NATURAL SETTING

Inner Asia is marked by three distinct features: (1) a belt of steppes and, to a lesser degree, deserts, which extend in a general latitudinal direction. This belt is delimited on the north by the Eurasian forest zone (the “taiga” of Siberia); on the south the limits are a variety of features, chiefly mountain chains but also transition to different climatic zones (notably in China) and bodies of water such as the Caspian and Black Seas; (2) several of these mostly latitudinal mountain chains that separate the steppe belt from South Asia, besides demarcating important segments within the area; and (3) a number of rivers, many of which drain into interior lakes or seas or disappear in the deserts through evaporation. All these features have affected the type and history of human presence, but some have in turn been modified by man's intervention, since the dawn of sedentary civilization but especially in recent decades.

The steppe belt, an immense swath of landlocked grassland, made possible the appearance of a unique historical phenomenon: the horse-breeding, highly mobile Eurasian nomad. To be sure, nomads have also existed in other parts of the world, but the scale of the habitat, the role of the horse, and the relative and paradoxical proximity of great agricultural or urban civilizations made it possible for the Inner Asian nomad to play a historical role as unique and often as grandiose as was his homeland.