bureaucracy. Even though there are patterns to human history, there are always exceptions to the rule.

The Decay of Empire

Over time, the empire breaks down because you have a hierarchy and a bureaucracy in place, with the people at the bottom. If you are a person in an empire, your life sucks. It really sucks because you're essentially a slave. Why?

• War: The empire goes to war a lot in order to protect its advantages. They can take you to war at any time, and you get killed.
• Debt: It's very easy if you are a peasant to fall into debt. You owe rent to a landlord, and then you have to sell your children.
• Immobility: You're just stuck where you are.

The people in the empire have terrible lives, but they're stuck because of war, debt, and immobility. The bureaucracy will develop a mythology in order to justify why things are like this.

But at the very top, it's actually even more problematic. At the top, you'll eventually have a problem of elite overproduction. This just means that there are only a few limited spots for the elite, and the elite have too many children, and therefore they fight. They break up into different factions, and each faction competes against each other for the right to be the elite. Because of this conflict at the very top, you usually have three results:

1. Revolution: One elite tells the people to overthrow everyone else. It's important to understand that the people themselves do not rebel. It's always one faction of the elite working with the people to overthrow the other factions.
2. Civil War: The factions have different armies and they fight.
3. War with another empire.

This is a common pattern in history. As the empire falls, the pastoral people—the steppe people or the pastoralists—come and take over. Pastoral just means that they don't farm for a living; they raise sheep, goats, and cows. They come and take over the empire. Why? Because these people are the best fighters in the world. They have horses, and they are archers.

What often happens is one faction invites them to be mercenaries in their struggle, and eventually, they recognize, "You know what, we don't have to fight for the prince; we can take over ourselves." Another thing that happens is the faction that invites the mercenaries doesn't have enough money to pay them off. So the mercenaries are just like, "Screw this, we'll just take over the empire ourselves."

Throughout all this, the pastoralists are always in contact with the empire through three things: trade, pillaging (the pastoralists come and steal from the people), and being mercenaries. This is a pattern throughout human history.

The Rise of the Steppe Peoples

The question we have to ask is: why are the pastoralists so different from the people of civilization and empire? The reason is geography. People who are pastoralists grow up in a different environment than the people of civilization and empire, and therefore they develop a different economy, mythology, and culture.

In the beginning, we had agriculture. People came together for religious purposes, built temples, and then had to maintain the temples. Therefore, you build farms around the temple and develop agriculture. But because of climate change and overpopulation, people were constantly forced to move to new places. Agriculture was first developed in the Middle East, and then it went over to Europe and other places.

When they went to Europe, they could actually maintain their agricultural practices because the climate, geography, and terrain of Europe were conducive to agriculture. As a result, Europe maintained the cultural practices of the people of the Middle East. They had egalitarian, artistic, and peaceful civilizations. They were peaceful because, first of all, women were in control. It's the most natural thing to have women be part of the political class. If there was any conflict, the women would just discuss it amongst themselves and come to a harmonious conclusion. They wouldn't have to fight.

Second, there was no money because there was no property. Agriculture is something that you work on together and share. There's no such concept as private property. In other words, no war, no conflict. These are the three distinct characteristics of early human society: women are usually in command, there's no sense of private property, and there's no conflict.

This changes when a city grows and you need a bureaucracy. But what's really important to understand about Europe is that, unlike China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, it does not have a large river, and therefore you cannot grow a big city in Europe. This allowed them to maintain a pretty good life.

But then they go to the steppes. The problem with the steppes is you cannot grow food because it's all grassland. You cannot farm. So now you have to change your cultural practice. What was happening is that these people in the steppes started to trade with people of agriculture. Also, you have people from agricultural areas who moved to the steppes, and they brought with them cows and sheep. This changed everything. As a person, you can't eat grass, but cows and sheep can. So now you can base your entire economy around animals as opposed to agriculture.

There are certain problems with cows and sheep. The first problem is that they're expensive. So now you have a concept of private property and money. This concept didn't really exist before. If I see someone with a cow and I don't have a cow, what do I do? I want to go steal it. This leads to war and conflict. And because you have private property and war, you can't have a system run by women. You need a system run by men. This creates a patriarchy.

This is a very important principle in human history. These three things go together: patriarchy, money, and war.

The Innovations of the Steppes

This new economy required innovations. Let's go over some of their major innovations.

The first is the idea of lactose tolerance. You may not know this, but most humans cannot drink milk naturally. You need to develop the enzymes to do so. They were able to do that because they were forced to rely on cows and sheep for their food. When they learned how to drink milk and started eating meat, they became stronger and taller. For most of human history, the people of the steppes were the tallest and strongest people in the world.

The second major innovation is horse riding. The steppes are a huge, flat area, so you need to move around a lot. Also, cows and sheep eat grass. When they finish the grass in one pasture, they have to move somewhere else. The only way to protect your cows and sheep from other people is to be mobile. So they learned how to domesticate horses, which was a major invention and took a long time. Imagine how hard that is. If horses see you, they run away. How do you train a horse not to run away and let you ride it? It takes a lot of effort, but because they had to do it, they managed to do it.

With horse riding, you can have another invention: the wheel and the wagon. Now you can put all your stuff in a wagon and move from camp to camp, covering the entirety of the steppes.

Because of these three major innovations, you now have a different culture.

1. Patriarchy: Men are in control because, in the steppes, war is a constant thing. The culture becomes very masculine and aggressive. It rewards aggression and courage. When you have a patriarchy in place, you can have more children. When women are in charge, they tend to practice birth control because they want to make sure every child is healthy and lives to adulthood. But with men in charge, they basically get women to have as many kids as possible. In a world with a lot of conflict, you need as many boys to fight as possible.
2. Primogeniture: If you have a lot of children, you have a problem of inheritance. When you die, who do your cows go to? Let's assume you have 100 cows and 10 boys. If you are fair and give 10 cows to each boy, very quickly your family is going to be poor. Because the weather in the steppes is bad, your cows are very likely to die, and your entire family could be extinct in two or three generations. So they invented a new concept called primogeniture, which just means that the eldest boy inherits everything. This ensures that the family can stay wealthy.
3. Patron-Client Relationship: This is what allows for the construction of society in the steppes. In a civilization, you have bureaucracy and centralization. But in the steppes, you can't have that because you can't have that many people. So you have a patron-client relationship. It's like a mafia: I'm the big brother, you're the little brother. Maybe I have 100 cows and you need cows, so I lend you 10. But now you are loyal to me. This creates the idea of tribes. What's really important here is that in civilization, bureaucracy maintains control over people through debt, and you become a slave. But in the steppes, there's no concept of slavery. You're still a free and independent person, but you're just loyal to your big brother. So if your big brother needs you to do something, you go do it for him. There's still a level of freedom in the steppes that you don't have in civilization, and that's why they're such good fighters.

A New Mythology: From Mother Goddess to Sky God

Now that you have these innovations, you need a new mythology to justify or explain them. They went from the Mother Goddess, the religion of agricultural people, to the Sky God. The Mother Goddess wants you to be harmonious, kind, and compassionate. What does the Sky God want you to do? The Sky God wants you to conquer and exploit. It wants you to destroy, kill, and steal.

Also, in this religion, horses and cows are very important, whereas in the agricultural religion, grain and nature are very important.

Because this system does not allow for the creation of a bureaucracy, the steppes always practice open cooperative competition. It's a system that forces you to be aggressive, independent, and to work hard. That's why people of the steppes are the greatest warriors in human history, and that's why when they encounter an empire, they are usually able to conquer it. The steppes are like a training ground for fighters. Over time, the fighters just become more and more fierce. What's ironic is that the fighters who are the most fierce can stay in the steppes. Those fighters who are forced out of the steppes go and conquer the empire. It's a constant pattern in human history.

On Inheritance and Primogeniture

Question: You said that these people pass their inheritance to their oldest son. Is it necessary for them to do so, or do they have some kind of system to determine which son is best suited to inherit?

The general principle is always the eldest son. That's to avoid conflict. If you open it up to say, "Whoever is most brave, whoever is most noble, whoever is most wise," that means they'll just fight each other. This is what happened after the death of Genghis Khan. So the general rule is you always give it to the eldest son. It doesn't matter if he has been manipulated by his siblings.

The Legacy of the Steppes

At first, Europe was populated by hunter-gatherers who were spread out. They did paintings in caves and had a free life. Over time, agriculture developed in the Middle East and spread to Europe.

But then, in about 2500 BCE, the steppe people, who we call the Yamnaya, came to Europe as well. You can refer to them as Proto-Indo-Europeans, Yamnaya, or steppe people; it doesn't really matter. They started mixing with the farmers. What's really important to understand is this: when the farmers went to Europe, they went as families—husband, wife, children—and so they integrated into Europe pretty peacefully. But when the pastoralists, the Yamnaya, went to Europe, they went mostly as young men. Therefore, they killed the local men in order to marry their wives. From DNA research, we know that it was a genocide. The European farming men were eliminated by the pastoralists. Always remember that the pastoralists were stronger, taller, and more aggressive.

This movement was global. The farmers went to Europe, but they also went to India and Iran. The same is true for the Yamnaya. They went to Europe, but they also went to Iran and India. We know this because when we study the languages—Persian, Hindi, and European languages—they're basically the same. So we know there had to be one common mother language.

By mixing with local customs and religion, they created new religions that had a tremendous impact on world civilization. In Iran, they would give birth to Zoroastrianism, and the Avesta is its holy book. In India, they of course gave birth to Hinduism, and the Vedas are its holy book.

We know this happened at first because of linguistic studies. When we looked at different languages, we discovered there are common words.

From linguistic studies, we know there had to be a common language, and that's why we hypothesize about the Proto-Indo-Europeans. This is even more stark with the Proto-Indo-European word for "two," which is dwóh₁. You can see how it spreads to other languages, from Latin duo to Old English twa to modern English two. All these languages are interrelated. That's why if you speak one, like English, it's pretty easy for you to learn the others.

Linguists have done studies of words that are distinct to Proto-Indo-European and discovered words for:

• Cow, ox, ram, dog
• Grain, cauldron
• Wrestling, wealth
• Households, families, clans

We are able to group these words together and discover four characteristics: lots of words for the wheel, words for dairy, no farming terms, and words for the horse. That's why we're able to figure out that these are nomadic pastoralists. Therefore, they must be from the steppes. Through archaeology and DNA studies, we're able to have a better understanding of who they are.

Old Europe Before the Conquest

Let's talk about Old Europe before the Yamnaya came and conquered them. Marija Gimbutas, a Lithuanian-American archaeologist, was the first to hypothesize that Old Europe must have been conquered by these people. She did a lot of archaeology and discovered that their culture was primarily peaceful, honored women, and espoused egalitarianism. This is exactly what I said previously. The Yamnaya people were completely different: a patriarchy with private property, which was very aggressive.

She wrote many books, including The Language of the Goddess, and her work is amazing. This is what she wrote about the Mother Goddess civilization:

The Goddess in her manifestations was a symbol of the unity of all life in nature. Her power was in water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hills, trees, and flowers. Hence the holistic and mythopoeic perception of the sacredness and mystery of all there is on Earth.

This is a religion that practiced balance and harmony because everything is sacred. Therefore, you cannot destroy life without first getting permission from the Mother Goddess.

This culture took deep delight in the natural wonders of this world. Its people did not produce lethal weapons or build forts on inaccessible places, as their successors did, even when they were acquainted with metallurgy. Instead, they built magnificent tombs for the dead and temples for the living, comfortable houses in moderately-sized villages, and created superb pottery and sculptures. This was a long-lasting period of remarkable creativity and stability, an age free of strife. Theirs was a culture of art.

This was a very nice place. They didn't fight, they were egalitarian, and they practiced art. What's really important for us to understand is they had writing systems and technology; they just chose not to use it for war because it was against their religion.

When the Yamnaya came, they completely inverted the culture. For example, the Old Europeans believed that the snake was a symbol of life energy and regeneration, a most benevolent, non-evil creature. It was the Yamnaya who introduced the idea that the snake is the devil. That's where we get the concept in the Bible from.

To them, black was a good color and white was a bad color. Why? Because black symbolizes life, while white symbolizes death.

Black did not mean death or the underworld. It was the color of fertility, the color of damp caves and rich soil, of the womb of the Goddess where life begins. White, on the other hand, was the color of death, of bones.

Again, when the Yamnaya came, they inverted this.

In this society, women were in control. They had power and agency. As the book Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá shows, women are just better at managing social relationships than men are. For most of human history, women had sexual agency. One piece of evidence is the fact that human men have the largest penises of all primates. Gorillas are much bigger than we are, but we have bigger penises. Why? Because we have to compete to put our semen into women, as women had multiple sexual partners.

Even when women had long-term intimate partners, they had other sexual partners. The idea is that for most of human history, love and sex were not the same thing. Love is intimacy; sex is just fun. In some societies, women would have many husbands, usually brothers, as a way to maintain peace and harmony.

The book looks at Melanesian people, where they practice sexual freedom for women. The explanation is that semen was essential to human growth and development. So if a bride got married, all the men would come and impregnate her because the idea is that semen is sacred, and they want to give her as much life as possible.

You may be disgusted by this, but there's a very good counter-argument. A French missionary argued that it's not honorable for a woman to love anyone except her husband and that in this "evil" system, a man could not be sure that his son was actually his. The natives responded by saying:

You French people love only your own children, but we love all the children of our tribe.

That's what humans can do. We can love each other; there's no limit to our love. In the system that we have today, a patriarchy, we only love our own children. But in their system, the ancient system, everyone loved each other's children. Everyone loved all children. In this system, it's better to be a child, and you would never, ever develop depression.

Women are just better politicians than men because women are more willing to cooperate, have more emotional intelligence, and can use sex and gossip as mechanisms of control.

The Collapse of Old Europe

If this world was so wonderful, why did it collapse? There are three major issues with agricultural societies:

1. It's static. It does not innovate.
2. Climate change. If the weather changes on you, you're screwed.
3. Disease. Because you're living close to animals and close together, if a disease hits you, you're all screwed. This is very different from the steppe people, who live far apart from each other.

We know that in Europe, the farmer communities' population collapsed. We can measure the level of carbon dioxide in the air, and we know that in about the year 3000 BCE, the population collapsed everywhere in Europe. Why did this happen? The plague. That's the problem with being a farmer: you are always susceptible to the plague. We know that about 5,000 years ago, a plague broke out—the Black Death, basically—spread by rats. In this world, people traded with each other, so the Black Death was able to go everywhere and wipe out farming communities, even spreading as far as China. But the steppe people were not as impacted because they lived far apart. If one person got the disease, you're not going to spread it to your entire community, whereas a farmer community will.

There was this huge drop in the population because of the Black Death in Europe. Number two is climate change. We know that now and then, there's huge climate change that destroys cultures, forcing people to migrate. This is what we suspect happened in Old Europe as well.

Because their society was static, and because of disease and climate change, the population in Europe went all the way down, leaving the Yamnaya an opportunity to come and invade. And they did.

when the agricultural people came, they came as families, roughly one man for one woman. But when the Yamnaya came, they came as young men. And what do young men do? They come and steal your women.

Over time, they established new cultures. Their culture blended with other cultures, and this happened because the geography was different. In the steppes, they had a certain culture, but when they moved to a new culture, they had to combine theirs with the local ones. This happened everywhere, producing different cultures and different languages. All of Europe was radically transformed because of this migration, and again, this migration was basically a genocide.

Look at Britain. The people who built Stonehenge are gone. This was a farming, agricultural community that worshipped the monoliths. All this wonderful scientific technology is now lost to us because the Yamnaya came and killed everyone. In Spain, it's a different story. All the men were replaced. The Y chromosome is the male chromosome. Before the year 2000 BCE, you had a lot of local male lineages, but after, they're all gone. They killed all the men in Spain.

When they went to India, it's a different story because Indians at that time were more peaceful. They came to a settlement where the new conquerors would be at the top of society and the locals would be at the bottom. There wasn't as much of a genocide, but we had a caste system created because of that. We know this because if you look at the upper castes, they all spoke Indo-European. If you look at the lower-caste people, they spoke the local language, Dravidian. Depending on the circumstance, the result is different.

The Yamnaya Culture of Conquest

This is a wonderful book called The Horse, the Wheel, and Language written by David Anthony, a Harvard anthropologist, and he explains the Yamnaya culture and why they were so dominant. One thing that is unique to the Yamnaya is their mythology. It's a mythology of violence, struggle, dominance, and conquest.

How the mythology works is that in the beginning, there were two brothers, twins, one named Man and the other named Twin. They go around the world accompanied by a great cow. Eventually, Man and Twin decided to create the world we now inhabit. To do this, Man had to sacrifice Twin. He had to kill his own brother, the person he loved, in order to create the world. And the gods thanked him and blessed him for that. This is a world that is pretty violent.

After the world was made, the sky gods gave cattle to Third Man. But the cattle were stolen by a three-headed, six-eyed serpent. Third Man entreated the storm god to help get the cattle back. Together, they went to the monster, killed it, and freed the cattle. This is a mythology of struggle.

What's really interesting is that this mythology becomes the mythology of all new Proto-Indo-European civilizations, including the Romans and the Mongols. This is Genghis Khan: his mythology is that he kills his best friend to become the leader of the Mongol people. And what's the Roman mythology? Romulus kills his twin brother to found Rome. That shows you that the Mongols and the Romans come from the same culture—a culture based on violence and exploitation.

Now, Anthony talks about the economy:

Domesticated cattle and sheep started a revolutionary change in how humans exploited the Pontic-Caspian steppe environment. Because cattle and sheep were cultured like humans, they were part of everyday work and worry in a way never approached by wild animals. Humans identified with their cattle and sheep, wrote poetry about them, and used them as currency in marriage gifts, debt payments, and the calculation of social status.

Now we have the beginning of money and property.

They were grass-processors. They converted plains of grass, useless and even hostile to humans, into wool for clothing and tents; milk, yogurt, and cheese; and meat, marrow, and bone—the foundations of both life and wealth. Cattle and sheep herds could grow rapidly, with a little luck. Vulnerable to bad weather and theft, they could also decline rapidly. Herding was a volatile, boom-bust economy and required a flexible, opportunistic social organization.

They lived in a world of tremendous volatility because their entire world was cattle. If the cattle died because of a bad storm or bad luck, they were completely screwed. They were very aggressive and opportunistic people. That's different from farmers, who can just afford to sit back and relax because nature will grow the food for them.

The connection between animals, brothers, and power was the foundation on which new forms of male-centered ritual and politics developed among Indo-European-speaking societies. This is why the cow and brothers occupied such a central place in Indo-European myths relating to how the world began.

This is a deeply patriarchal society.

Participation in long-distance trade, gift exchange, and a new set of cults requiring public sacrifices and feasting became the foundation for a new kind of social power. Stockbreeding is by nature a volatile economy. Herders who lose animals almost always borrow from those who still have them. The social obligations associated with these loans are institutionalized among the world’s pastoralists as the basis for a fluid system of status distinctions. Those who loaned animals acquired power over those who borrowed them, and those who sponsored feasts obligated their guests. Early Proto-Indo-European included a vocabulary about verbal contracts bound by oath, used in later religious rituals to specify the obligations between the weak and the strong.

The idea here is there's no slavery in the system, but there is obligation and loyalty. If I take you out for a meal, guess what? Now you owe me a meal. I'm now your big brother. That's what keeps the society cohesive. This is important because if no one's a slave and everyone's free, then everyone is a great warrior because you're fighting for yourself. You're not fighting because someone asked you to. That's why in wars between empires and these people, these people usually win. They're much more motivated.

An Indo-European-speaking patron could accept and integrate outsiders as clients without shaming them or assigning them permanently to submissive roles, as long as they conducted the sacrifices properly. Praise poetry at public feasts encouraged patrons to be generous and validated the language of the songs as a vehicle for communication with the gods who regulated everything.

Another way of saying this is that even though there are wealthy people and poor people, they are still treated with respect. It's a very egalitarian society. What keeps the system in place is the belief in the gods—the belief that if I do you a favor, then you owe me a favor. We have a contract now, and the gods oversee the contract. What's really important is that this is an open-ended system, so it's easy for me to bring more people into it. That's why they were such an innovative, cohesive, and open society.

The last thing we'll talk about are these young men who enter secret societies, which are basically mafia gangs.

The institution of the koryos, the warrior brotherhood of young men bound by oath to one another and to ancestors during a ritually mandated raid, has been reconstructed as a central part of Proto-Indo-European initiation rituals.

It's a very important part of society because these young men otherwise have no place to go. If you want to know who they are, they're basically the Vikings. The Vikings are the direct descendants of these people.

The Great Conquerors from the Steppes

The Mongols conquered most of the world. The question is, how did they do it? The answer is that the steppe people have always been good at conquering empires. The secret weapon, of course, is the horse archer. This was the ultimate weapon for most of human history. You could not defend against a horse archer. They were fast, they were strong, and these were the best warriors in the world.

This has been a consistent pattern in human history. First, the Yamnaya came and conquered Europe, India, and Iran. But then you have the Scythians—same place, same people, same culture. This is not a race of people; this is a culture of people. Remember, at this time in human history, genetic exchange is very common. After the Scythians were dominant, you have the Medes, who would later give rise to the Persian Empire.

Now, what's going to happen is this: the steppe people are all around the grassland. China emerges as an empire—the Han Empire. This is really the last Chinese dynasty because they are ethnically Chinese and proud of who they are. They are going to try to destroy the steppe people once and for all. They move a huge army into the steppes to try to limit the threat. What happens now is it forces a cascade effect where these people are now forced to go westwards, which forces them into conflict with people over here. You have this huge migration all the way to the Roman Empire.

China forces the Huns, the Xiongnu, westwards, which then forces these other groups to go elsewhere. Again, the strongest people stay in the steppes; the weakest people go and conquer empires. This is a process of constant innovation.

Then you have the Turks emerge. Then you have the Mongol Empire, they conquered basically most of the world.

Because they conquered most of the world and the world was unified, you have the Black Death, which wipes out about a third of Europe. The last great conqueror from the steppes is Tamerlane. He conquers most of the world.

This is a really important principle. Remember, the steppe people are the most innovative, the most open, the most aggressive, and the most courageous, and that's why they're the greatest conquerors in history.

But eventually, we develop gunpowder. Now, the steppes will be conquered by civilization. This was the turning point in history. Civilization will now attack the steppe people and reduce their culture.

On Religion and Worldview

Question: The barbarians, the steppes, are they capable of developing religions? Because they are conquering all around the world, it's difficult for them to build up temples, right?

Religions don't require temples. Religion is just a collective belief. All humans have a religion. A religion is just a worldview, an understanding of how the world works that answers three questions: Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Even today, even though we may be atheists, we're still religious. We worship money, materialism, science.

These people of the steppes worshipped the horse, the Sky God, and the cow. They worshipped war, courage, and bravery. Every culture, every person has a religion of some sort because it's impossible for you to understand the world and operate in it without one, especially for groups.