The Nomadic Alternative – Page 76

herdsman. Perhaps the best known nomads of the ancient world were the "mare-milking Scythians" Aeschylus described as "living perched aloft on strong wheeled waggons", and whose mercurial shiftings over the northern grasslands exerted a peculiar fascination for the Greeks, always mindful of their own pastoral background. 'Nomos' also meant law. A nomad proper was a tribal elder with sufficient moral authority to allocate pasture rights according to custom. This custom became law - the basis of all Greek and Western law.

The same word resurfaces at the other end of the steppe. The Mongolian 'nom' signifies a 'pasture, a law, doctrine or religious text'. Another Mongol word 'nutuk' means a 'land, country or place where a man belongs' and shares its root with a verb meaning to 'move or migrate'. Nomadism is far more than just a highly skilled form of economy. It is a self-conscious act of faith - a perpetual prayer to an unnamed religious principle. In Tibet the definition of a human being is "the man who goes on migrations". The man who stays at home is less than human.

Nomadism is born of wide expanses swept by extremes of climate - ground too barren for the farmer to cultivate. Savannahs, deserts, steppes and tundras all command perpetual movement. Nomads never "roam aimlessly from place to place" as one dictionary would have it. The migration is a guided tour of domesticated animals round a predictable sequence of pastures. It has the same inflexible - almost clockwork - precision as the movements of wild game since similar ecological conditions affect it. But domestication blunts an animal's innate sense of time and space. The herdsman substitutes this loss with his own acquired skill, hinging his cycle of movement to the cyclical year, plotting his orbit to suit the needs of particular animals.

The timing of nomadic movements varies from climate to climate. The Reindeer Tungus in Siberia migrate in winter, when the rivers freeze and their sledges glide easily over the snow-bound taiga. Their reindeer are suitably adapted for this winter migration, and