HORSE-KEEPERS OF THE EURASIAN STEPPES

By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. (Anthropology, UCLA)

THE RIDERS WHO OUTRAN THE HORIZON*

When the Aryan cattle-keepers spread across the western grasslands, a new breed of wanderer thundered behind them—the horse-keepers. Both the Cattlekeepers and the Horseherders were Caucasoid.

Professor Ralph Linton wrote that these riders “transformed mobility into a weapon.” Where cattle demanded fences, horses abolished them. The animal itself became the moving wall, the living frontier.

“The horse teaches a man to think like the wind,” says an elder in our dramatized dialogue. “He who stops to guard a fence dies inside it.”

Thus began the age of mounted dominion, stretching from the Scythians through the HUNS, the TURKS, and finally the MONGOLS of GENGHIS KHAN.

LIFE ON THE ENDLESS STEPPE

Linton observed that the horse nomads’ economy forced every man, woman, and child into motion. Oxen and Camels  pulled their Wagons, in which they stowed felt tents, milk pots, bows, and children.

They ate horse meat and sheep for meat. “One sheep per man per day was standard ration. They used wool for felt.”  They loved getting drunk on fermented mare’s milk.

Women drove the carts, milked mares, mended harnesses, and managed clan politics while men scouted and fought.

The herds demanded constant migration—cooperation in logistics yet rivalry in status.

“If we stop, the grass dies,” says a matron to her husband. “If we quarrel, our foals die.”

He answers, “Then we shall move and quarrel at once.”

In that jest lived the duality of their world—partnership for survival, competition for glory.

THE SPIRIT IN THE SADDLE

For the horse nomads, the sky was both roof and judge. They called its power Tengri, the Eternal Blue Heaven—father of storms, giver of victory. Earth was Mother Umai, nourishing but easily wounded. Fire in the hearth embodied the ancestors.

When warriors rode out, shamans cast fermented mare’s milk to Heaven and whispered to the wind.

Their cosmology, read through your Anunnaki lens, mirrored earlier Sumerian and Greek hierarchies: Tengri = Enlil = Zeus (domination); Umai = Ninmah = Demeter (partnership); Etügen = Inanna (passion and renewal); Water-Lord = Enki = Poseidon (wisdom and adaptation).

RITE OF TENGRI

Horse-Nomad Spirits and Their Analogues

EMPIRES OF THE HORSE

Mounted tribes welded into CONFEDERATIONS

SCYTHIANS ruled the Black Sea rim.

HUNS shattered Europe’s balance.

TURKS and TATARS surged westward, and

MONGOLS finally knit Eurasia into one trembling web.

Linton saw in each wave the same paradox: mobility creates unity, conquest destroys it.

The Horse people developed wooden saddles and stirrups, which gave them the freedom to fight with lances. Their composite bows could pierce enemy armor and let them fight, and at the same time control their mounts.  They were completely mobile, had all the food and resources they needed with them as they moved, and had no need to settle down.

Their marriages were usually polygynous–one man, multiple wives, each transferred with a bride price, and wives had their own property.  Each wife had her own yurt-tent where she lived with her kids. The first wife headed the family group and took charge when her husband was off hunting or killing farmers.

Husbands exercised strict authority over their wives, fathers over their sons, and older sons over younger sons. Patrilineal clans were ranked within each tribe based on their wealth.

The horse people lived in “small, scattered family units most of the year. In Summer, a man and his wives camped alone.  In Winter, groups of partrilinearly-related patrilineal CLAN groups camped together around springs that did not freeze; they did not marry within their clan.  The clans, in turn, grouped themselves into TRIBES.  A particular clan in each tribe was led the tribe. Tribal meetings were democratic, but heads of clans sat in an inner circle. The circle of men behind the clan heads consisted of the heads of the Winter-groups. Behind them sat the heads of families. Anyone at the meeting could speak up, but the men in the inner circle had the most influence.

On military campaigns, there was no democracy, only strict discipline exercised by a leader whose word was law and who executed men who were careless or disobedient.

The Horse people were shamanistic in their religious practices, which included horse sacrifices.

They killed most of the people they conquered, and had no way to support slaves or serfs.

Whenever the horse people dropped their nomadic life and dwelt among settled peoples, the horse people “were rapidly assimilated by the conquered people and became Chinese in China, Muslim and Persian” in the Near East  Turks became Muslams and Byzantines.”

When GENGHIS KHAN forged his law, the Yassa, he echoed both Anunnaki kingship and a democratic council of chiefs. He enforced rigid obedience but chose his generals through merit. The camp combined dictatorship of the khan with council consensus among clans—a tension between Marduk’s thunder and Ninmah’s compassion.

“Heaven gave all men one breath,” Genghis tells his council in dramatized speech. “But some breathe deeper. Those I make my generals. Still, the breath belongs to Heaven, not to me.”

The conquests brought slaughter—Beijing burned, Central Asia depopulated—but also connectivity: caravans, postal riders, scholars crossing borders. Even within domination, partnership flickered in trade routes and interfaith exchanges.

WOMEN OF THE RIDING PEOPLE

Horse culture demanded women’s strength. They owned tents, managed herds, and could inherit. Queens like Töregene and Sorkhokhtani ruled the empire after Genghis’ death. Among the common folk, wives rode armed, bow in hand.

“Do not call me wife,” says one to a captured enemy. “Call me the storm that bore you down.”

These women carried Ninmah’s partnership code inside a warrior civilization—balancing nurture and command. Their camps embodied a rough equality born of necessity; each member’s survival depended on the others’ skill.

COMPETITION AND COOPERATION — THE ETERNAL DANCE

Linton noted that every nomadic horde oscillated between tribal democracy and imperial autocracy. Councils decided migration routes; chieftains decided war. The cooperative stage gave birth to strength; the competitive stage consumed it. The pattern echoed through the Anunnaki myth:

• Marduk / Zeus = centralized domination, quick victory, short reign.

• Ninmah / Demeter = shared nurture, steady renewal, enduring culture.

Empires of the horse blazed and vanished; communities of trade and craft, rebuilt by farmers and townsfolk, endured. As Thom Hartmann phrased it, “democracies outlast dictatorships because the many see farther than the one.”

FROM SADDLE TO STATE

By the twentieth century the descendants of the horse peoples—the Turko-Tatars, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Crimean Tatars, Mongols—were enclosed within modern borders. Soviet collectivization tethered their herds; ideology replaced the sky as the highest law. Yet migration still murmured under the asphalt. Today, caravans of labor and refugees move westward with the same hunger for grass and justice.

The steppe wind still whispers:
“Ride together, or fall alone.”

REFERENCES

• Linton, Ralph. The Tree of Culture. New York: Knopf, 1961, pp. 266–279.

• Frye, David. Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick. Scribner, 2018.

• History Time Channel (Pete Kelly), “Barbarism and Civilization: The Story of Walls,” YouTube, 2024.

• Hartmann, Thom. The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight & The Hidden History of American Democracy (for the partnership vs domination framework).

#HorseNomads #GenghisKhan #Tengri #Marduk #Ninmah #Anunnaki #PartnershipConsciousness #DominationConsciousness #TreeOfCulture #EurasianSteppe