9. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, Gumilev

Part Four, (second section), IN ANCIENT CHINA

[Here connection ethnos to the modifications of landscape, and exploring how a new ethnos is born. Posing the question, but not answering it. Many great examples.]

In the 3rd millennium B.C. the territory of China had little resemblance to what it is now: virgin forests and marshes fed by rivers flowing at high water, vast lakes, marshy saline lands and only on the upland plateaus grasslands and steppes. In the east, between the lower reaches of the rivers in the delta plains stretched a chain of quicksand soils, and the Yi and Huai rivers disappeared into the swampy valley of the lower Yangtze. "Lush vegetation clothed the Weihe River basin; majestic oaks rose there, groups of cypresses and pines were visible everywhere. In the forests swarmed tigers, irbis, yellow leopards, bears, buffalo and wild boars, and jackals and wolves howled perpetually."[55]

But the main enemy of the people here was the rivers. During the dry season they grew shallow, but as soon as it rained in the mountains, the rivers swelled up and overflowed their banks. The Huanghe, during the flood, had up to 46% of silt and sand (56).

Primitive agriculturalists had to build dams to save their fields from floods; and yet the dams broke on average once every 2.5 years[57]. Some of the ancient inhabitants of China retreated from the fierce waters into the mountains and continued to hunt - no trace of them remained there. The other "hundred black-headed families", who came to Shanxi from the west, rushed to fight the river - these were the ancestors of the Chinese. They had to abandon their former wild will and assimilate discipline, rigid organization and adopt despotic forms of government, but nature generously rewarded them by providing opportunities for intensive reproduction and the means to create an original culture[58]. Those who retreated from the difficulties of earthworks and the threat of the water element to the mountains became the ancestors of the Jungs, and indeed of the Kyan Tibetans. They were content with those fruits of nature, the extraction of which did not require changing the landscape and topography, and therefore they had no need to create a state organization. Their occupation, life structure and, finally, their ideology were sharply different from the Chinese, and with each generation the two peoples became more estranged from each other. This discord ended in irreconcilable enmity, which determined the direction of history of early China and its neighbors.

Now let us overlay the facts of anthropogenic change in the landscape on the chronological...the chronology. The first stage of the struggle with nature took place about 2278 B.C., when the legendary ancestor of the first Chinese dynasty Yu carried out works on regulation of the Huang He riverbed, after which the central part of northern China (Shanxi and part of Shaanxi) turned into an agricultural country. The river behaved calmly until 602 BC, i.e. for sixteen centuries[59].

59] Historically, it was a monolithic era of ancient Chinese culture comprising three dynasties: Xia, Shan-Yin and Zhou, during which China was a confederation of numerous principalities, bound together by the highest, for that time achievement of culture - hieroglyphic writing[60]. During this entire period the artificial landscape created by Yu was only maintained.

But when from 722 BC came the era of the "Spring and Autumn" (the conditional name of the era derived from the title of the chronicle in which it is described), everything went differently. The confederation of principalities, which represented a single whole under the presidency of the van (king), broke up into 124 independent states, which began to assiduously absorb each other. Then the mountain jungs and the waters of Huache went on a counteroffensive. As a result of the poor maintenance of the dams, the first recorded change in the course of the Huang He River occurred in 602 AD,[61] and from then on the main work on the river until the 18th century consisted in maintaining dams and capping breaches[62]. In the aspect adopted by us, this phenomenon should be considered as a maintenance of the existing landscape, i.e. we come to a paradoxical conclusion - that the Chinese should be enlisted in the same category of ethnic groups as the Algonquin or Evenks. However, let us check our initial conclusion.

In the fourth century BC iron became such a commonly available commodity that not only swords, but also shovels were made of it[63]. Technical improvements in the 3rd century led to the creation of irrigation systems, the most important of which was the Weibei system, which irrigated 162,000 hectares of fields [64] in the northern Shaanxi. Thanks to this irrigation system "Shaanxi province became fertile and did not know any bad harvest years. Then Qin Shi Huangdi became rich and powerful and was able to subdue the other princes to his power."[65] 

This was the famous unification of China, which ended with the mass slaughter of the defeated, the enslavement of the survivors, the building of the Great Wall of China and the extermination not only of scholars and all books except technical literature (understood as books on divination, medicine and agronomy), but also of all readers of historical and philosophical treatises and poetry lovers.

And here we can pose the question: was the purposeful alteration of the landscape connected with the grandiose human murder, or did they simply coincide in time? Or do both of these phenomena go back to one common cause? And to solve the problem, let us trace the history of China and the history of the Weibei irrigation network further.

The popular uprising of 206 BC eliminated the regime of the Qin Empire, and no such great bloodshed took place during the Han Dynasty. The country was growing rich, because the former granary in Shangsk on the banks of the Huang He was joined by a new one - on the banks of the rivers Wei and Jing, but then nature had its say. Water for the irrigation network came from the Jing River, which was blocked by a dam, but the river deepened its bed and the water intake remained in a dry place. A new canal had to be dug and a dam built upstream, and this was repeated ten times in subsequent centuries, which required a huge investment of labor, and yet in the seventeenth century the Weibei system was effectively abandoned[66].

Over the course of the past two thousand years the middle history of China unfolded its imperial period. In terms of ethnology, the Chinese of this period refer to the ancient Chinese as the Italians to the Romans or the French to the Gauls. In other words, a new people was created on the banks of the Huang He, which we call by the same word as the old one, Chinese. But it is not necessary to transfer the defects of our terminology to the subject of the study, especially since the word "Chinese" is a conventional term that appeared in the XII century due to the development of caravan trade, and it meant a Mongol speaking tribe, with which Italian and Russian merchants dealt at that time. From this tribe the name "China" passed to their neighbors, who called themselves simply "inhabitants of the Middle Plain. This is important for our analysis because the well-known word "China" taxonomically corresponds to such concepts as "Europe" or "Levant" (Middle East), not such as "France" or "Bulgaria". So, from the time of the unification of China by Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi until China lost its independence in the territory between the Huang He and the Yangtze, two large ethnic groups emerged, formed and lost their strength, conventionally called the North Chinese and the South Chinese.

The second one is also connected with the change of landscape, because when the ancient Chinese (from which both medieval ethnoses were formed) flowed into the Yangtze valley, they made rice paddies in place of the jungle. Northern Chinese, on the other hand, created irrigated farmlands in the place of dry steppes and as long as they had enough energy to maintain the irrigation system, they established themselves as an independent people and repelled, although not always successfully, attacks of foreigners. But in the seventeenth century irrigation ceased to exist, and in the same century the Manchus conquered China. The subjugation was preceded by a grandiose peasant revolt that shook the might of the Ming Empire, but you can only raise peasants to a brutal war when agriculture is in decline. Indeed, the loss of the Northwest's richest croplands, sanded down after the canals were silted up, weakened China's resistance and turned the Ming Empire from aggressor to victim.

EMERGENCE AND DECLINE

We can now answer the questions posed. The epochs in which the agricultural peoples created man-made landscapes are relatively short-lived. Their coincidence with violent wars is not accidental, but certainly land reclamation is not a reason for bloodshed. To assert such a claim would be to go further than Montesquieu himself in the direction of geographical determinism. However, both parallel phenomena share a trait in common: the capacity of the ethnic collective to make extraordinary efforts. What this effort is aimed at is another matter; the goal in our aspect is not taken into account. All that matters is that when the ability to make extraordinary efforts weakens, the created landscape is only maintained, and when this ability disappears, the ethnolandscape equilibrium, i.e. the biocenosis of a given biochoir, is restored[67]. This happens always and everywhere, irrespective of the scale of the changes made and the nature of the activity, creative or predatory. And if so, then we have stumbled upon a new, hitherto unaccounted for phenomenon: nature change is not the result of the constant impact of peoples on it, but a consequence of short-term states in the development of peoples themselves, i.e. creative processes, the same ones that are the stimulus for ethnogenesis.

AS IN EUROPE

Let us verify our conclusion on the material of ancient Europe. At the turn of the first and second millennium B.C. Western Europe was invaded and populated by warlike peoples who could forge iron: Celts, Latins, Achaeans and others.  They created many small farming communities and, by tilling the virgin soil, changed the landscape. For almost a thousand years no great states arose in Europe, because every tribe knew how to stand up for itself and conquest was a difficult and unprofitable affair: the tribes would rather let themselves be slaughtered than agree to submit. Suffice it to recall that neither Sparta nor Athens could achieve power over Hellas, and the Latin and Samnite wars of Rome were more difficult than all subsequent conquests. In the first half of the first millennium B.C., parcellular farming with intensive cultivation of plots was the institution that supported the cultural landscape created. At the end of the first millennium BC, parcels were replaced by latifundia, where attitudes to nature became predatory and at the same time the possibility of conquest emerged.

It is commonly thought that Rome conquered the Mediterranean and Western Europe because it "somehow" became stronger. But the same result should have been obtained if Rome's power had remained the same and the peoples around it had weakened. It was so, and in parallel with the expansion of Rome, the fields were transformed into pastures, then into deserts finally by the V-VI centuries.  Landscapes were restored by nature: forests and scrublands. Then the population declined and the Roman Empire fell into decline. The whole cycle of landscape transformation and ethnogenesis from the formation of ethnoses to their complete revelation took about 1500 years.

The new rise of human activity and at the same time the formation of medieval ethnoses occurred in the IX-X centuries and was not completed. It is possible that additional adjustments should be introduced to explain the peculiarities of this period because of the unprecedented development of science and technology, but this question should be studied separately, for we are now interested in the rule, not in the exception to it.

And now let us return to the Indians and peoples of Siberia, because we can finally answer the question posed above: why do hunters and farmers exist side by side without borrowing useful labor and life skills from each other? The answer suggests itself: obviously, once ancestors of both experienced periods of mastering the landscape and modified it in different ways, while descendants, preserving the status created by ancestors, preserve the heritage of past epochs in the form of tradition, which they are not able to, and do not want to break. And even when the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons threatened the Indians with physical extermination, they bravely defended their way of life, although, if discarding it, they had every chance to mingle with the colonists and not to perish.

At the same time the Aztecs, who were in the state we have described above as creative, not only survived the terrible defeat, but also found the strength to assimilate some of the conquerors, and 300 years later overthrew Spanish domination and founded the republic of Mexico, where the Indian element plays the first role. Of course, Juárez's companions were no replica of Montezuma's companions, but they were even less like Cortés's soldiers. Mexicans are a young people, ethnogenesis of which took place before the eyes of historians. And this people, formed in the XVII-XVIII centuries, very much changed the character of the landscape by breeding cultivated plants and acclimatization of animals alien to America - horses and cows.

Ethnoses that do not maintain a "cultural landscape," but adapt to the natural balance, are commonly referred to as "wild," which is incorrect. Their attitude to nature is passive: they enter biocenoses as the upper, completing their link. The attitude of this last group of ethnoses to nature is conveniently taken as a baseline of reference. If such ethnoses find themselves in a territory inhabited by another ethnos, they adapt to exist at its expense. For them, the host ethnos becomes a component of the feeding landscape. Such a collision arose recently in Brazil, where the Karaju Indian tribe, living by hunting and gathering, was discovered. A movie company sent an expedition there and paid the Indians well for their work as extras. Film advertising attracted many tourists, for which were built hotels and bars. Servants, police, doctors, etc. settled around. As a result, the Indians got used to getting free food and forgot the skills of forest hunting and gathering. They became a parasitic ethnos, living off another, larger and richer ethnos that treats them like a toy. But as soon as the fashion for them passes and they are abandoned to their fate, they become extinct, just as tame animals die, because they cannot withstand the competition of wild species. The law of the irreversibility of evolution also applies in ethnology.

PERIODIZATION BY PHASE

Now we can generalize our observations and present them in the form of a scheme of the relationship of the ethnos to the natural, i.e. landscape, conditions.  For some unknown reason, a new ethnos (often with an old name) appearing on the arena of history transforms the landscape with a new way of adapting to the natural conditions. This occurs, as a rule, during the incubation period of the ascendant phase and is not recorded in historical sources (except legends). The historical, source-described epoch includes, in the absence of external displacement, the following phases of ethnogenesis: 1) the explicit period of the rise phase, 2) the acmatic phase, when the ethnos is extremely active and the pressure on the landscape is reduced, 3) the phase of supression, when anthropogenic pressure is maximum and destructive, 4) the inertial phase, in which the accumulation of technical means and ideological values takes place; the landscape at this time is maintained in the state in which it was previously brought; 5) the phase of obscuration, during which there is no concern for either culture or landscape. After this there comes the phase of homeostasis, when the remnants of a half-extinct ethnos interact with the impoverished landscape that emerged on the debris of the dead cultural landscape, where burdocks have grown instead of oaks, among which great-grandchildren of invaders and children of robbers play hide-and-seek.

In this era, the attitude of the ethnic group-percipient to nature becomes both consumptive and protective. But, alas, both are dictated by tradition rather than by a conscious decision of the will. And so it goes until the new ethnos transforms the landscape once again. Apparently, ethnogenesis is not a single global phenomenon, but a multitude of independent ethnogenesis in certain areas.

As in all complex natural phenomena, the boundaries of phases in ethnogenesis are not "linear" and not absolutely precise: they are "blurred" to a greater or lesser degree. But some vagueness of the borders does not reduce the need to characterize the beginnings and ends of phases by certain historical milestones in the further study of specific ethnogenesis, keeping in mind however, that the dates of these milestones are conditional and characterize only typical turning points.

But if we break away from the comparison of ethnic groups with landscapes and consider them as historical entities, we will find the same picture of a gradual change of phases, only in a different system of reference. This shows that we are on the right track. Therefore, running ahead, let us give a scheme of the phases of ethnogenesis, which will be very necessary in the future. And let the reader not be confused by the fact that so far we are answering the question "how?" rather than "why?" The description of a phenomenon always precedes its explanation, if the latter is unbiased, bias which should be avoided at all costs.

So, firstly, there is the incubation period of ethnos' formation, which usually does not leave any traces in the history. It is the "starting mechanism" which doesn't always lead to the emergence of a new ethnos, because the process can be abruptly broken off by some extraneous force. At some point, an established (historically) group of people, or consortium, appears on the historical scene, quickly developing and forming its ethnic face and identity ("us and not us," or "us and others"). Finally, it is clothed in a time-appropriate social form and enters the broad historical arena, often starting with territorial expansion. The formation of the ethno-social system marks the end of the incubation period of the rise phase. The formed ethnos can either perish or experience, like the Roman or Byzantine ethnos, a relatively long period of peripeteia - historical existence. This period, as in the case of landscapes, includes an explicit passionate beat, an acmatic phase, and phases of breakdown, inertia and obscuration.

The Acmatic phase in particular is often very heterogeneous in character, dominance and intensity of the ethnic processes taking place.

The phases of ethnogenesis associated with the process of simplification of the ethnic system (fracture, inertia and, to a lesser extent, obscuration) are often disrupted by reverse processes of ethnic regeneration. In this case, the initiative of social renewal, responding to the new needs of ethnic dynamics, is taken by those ethnic subsystems that had previously been constrained by the presence of the leading subethnos or ethnos. Only after the former leader has cleared the place can the forces that suspend the processes of ethnic decline manifest themselves.

It is most difficult to study the final and especially the initial phases of ethnogenesis because of the specific work of the chroniclers. If chroniclers were interested in how this or that mighty nation disappeared and offered their explanations, even if imperfect, they, as a rule, ignored the primary manifestations of ethnogenesis, considering them trivial, not worthy of attention. Anatole France showed this beautifully in the famous story "The Procurator of Judea" and in the dialogues of the Roman sages in the book "On the White Stone”.

It is easy to see that for the spontaneous development of society, the processes of ethnogenesis are a background, for they correlate with each other.  The science of history records precisely this constant correlation, while for ethnology we must first analyze, that is, dissect the stimuli of natural and social, and then the synthesis to which we aspire is possible. But before this goal can be reached, another obstacle, perhaps even more difficult than the ones left behind, must be overcome. Climatic changes in individual countries take place over several centuries of historical time; the landscape of these countries naturally changes, which is always reflected in the economy, and thus in the life of the ethnos. So are not these dynamics of natural conditions the cause of the formation of new ethnoses? This solution is tempting, for it is simple and easily removes many difficulties. But does it remove all?

The dependence of mankind on its natural environment, more precisely, on the geographical environment, has never been disputed, although the degree of this dependence has been assessed differently by different scientists. But in any case, the economic life of the peoples who populated and inhabit the Earth is closely linked to the landscapes and climate of the inhabited areas.

This is so, but even this solution cannot be considered exhaustive, because it does not answer the two "sick" questions: 1. People are able to adapt natural conditions to their needs, and by creating anthropogenic landscapes" they counteract undesirable changes. So why then do many ethnic groups and their economic systems, which we call "civilizations," perish? And yet they perish before the eyes of the historian.

2. Climatic fluctuations and related processes can affect what is, i.e. already existing ethnic groups. This phenomenon is described in the Babylonian poem Enuma Elish and in the Hebrew Book of Genesis, the dates of which coincide.

They may force people to leave their native lands and seek refuge in foreign lands, which happened to the Mongols in the 16th and 17th centuries[68]. But they are powerless against what does not yet exist. They cannot create a new ethnos that would create a new artificial landscape. Consequently, our task is only partially solved, and we must return to the question, not how, but by whom a new place-development is created, for by doing so we will come closer to unraveling the origin of ethnoses.

But even here we face difficulties: if the ends and deaths of civilizations are obvious, where are the starting points of ethnogenesis? Even if not the starting points, assuming the presence of the incubation period, but at least those from which we can make a count, and the same for all the processes under study. Otherwise, the comparisons of different ethnogenies will not be justified.

But even this problem can be solved, since new ethnic groups do not emerge by fragmenting the old, but through the synthesis of the existing ones, i.e. ethnic substrates. And these ethnic groups emerge in strictly delineated geographical regions in a super brief time, and the regions change every time, which excludes the impact of terrestrial conditions, i.e. geographical determinism, which E. Semple defined as follows: "Man is a product of the earth's surface"[69]. Not only that! The influence of solar activity and cosmic radiation occasionally reaching the surface of the planet is known and described[70].

But let us limit the enumeration of doubts and proceed to the description of the phenomenon.

XVII. Explosions of ethnogenesis

EXPLOSION OF ETHNOGENESIS IN THE 1ST CENTURY. N.E.

If ethnoses were "social categories," they would arise under similar social conditions. In fact, as will now be shown, the triggers of ethnogenesis, where they can be traced on strictly factual material, coincide in time and are located in regions stretched either along the meridians or parallels or at an angle to them, but always as a continuous band. And regardless of the nature of the landscape and occupation of the population in such a band (spatial on the globe), at a certain epoch ethnic restructuring suddenly begins to occur - the addition of new ethnic groups from the substrates, i.e. ethnic groups of old. The latter break down and disintegrate, while the new ones develop very actively.

And next to such a strip - peace, as if nothing happens anywhere. Naturally, the complacent ethnic groups become victims of their restless neighbors. Another thing remains unclear: why is there such an exceptionality in the position of the zones of ethnogenesis beginnings and why does the process start in a new place every time? As if someone whips the globe with a whip, and blood rushes to the scar and it becomes inflamed.

But before answering the question posed, let's see how it happens, so that the explanation of the phenomenon fits its description.

In the first century the Roman and Parthian empires were in ethnic decline. The population was shrinking, virtue was being consigned to oblivion, and previously widespread culture was becoming the domain of narrow specialists. From then on, the economy became predatory of natural resources, and the area under cultivation shrank. After the brutal losses of the civil wars, there was a shortage of able officials and officers, but the number of lumpen proletarians increased. Drunkenness and debauchery in Rome became a household norm. These phenomena are elements of the phase of ethnogenesis, which we dare to call obscuration.

The Germanic and Sarmatian tribes are not in a better position, having sunk and losing their former fighting prowess. Germanicus passed through enemy territory from the Rhine to the Elbe without difficulty; the conquest of Britain was also accomplished with astonishing ease. This is all the more strange because in the third century B.C. the initiative of ethnic aggression belonged in the west to the Celts and in the east to the Sarmatians.

Studying the details and general course of Caesar's campaigns in Gaul, Pompey in Syria, Mark Antony in Parthia and Claudius in Britain, we see that successes accompany the Roman eagles only where resistance is exceptionally weak. Parthia was a poor country, and the Arshakid dynasty was not popular in Iran because it was considered "Turanian. Nevertheless, it held the border on the Euphrates. And when the Roman legionaries faced the Chinese crossbowmen at Talas in 36 BC, they outgunned the Romans without losing a single soldier[71]. So we can conclude that the Romans were defeating the barbarians only because the barbarians were weakening faster than the Romans.

But in the second century the process of general obfuscation was broken. On a wide strip between 20+ and 40+ east longitude, the hitherto inert peoples became active. The Dacians were the first to come forward, but unsuccessfully; they were completely overwhelmed by Trajan's legionnaires. Then the Illyrians, who persistently augmented the Roman army and placed their leaders Severus on the throne of Caesars, showed increased activity. Almost the entire 3rd century this small nation was the hegemon of the Roman Empire, but overextended itself from overstretch and its descendants turned into arnautian brigands.

More fortunate were the Goths, who quickly conquered a vast territory from the mouth of the Vistula to the shores of the Black Sea and extended their raids to the shores of the Aegean Sea. And even after the defeat inflicted on them by the Huns, the Goths found the strength to conquer Italy, Spain and for a short time dominated the palace of Blachernae Constantinople. The fate of the bloody upsurge was shared with the Goths by the Vandals and Antes.

The presence of supernatant capacity in the East Germanic tribes in the 2nd-3rd centuries stands in stark contrast to the inertia of the West Germanic and Sarmatian-Alanians, who allowed a small horde of Huns to subdue themselves. But the most important event was the formation of a new ethnos that called itself "Christians”. This ethnos could not in principle have unity in terms of origin, language, and territory, for it was said, "There is no barbarian and Scythian, no Greek and Jew”. In the system of the Roman Empire, where broad religious tolerance was established, Christians were the exception. The reason for this, of course, was not dogma, which, moreover, had not been established before 325, nor government terror, for the emperors sought to avoid persecution by prohibiting by special edicts denunciations against Christians, nor class differences, because people of all classes became Christians, but an acute feeling of "alienation" of the Christian stock to all others. In the first and third centuries not everyone became a Christian, but only those who felt "alien" in the world and at home in the community. The number of such people increased all the time, until they began to dominate in the fourth century, when Rome became Byzantium. 

Whatever the evangelical doctrine may say, but in ethnogenesis the early Christians showed the presence of all those qualities which are necessary to create a new ethnos and which can be reduced to two: purposiveness and the ability to overstretch. The inertia of the push of the first century was enough for one and a half thousand years, during which Byzantium went through all the phases of the historical period and the phase of obscuration, after which the Phanariots [72] turned into a persistent ethnos, and the other Byzantines were assimilated by the Turks and Slavs.

On the eastern fringe of the strip outlined by us, in the III century a new people with an old name Persians made themselves known. They refer to the ancient Persians as the Italians refer to the Romans, or the modern Greeks to the Hellenes. The Achaemenid monarchy was the historical conclusion of a long period of cultural, social and ethnic development in the classical Near East. The Macedonian invasion cut short the straightforward development of this tradition, and the Parthians, who liberated Iran from the Seleucids, were also conquerors and "strangers" to the local population. In 226 the Persians established their own state and their original ethno-cultural complex based on a witty combination of confessional and tribal principles.

Zoroastrianism, which became the official ideology, in contrast to Christianity, was alien to proselytism, but this gap was filled by Manichaeism, the Gnostic system in the Iranian interpretation. In contrast to Byzantium, the development of the Persian population was disrupted by invasion from outside, first by the Arabs and then by the Seljuks. The last Persian state proper, the Samanid kingdom, fell in 999, after which the Iranian cultural tradition gradually disappeared, and the Persian ethnos entered the system of so-called Muslim culture and re-formed, again retaining only the name and some features of life from the ancient stereotype of behavior.

Finally, on the western fringe, in Jutland, the Anglian people, also captured by the described rise, showed themselves with some delay, invading Britain in the 5th century. It would have been difficult to understand why the sparse forces of Gengist and Gorza were suddenly stronger than the dense population of this rich country. Economically and technically the Saxons and Angles were weaker than the Romanized Britons, but ethnically they were younger. and the potency of young age gave them the upper hand in an unequal struggle with the Celts. The only exceptions were the backward areas of Britain where the Celtic population had not squandered their former militancy and used it to repel foreigners (Wales, Cornwall and Scotland).

THE HUNS IN THE III-VTH CENTURIES. N.E.

It is a very common opinion that the Great Migration of Peoples in Europe was due to the advance of the nomadic Huns from the Trans-Volga region. However, familiarity with the dates of the events allows this view to be rejected completely.

The Xiongnu is a nomadic power that emerged in modern Mongolia earlier than the 4th century B.C. The Turkic-speaking Xiongnu, being a pre-class society, created a power based on "dominion over the peoples”. From 209 B.C. to 97 B.C. the Xiongnu power grew and defeated the best forces of mighty China, and after that the victorious Xiongnu steadily weakened, and the defeated China became the master of the situation without a fight, i.e. their victory was not of use to the Xiongnu.

In the I century AD Huns were freed from the power of China, but split into four branches, one of which, most indomitable and freedom-loving, repulsing enemies attacking from all sides, in the 155-158 years disappeared in the west of the Great Steppe, mingled with the Ugric of the Volga-Ural interfluves and became for 200 years in the Eastern European ethnic group, which for the avoidance of confusion is called "Hunnu"[73].

In the III-IV centuries Huns defeated Alans, "exhausting them by an endless war",[74] and only in the V century crossed the Carpathians and reached the Danube valley, and a part of their Akatsirs remained in their native steppes on Don and Volga.

Hence, the Hun activity took place three centuries later than the explosion of the activity described by us; there was not a mass migration from Asia either, but a skillful policy of the experienced leaders, skilled in diplomacy and strategy. The Goths, in comparison with the Huns, were as frivolous and naïve as children. That is why they lost the war and lost their beautiful country near the Black Sea. In the II-IV centuries, the Black Sea steppes were the second (after Egypt) source of bread for Constantinople. So farming was mastered in the Alanian steppes and river valleys.

The Huns crossed the Don, defeating the Alans in 371, defeated the Goths with the help of the Wolverines in the end of the IV century, and took Pannonia about 420. Hence, the whole stay of the Hunnish horde in the southern steppes fits in less than half a century. In that case the Huns themselves were not numerous [75], and they behaved with the hands of the same subdued Alans, Wolverines, Antes, Ostgotians, and other local tribes. If all inhabitants of the Eastern Europe were massacred, from where would Huns get people for the war with the Roman Empire and Iran?   It is true that the settled-agricultural economy was destroyed by the Hun invasion, but it does not follow that the inhabitants of the forested valleys of the Terek and Middle Don or the reed thickets of the Volga Delta did not outlive the short-term movement of the nomads in their shelters, especially since they were not engaged in agriculture, because they were hunters and fishermen. Even Alans lived in the steppes of the North Caucasus and the Don until the 10th century, which characterizes the stability of Eastern Europe at the time when intensive ethnic processes took place in Central Europe.

It is also important to note that the success of Huns coincided with the climax of temporal drying up of steppe[76], which undermined the Alanian agriculture, and thus weakened the Alanian military force. Huns, on the other hand, accustomed to the arid conditions, suffered less from the drought, which caused their victory in the war, waged by them from 160 till 370 without any decisive successes. But as soon as the dry period was over, the domination of the Huns was also over. In the VI century in the steppes the old balance of forces was restored, but the place of Huns was taken by Bulgars, and the place of Alans - by Khazars.

And, at last, the most important thing: the Huns, as well as the Asiatic Huns, were not a young people. Their history is consistently traced from the great reforms of their leader Mode, who seized power by patricide in 209 BC.

Let us turn to the comparative method: the Hunnish power lasted from the moment of its foundation - 209 B.C. - to the time of the deposition - 48 B.C. - 257 years. France emerged from the wreckage of the Carolingian Empire in 843. The year 1100 (843 plus 257, the Hun period) was an era of the darkest French feudalism; the Xiongnu did more for culture in the same period than the French did[77].

The tribal power of the Xiongnu is not the only case in world history of a pre-class society creating a powerful organization. Military undertakings on a large scale are unthinkable without the coordination of forces, and we know of the tremendous campaigns carried out by the Celts in the first millennium B.C., the Aryan conquest of India in the second millennium B.C, The formation of the Nagua power in Ana-Oka in the 11th century, even before they had the institution of patriarchal slavery[78] and, finally, the Amazulu power in South Africa in the 19th century, as well as a very similar ancient Turkic ethnic group[79] and even the pre-Chinggis Mongols in the 12th century[80].

EXPLOSION OF ETHNOGENESIS IN THE VII CENTURY. N.E.

Similar in character and results were the events of the 7th century in Central Arabia. A community of militant followers arose around the prophet Muhammad, breaking white tribal relations and creating a new stereotype of behavior. The disparate Bedouin and Yemenite tribes even adopted a new ethnonym: Arabs. The neighboring peoples at the time - the Persians, Syrians and Egyptians - did not have such an upsurge of activity.

At the same latitude, in the Indus valley, a new nation of Rajputs, the descendants of mixed local and foreign ethnic elements, was formed at the same time[81]. The Rajputs crushed the heirs of the Gupta despotism (after the dynasty had been suppressed), the Buddhist community[82] and all those who had supported the old orders[83]. On the ruins they created a Hindu theocracy and a system of small principalities, highly decentralized and only therefore unable to fight back against the Muslim invasion, which broke the rectilinear inertia of ethnogenesis. But what is important for us is not the political success of the system under study, but the presence of an ethnogenetic trait - the ability to supertension, which was present among the Rajputs to a large extent. In a certain sense, this is what determined their defeats in the 9th century, for each prince would rush into battle with the Muslims alone and die, but would not agree to recognize the supremacy of his neighbor. For an active foreign policy of an ethnos the most advantageous is not the highest, but the average degree of spreading the ability to supertension, because it allows the consolidation of forces and the coordination of actions. With further weakening of tension in the ethnic collective it becomes easy to manage, but the strength of resistance to external influences decreases. For example, the descendants of the warlike Aryan-Bengali Hindus were not recruited by the British into their colonial armies because they were too docile to be combat-ready soldiers. It was not the support of particular social groups that enabled the East India Company to conquer India, but the passivity of the most numerous Indian ethnic groups that tied the hands of those energetic rajahs and sultans who wanted to keep the country from enslavement.

However, the Muslim conquests after the 11th century were conducted in the same way. Apparently, the cause of India's troubles was the Hindus themselves.

Further eastward at the same time the Tibetan people formed, uniting the hitherto fragmented Tibetan Plateau by a direct and rapid conquest of the tribes of Northern Tibet. The ancestors of the conquerors were a small tribe in the middle reaches of the Tsanglo (Brahmaputra), who accepted into their midst a number of Sanbi, who were driven out of Hesi in the middle of the 5th century,[84] and the Nepali highlanders, so that by the 6th century a mixed ethnic population had formed. It created the famous Tibetan Empire in the 7th-9th centuries, which challenged China for hegemony in East Asia.

Finally, in western China during the same period there was a powerful ethnic explosion that toppled the barbaric Wei Empire. [85] and the historical tradition of an independent empire, interrupted by the Manchu conquest of the 17th century.

The described phenomena of ethnogenesis are not only synchronous, but also located on the same strip, the axis of which is the line connecting Mecca and Chang'an. Further eastward this axis passes through southern Japan, where ethnic consolidation also took place, and is lost in the Pacific Ocean. Continued to the west, it passes through the deserted Libyan desert and reaches western Sudan, where, however, the ethnogenetic processes of this epoch are not registered. Isn't it strange?

EXPLOSION OF ETHNOGENESIS IN THE XI CENTURY. N.E.

The impression arises that the linear sections of the earth's surface, over which intensive processes of the emergence of ethnoses took place, do not cover the entire globe, but are limited by its curvature, as if a strip of light fell on a school globe and illuminated only that part of it which faces the source of light. This analogy is rather an illustration. What is its substantive basis - this is to be discussed; for now we will consider one more case, leaving the others (Europe and Central America) for later. This is necessary in order to exclude other, habitual, but non exhaustive explanations.

In the twelfth century, two mighty ethnoses and one small tribe, which died in infancy, were formed simultaneously in East Asia. And this time the range of ethnogenesis was strictly delineated geographically, but had no relation to terrestrial situations: landscape, social and cultural.

Until the beginning of the 12th century, the population of the Amur banks and its tributaries - Tungus-speaking Jurchens - was in a state of homeostasis, which manifested itself in social primitiveness, tribal fragmentation and inability to defend themselves against the southern aggressive neighbors - Liao Qidan empire. The Jurchens paid tribute to the Kidan emperors with falcons trained for hunting as well as supplied recruits for military service.

The steppe tribes of the eastern Transbaikalia, summarily called either "Tszubu" or "da-dan" - Tatars, were under the same imposition. The civilized Kidans dealt with them the same way as in the 19th century the North American colonists dealt with the prairie Indians.

But already in 1115 everything changed. The Jurchens rebelled and by 1126 had crushed the Liao Empire. The direction of their ethnogenesis, i.e., ethnic dominance, was tribal consolidation. This allowed the former tribal leader Aguda to create an empire called the Golden Empire.

The nomads had a different dominance. From the tribes stood out individual warriors, "men of long will", who at first were very poor, but at the end of the XII century found a leader named Temujin, whom they christened Genghis and elected the Khan. In a fierce civil war, the "men of long will" crushed their own tribal system and created the Mongol Ulus, in which the defeated and the victors were united and merged into a single ethnos.

Finally, on the southern shores of Lake Baikal a militant tribe of Merkits manifested itself. It is not established who Merkits were by origin. They are neither Mongols, nor Turks, but most probably Samoyedians, but what is important for us is not this, but the fact that up to 1216 Merkits were contesting the hegemony in the Central Asia from Mongols. Consequently, here we are facing an explosion of ethnogenesis similar to the ones we discussed above. It is significant that the area of this explosion of ethnogenesis is as clearly delineated as that of its predecessors. Neither the Evenks nor the Yakuts in the north, nor the Koreans, Chinese, and Tanguts in the south. In the west, the range wedged out at the southern tip of Lake Baikal, without touching the Oirats and Kumans (Polovetses), who, like Mongols, lived a nomadic way of life. We can think that we are looking at the extremities of the range, and its main part fell on the Pacific Ocean territory. If so (and there is no reason to object), the ethnogenetic explosions, or tremors, are the phenomenon inseparable from physical geography. History only records them, just as the climatologist records the movements of cyclones and monsoons, and the historian-geographer records the migrations of Eurasian nomads. And now it is obvious that manifestations of activity of steppe and forest ethnoses of Eurasia, is not always connected with climatic fluctuations, but striking the imagination of medieval chroniclers, are the results of ethnogenesis explosions. This, and only this, is a link between the Mongolian rise and the Great Migration of peoples, the triumph of Byzantine Orthodoxy over Roman paganism and the preaching of Islam through holy wars, the formation of the Tibetan Kingdom, the exploits of the Rajputs and the brilliance of the court of the Tang emperors. And apparently such "tremors" or "explosions" localized in certain territories gave rise to the great ethnoses of antiquity, whose initial periods are not illuminated by the sources to the same extent as in the Middle Ages.

Once we have grasped the element of similarity in the various phenomena, explaining their differences is extremely simple. The same impulses must manifest themselves differently in different environmental conditions.   Imagine a man walking along a mountain ridge and pushing a rock with his foot, which rolls down the slope. Sometimes that stone might cause an avalanche that would bury several settlements under it, and sometimes it would get stuck in a crevasse or bump into a ledge and immediately stop. It would be possible to calculate the stone's path and predict its fate with all the data about the force and direction of the tremor, as well as all the obstacles in its path, but it is totally impossible to obtain such a quantity of data.

This is a vivid illustration of the fate of ethnogenetic push, where the role of obstacles that change the development of the process is played by many phenomena: social conditions developed over the past centuries, the accumulated and inherited culture from ancestors, the geographical environment of the region, the ethnic environment, including international relations, political calculations and intrigues of contemporaries. But they all gain power only when the ethnosystem receives the energy that transforms it and allows it to do great things.

What kind of energy is this? By determining its nature, we will solve the problem of ethnogenesis.

Let us note that when we study ethnic history, we see only social relations and social institutions. But this does not mean that our observations exhaust the topic. After all, we detect electricity or heat only in manifestations, seeing, for example, the glowing filament in a light bulb or feeling its heating, but this does not prevent us from generalizing experience and operating with speculative concepts. After all, such concepts as "life" and "social formation”, are also generalizations of many observations. Obviously, so is ethnos.

Ethnos can be correlated with social and biological categories in the same way as length, weight and temperature of an object are correlated: both are parameters of processes of different nature, not reducible to each other. Since we have already established that social processes and ethnogenesis develop in parallel, we need to check how ethnoses interact with populations of biological taxa at the same level. No fewer surprises await us.

[Part V coming up next: NATURE WITHIN US, WHICH SHOWS WHICH PART OF MAN BELONGS TO NATURE AND WHICH PART DOES NOT.]

NOTES

[55] Grumm-Grzhimoilo G.E. Can we consider Chinese as autochthons of basins of the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River // Izv. 1933. Т. 65. Wyp. С. 29-30.

[56] Nesteruk F. Ya. Water economy of China / / From the history of science and technology of China / Ed. by I. V. Kuznetsov et al. М., 1955. С. 6.

[57] Zaichikov V. T. Natural wealth of China // Izv. AS USSR. Ser. Geographic. 1954. - 6.

[58] Lattimore O. Inner Asian Frontier of China. New York, 1940. P. 275.

[59] Nesteruk F.Y. Water economy of China. P. II.

[60] Gumilev L.N. Chinese chronographic terminology in the works of N.Ya.Bichurin on the background of the World History (foreword) // N. Bichurin. Я. Collection of information on the historical geography of East and Middle Asia. Cheboksary. 1960. С. 648- 649.

[61] Nesteruk F.Ya. op. cit. p. 19.

[62] Ibid. С. 22-23.

[63] Gumilev L.N. Chinese chronological terminology. С. 652.

[64] Nesteruk F.Y. Water economy of China. С. 51.

[65] Ibid. С. 52.

[66] Ibid. С. 52-55.

[67] Schnitnikov A. V. Variability of total moisture content in the continents of the Northern Hemisphere // Notes of SA. VOL. XVI. MOSCOW, L., 1957. С. 220-221, 262.

[68] Grumm-Grzhimailo G.E. Desert growth and destruction of pastures and cultivated lands.... С. 437.

[69] Isachenko A. G. Determinism and indeterminism in foreign geography // Vestnik LSU. 1971. - 24. С. 90.

[70] Ermolaev M.M. On the boundaries and structure of geographical space // Izv. 1969. - 5. С. 401- 427.

[71] For more details see: Gumilev L.N. Hunnu. С. 171-173.

[72] The inhabitants of the quarter of Fanar in Istanbul where lived descendants of the Byzantines, spared by the Turks during the capture of Constantinople in 1453, were massacred during the Greek revolt in 1821 in retaliation for the massacre of Muslims in Moreia.

[73] Inostrantsev K.A., Huns and Huns // Works of the Turkic Seminary. VOL.I. L., 1926.

[74] Jordanes. Origins and deeds of the Goths //Translated by B.Ch. Skrzhinskaya. М., 1961. С. 91. By "Goths" is meant Goths.

[75] Gumilev L.N. Some questions of history / / Vestnik drevneyh istorii.1960. - 4.

[76] Gumilev L.N. Origins of nomadic culture / / Peoples of Asia and Africa.1968. - 3.

[77] Gumilev L.N. Hunnu.

[78] Kynzhalov P., Belov A. The fall of Tenochtitlan. Л., 1956. С. 130-136.

[79] Gumilev L.N. Ancient Turks.

[80] Gumilev L.N. Search for an imaginary kingdom.

[81] Rajputs - descendants from mixed marriages of Saks, Kushans and Ephthalites with Indus saborigens (see: Sinha N.K., Benergi A.C. Ibid, p. 114).

[82] Grousset R. Histoire de l'Extreme Orient. Paris, 1929. P. 125.

[83] History of India in the Middle Ages / Edited by L.B.Alaev. М., 1968. С.76-83.

[84] Gumilev L.N. Greatness and fall of ancient Tibet // Countries and Peoples of the East / Edited by D.A. Olderogge. Vyp. 8. М., 1969. С. 156-157.

[85] Gumilev L.N. 1) Xiongnu in China. С. 234-235; 2) Ancient Turks. С. 10

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