Steppe, The
Map, Biome, Eurasia, Peoples, & Animals
Eurasian steppes
the Steppe, belt of grassland that extends some 5,000 miles (8,000 km) from Hungary in the west through Ukraine and Central Asia to Manchuria in the east. Mountain ranges interrupt the steppe, dividing it into distinct segments, but horsemen could cross such barriers easily, so that steppe peoples could and did interact across the entire breadth of the Eurasian grassland throughout most of recorded history.
Nonetheless, the unity of steppe history is difficult to grasp; steppe peoples left very little writing for historians to use, and Chinese, Middle Eastern, and European records tell only what happened within a restricted range across their respective steppe frontiers. Archaeology offers real but limited help (grave relics from chieftains’ tombs abound but, of course, say little about everyday life and leave political, military, and linguistic alignments to inference). As a result, until about 1000 ce, information concerning the rise and fall of steppe empires and the relation between events in the eastern and western portions of the steppe remains fraught with great uncertainty.
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