The Barbarians of Asia: The Peoples of the Steppes from 1600 B.C.

written by: Stuart Legg

Central Asia is a vast area. It is bordered on the north by wastelands that stretch to the ice-locked Artic, on the south and west by the towering mountains of the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. It is a land of arid plains and plateaus, without outlets to any navigable sea, a land peopled until modern times by fierce nomadic tribes who for centuries terrorized both the Far East and Europe. The Barbarians of Asia is a panorama of the peoples of the steppes and how they acted as a catalyst to shape the history of China, Southeast Asia, Russia, Greece, Rome, the Islamic world and Spain.The first onslaught from these tribes came around 1600 B.C., when they destroyed the great civilization of the Indus Valley and inflicted the first of many maulings on the Chinese empire. The penultimate attack, led by Tamurlane in the first years of the sixteenth century, was followed by his descendant Babur’s drive into India to found the great Moghul Empire. From then on the nomads were no longer outsiders.But for centuries, these barbarians were a threat to all Asia and most of Europe. Among their most famous warriors were Attila, whose hordes swept almost to the Atlantic; Toghrul, the founder of the Seljuk Turk Empire, which stretched from the Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean; and Chingis Khan the greatest of all warriors, whose brilliant portrait is one of the highlights of this book.By the 18th century the barbarians of central Asia were no longer a menace, having been absorbed into many countries. Russia and China have moved in to fill the void. As Stuart Legg points out in The Barbarians of Asia, the confrontation between these superpowers may be the greatest peril the world knows today