When traveling people make history

Human beings have always been on the move. Since the most remote prehistory they have moved alone or in groups to collect roots and wild fruits or to chase prey during hunting. In their wanderings, our most ancient ancestors moved further and further from Africa - according to most scholars, the land of origin of human beings. If Homo erectus, more than a million years ago, had already reached Europe and Asia from his native African continent, it was the family of hominids to which we all belong, that is, Homo sapiens, who reached, with a journey lasting dozens of all continents except Antarctica by thousands of years.

These prehistoric migrations were certainly not the last. In the Neolithic era, humans became breeders and farmers, settling in the first villages and then in the first cities. Many of our ancestors became sedentary, but nomadism did not disappear completely and people stopped migrating in search of more fertile lands or because they were pushed by the arrival of other populations. The events of Mesopotamia were all a succession of migrations of populations who tried to settle in the fertile land between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.

We could go on for a long time despite the pages of too many essays and history manuals tending to exclude nomads, except for a few references when their wanderings collide with settled societies. The essay by the journalist, historian and traveler Anthony Sattin entitled "Nomadi" (Neri Pozza, 2023, Euro 28, pp. 432. Also Ebook) heals this lack. It is, in fact, the story, hitherto never written, of civilization told through the events of those who seem extraneous to it. Sattin, with a wide-ranging story that resonates with ancient echoes and reverberates today, reminds us that the great stone monuments before the pyramids were built were created precisely by the populations on the move. Furthermore , migrants domesticated the horse, shaped the bow which for millennia was used above all to feed themselves. Even peoples who we usually consider sedentary and who certainly mostly were, like the Greeks, were in reality in constant movement. With the so-called first Greek colonization (starting from the 12th century BC) reached the coasts of Asia Minor and the islands in front. During the second colonization (starting from the 8th century BC) the Greeks spread across a large part of the Mediterranean basin and on the coasts of the Black Sea. Where they landed, they often found colonies founded by another people of travellers, the Phoenicians.

The Romans stabilized the Mediterranean basin for centuries, a people who built an empire based on the sedentary nature of their cultivated fields and urban centers. The Romans, however, had to constantly deal with the nomadic populations who lived in contact with the limes. The desert peoples who lived on the edge of Rome's African provinces were nomadic and constantly on the move. The Celts were nomadic and during the 1st millennium BC they laid waste to the city and in their migrations reached the Iberian Peninsula, present-day France, the British Isles, the Balkans, northern Greece and Asia Minor. Finally, the Roman Empire had to face pressure from the Germanic populations for centuries. What from the point of view of the Romans of the time were the barbarian invasions were real migrations of peoples, moving from central Europe towards the Mediterranean under the pressure of nomads coming from the steppes of Asia, the Huns. Those same Huns who in the first centuries of the 1st millennium AD put pressure on the Chinese Empire and the kingdoms of northern India in the east.

They gave great impetus to poetry and storytelling and were always more sensitive than the settled people to respecting nature. Multicultural by definition, migrants were more tolerant of other people's religions, favored the development of trade and contributed to the cultural flourishing of Eurasia, guiding the path of humanity. From the Neolithic revolution to the 21st century, including the rise and fall of Rome, the great nomadic empires of the Arabs and Mongols, the Mughals and the development of the Silk Road, “Nomads” explores the often turbulent relationships between sedentary and mobile societies and their mutual counterbalance, providing a radically new vision of human civilization. Exploring the evolutionary biology and psychology of the restlessness that makes us human, Anthony Sattin's sweeping history thus redraws the role of nomadism from the Bible to its decline and demonization today.