I think my first exposure to Genghis Khan was Harold Lamb’s Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde. That was a Random House World Landmark Book. Fifty years ago, school libraries were filled with World Landmark Books.

Later I read Harold Lamb’s books on Genghis Khan, the Crusades, Tamerlane and my favorite, The March of the Barbarians. I also have Stuart Legg’s The Heartland/The Barbarians of Asia and have read a translation of Rene Grousset’s The Empires of the Steppes which is the most detailed.

There is a new entry: Kenneth W. Harl’s Empires of the Steppes. I happened to stumble across a new trade paperback edition while killing some time at a local bookstore a couple weeks back. It turns out the local library has the 2023 hardback.

Harl is a professor of classical and Byzantine history at Tulane University. He has written two books on coins of the Roman era.

There is some new information from genetics and archaeology since the days of Harold Lamb and Rene Grousset. Harl does a good job of incorporating that newer information in his history.

The prologue is the scene of Attila the Hun on the road to Rome and turning back for speculative reasons. Harl starts at the beginning with the peopling of the Eurasian steppes with the spread of the Yamnaya culture, the impact of the Indo-Europeans, and the spread of the Sintashta, Afanasievo, and Andronovo Cultures. He goes into the Indo-European languages but does not bore you. Also very important – horses. Horses were first domesticated for meat, then used for carts/wagons/chariots, and then bred to be ridden. Aryan/Indo-European tribes around the northern shore of the Caspian Sea developed horses that could be ridden.

Harl gives plenty of space to the Scythians/Sarmatians/Saka/Alans which are often given short shrift in steppe nomad histories. He does not shy away on the red-haired mummies in the Tarim basin. He made a good point on the failure of the Persians to invade the steppes. Alexander the Great inflicted a defeat on the Sakas close to the Jaxartes River and then made a deal with them. He did not attempt to follow them into the steppes and subdue them. The result was the trading cities of Transoxiana and the Silk Road moving goods east and west from China to the Mediterranean.

He switches over the the East and has a very good account on the Xiongnu and Han Chinese relations. Again horses – Chinese pastures lack selenium needed for building good bones in horses. The Han Chinese were limited to using chariots with smaller horses and never could develop a good cavalry arm.

He has the idea the Romans should have married a princess off to Attila, something the Persians and Chinese did with their nomadic neighbors. Harl thinks the Western Roman Empire could have survived with an army of Huns beating up the Germanic Goths, Vandals, Franks, Suebi, Burgundians setting up independent states within the boundaries of the Empire. Now there is an alternate history story waiting to be written.

Harl states the Xiongnu, Turks, and Uighurs built more stable realms than the western nomads due to contact with Chinese bureacracy and especially calligraphy. I recently came across the idea that steppe tribes were dependent on neighboring more civilized areas in one of Rudyard Lynch’s Whatifalthist videos. Harl has a similar idea though I don’t know if that applies to the early Afanasievo Culture.

The book of course covers Genghis Khan and ends with Tamerlane when the era of the steppe conquerors was over.

This book is an easy read. One flaw with the book is the lack of maps. I like maps. I know the geography but someone new to the place and era might find themselves lost without an atlas. It is now my recommended go to book if someone wants to learn about the Eurasian steppe tribes and their history.