Nomads, Past and Present

When Ovid was exiled from Rome to a border town on the Black Sea, he despaired at his new bleak and barbarous surroundings. Like many Greeks and Romans, Ovid thought the outer reaches of his world was where civilization ceased to exist. Our fascination with the Greek and Roman world, and the abundance of writing that we have from it, means that we usually explore the ancient world from this perspective too. Was Ovid's exile really as bad as he claimed? What was it truly like to live on the edges of these empires, on the boundaries of the known world?

Thanks to archaeological excavations, we now know that the borders of the empires we consider the 'heart' of civilization were in fact thriving, vibrant cultures – just not ones we might expect. This is where the boundaries of 'civilized' and 'barbarians' began to dissipate; where the rules didn't always apply; where normally juxtaposed cultures intermarried; and where nomadic tribes built their own cities.

In this episode, Owen Rees joins me to discuss his book The Far Edges of the Known World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2025) and his research into what ‘everyday’ life looked like beyond the Athenian or Roman heartlands. Covering over 6,000 years of history on three continents, the book encourages readers to interrogate misconceptions about the ancient world and to understand its enormous diversity of lived experiences.
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State Builders from the Steppe: A History of the First Bulgarian Empire (This is RETHINK, 2025) explores how the Proto-Bulgarians were able to build both an empire and an identity amidst the turmoil of the Balkans in the Early Middle Ages. From creating the Cyrillic Alphabet and crowning the first ever Tsar to defeating the first Arab invasion of Europe and nearly conquering the last vestiges of the Roman Empire, the history of the First Bulgarian Empire is equal parts fascinating and dramatic. In this episode, Eric Halsey joins me to discuss the little-known history of the First Bulgarian Empire, its nomadic pastoralist origins, why the empire collapsed, and its legacies in Bulgaria today.
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As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. In this episode, K. G. joins me to discuss his research on the morin khuur, or “horse fiddle,” in Mongolia, and how Mongolians use the traditional instrument to express and envision human and more-than-human futures against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change.
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Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) offers an in-depth exploration of the Urartian empire, which occupied the highlands of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran in the early first millennium BCE. Lesser known than its rival, the Neo-Assyrian empire, Urartu presents a unique case of imperial power distributed among mountain fortresses rather than centralized in cities. Through spatial analysis, the book demonstrates how systematic warfare, driven by imperial ambitions, shaped Urartian and Assyrian territories, creating symbolically and materially powerful landscapes.

Tiffany Earley-Spadoni challenges traditional views by emphasizing warfare’s role in organizing ancient landscapes, suggesting that Urartu’s strength lay in its strategic optimization of terrain through fortified regional networks. Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes GIS-enabled studies and integrates archaeological, historical, and art-historical evidence, she illustrates how warfare was a generative force in structuring space and society in the ancient Middle East. Landscapes of Warfare situates Urartu’s developments within the broader context of regional empires, providing insights into the mechanisms of warfare, governance, and cultural identity formation.
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Contemporary, commonly-accepted understandings of the history of Chinese state formation see the nomadic pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe as peripheral appendages to a centralized, agriculturalist empire. In his work, Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene argues against what he calls “the Sinocentric paradigm” in favor of an interpretation of nomadic pastoralism as the origin of the premodern state. In this interview, we discuss the conquest theory of state formation, how mobility is essential to state control, and how nomadic state origins can be found globally beyond the Eurasian steppe.
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