The eastern end of the Eurasian steppe, Mongolia and its surroundings, is the earliest attested centre of Turkic history. From very early on it received its cultural impulses from the steppe to its west. The outline below is greatly simplified, and scholars still discuss the chronology and contours of these cultures.[1] Two cautions frame everything that follows. The first concerns the ancestors of the early Turkic peoples. They were not necessarily steppe nomads, and at some point they certainly were not. Their nomadisation may have been a relatively recent thing, occurring just before their entry onto the stage of history. As late as the tenth century a Chinese traveller could still describe a hunting and fishing Turkic group living in the forests. The second caution concerns what spread across the steppe. It was a system of economy, with its attendant culture and political organisation, and not one particular people.
Bronze Age of South Siberia
Archaeologists divide the steppe cultures of Inner Asia into a series of periods. The sequence in the Yenisei-Minusinsk region and the Altai runs as follows. Europoid stockbreeders with some metal-working skills introduced the Afanasevo culture there by the middle of the third millennium BC, if not earlier. Their culture shows continuing contact with western Eurasia, and the Pontic steppe was their probable point of origin. At the beginning of the second millennium the Okunevo culture followed. In it a population probably from the Siberian forest belt predominated, and stockbreeding and metallurgy received more emphasis. Groups of similar culture are found in Tuva and elsewhere in South Siberia. About 1500 BC or possibly earlier, the Andronovo culture, or several Andronovo-type cultures, replaced Okunevo. These cultures were of western Eurasian origin. A Europoid population, most probably Indo-Iranian, dominated them. It practised a more sedentary style of stockbreeding, and metallurgy was still important. The cultures stretched from the Pontic steppe to the Yenisei but apparently did not reach the Altai. In their later stages they are connected with the early Scytho-Saka, that is Iranian, peoples. One national-historical view regards the Andronovo culture as the culture of the ancestors of the Turks. It rests on the physical type of the skeletons and on the spread of horse and sheep.[2][3] The home of the Turkic-speaking peoples has been sought in the Altai, between the Irtysh and the Urals, south-west of Lake Baikal, east of the Altai and in the Khingan range.[4] In the Minusinsk region the Karasuk culture, about 1300 to 800 BC, appears to have been transhumant or semi-nomadic. It bred camels among other animals, which points to Central Asian connections. Its population shows some elements that came from the east.
Horse and the coming of nomadism
Scholars now believe that pastoral nomadism developed in lands marginal to agriculture in the fourth and third millennia BC. It developed unevenly, over a long time and in response to local stimuli, out of a primitive pastoralism in communities that kept animals and farmed. Where it began is argued. One school holds that the archaeology shows it spreading across Eurasia from west to east. Another connects the livestock-dependent and then pastoral nomadic economy with South Siberia and northern Mongolia. A third sees it arising from specific economic and ecological conditions at about the same time across the whole steppe. Crucial to it was the domestication of the horse, certainly by the third and perhaps as early as the fourth millennium, in the Ponto-Caspian steppe. Only about 1500 BC, and the dating is uncertain, was equestrian technology developed enough to produce a true culture of mounted riders. Those skills were not necessarily applied at once to war. Several factors finally came together: the full mastery of the horse, which probably came earlier in the west and spread east; the growth of human and animal populations; advances in metallurgy; a change of climate, above all the increasing aridity of the late second millennium; and the appearance of sedentary states or their outposts on the edge of the steppe.[1] The transition to pastoral nomadism is placed at the end of the Karasuk period. It set tribes moving as they struggled for the pastures.
Early Nomads
The Tagar culture, from about 800 BC to the first century AD and divided into four stages, supplanted Karasuk in the Minusinsk region. It never fully developed the nomadic pattern. It is something of an exception to the culture of its age, which archaeologists call Early Nomad. Outside the Minusinsk basin that culture belonged to equestrian pastoral nomads of probable Scytho-Saka origin, organised in tribal unions. The famous burials of Pazyryk in the Altai are its best-known example. An older view of the 1950s assigned them to the second century BC and to the culture of the great Xiongnu state, against the dating to the fifth to third century BC.[5] The age brought iron to the region, and the finds show sophisticated trade with China in the east and Iran in the west. East of it, in the Trans-Baikal and northern Mongolia, there were also horse-riding, stockbreeding populations of a different physical type. They appear to have moved from hunting and gathering to nomadism. They had a culture of their own and a well-developed metallurgy, but their nomadism may well have been borrowed from their western neighbours.
Among the nomads of the Altai the equestrian culture, helped by the development of the bridle about the seventh century BC, found its way into their spiritual life. They ritually slaughtered horses and buried them with their owners. These nomads lived in transportable dwellings, and in some seasons and regions in birch-bark tents and log cabins. Horse-breeding was their chief occupation, and they also raised cattle and sheep. The outlines of the clan and tribal organisation later associated with the Eurasian nomads are already in evidence. It is not unlikely that these Altai nomads exerted a strong cultural influence on the Turkic peoples, or on the elements that would become Turkic peoples. The nomads of Tuva of the seventh and sixth centuries BC show close affinities to those of the Altai.[1]
Cavalry and the first raids
Cavalry warfare is closely bound up with this culture. It is attested in the eighth century BC in the borderlands of Inner Asia and East Asia, where some scholars attribute the fall of the Western Zhou in 771 BC to the attacks of raiders from the steppe. By about 690 BC, if not earlier, it is attested in western Eurasia, where it is clearly associated with the Cimmerians and with the Scythians who supplanted them. Some scholars have proposed that the Assyrians, not the steppe peoples, were the first to develop cavalry for war. Against that view, the Assyrians organised their horses carefully but never made full use of the new technology, and went on relying on the chariot. A steppe origin for mounted warfare therefore seems more likely, since the steppe has always remained its natural home.[1] Cimmerian raids, reflected in the Assyrian records, and then Scythian raids struck the Near East in the eighth to sixth centuries BC. They were the first reverberations of the new society taking shape on the steppe.
Both Chinese and Assyrian sources note these first mounted nomads in a military capacity. Their precise origins cannot everywhere be determined. Their components were probably diverse but most probably Indo-European. In Central and Inner Asia they came in time to form what has been called the Scytho-Siberian cultural community. Scytho-Saka elements seem to have taken the lead in it, but it also contained elements of non-Indo-European origin and interacted with local Siberian cultures. It is possible that by the late fifth century BC elements of the Turkic and perhaps other Altaic-speaking peoples had adopted equestrian nomadism. This is offered as a possibility only.[1]
Cimmerians, Scythians, Saka
In the west the Cimmerians, an equestrian nomadic people, held the steppe from about 1000 to 800 BC before the Scythians came. Their ethnic identity is undetermined. The name may not have been an ethnonym at all but a word for a mobile mounted band of Iranian-speaking nomads. Their successors in the western steppe in the eighth and seventh centuries were the Scythians, who seem to have entered the region from the east. They were Iranian, or at least ruled by an Iranian-speaking military elite. Their name is understood as the Iranian word for archer. The Persians called the eastern groupings of the same Iranian nomads, in Central and Inner Asia, Saka. This word is taken to mean running, swift, vagrant, that is nomad. The Saka were not confined to the Central Asian steppe. The Persian inscriptions distinguish the Saka with pointed caps, the Saka who prepare haoma, the Saka beyond Sogdia and the Saka beyond the sea. At some point, probably in the first centuries BC, Saka entered Iran itself and gave their name to Sistan. Herodotus is the reason the western branch is better known. The Scythians assumed political supremacy over the western steppe from the Cimmerians probably in the late ninth or early eighth century. The Royal Scythians, the ruling tribe of his day, appear to have migrated into the Pontic region about 600 BC. The attempts of Achaemenid Iran to conquer the Scytho-Saka nomads met with limited success.
A few of the customs Herodotus records have some relevance to the Turkic world. One is the sacrifice of horses, hardly unexpected in a horse-based economy, which the Altai Turkic peoples still observed in the nineteenth century. Another is a taboo on washing in water, later found among pagan Turkic and Mongol tribes of Central Asia. A third is the making of drinking cups from the skulls of slain enemies, a custom the Xiongnu, the Bulgars and the Pechenegs among others would repeat.[1] The fifth and fourth centuries BC challenged Scythian hegemony in the western steppe. It ended, probably early in the fourth century or in the third to second, at the hands of the Sarmatians. They are in all likelihood the Sauromatians whom Herodotus knew beyond the Don. Like many nomadic confederations, they held a variety of ethnic elements that changed with time and migration. Pressures in the steppe to their east drove their movement west. A pattern was set by which movements that began in Inner Asia ended on the Danube.
Significance for the Turkic peoples
Three lessons follow.[1] The Turkic peoples entered a steppe whose economy, technology and political forms were already old. Others had made them, and the Turkic peoples took them over rather than inventing them: the horse, the bow, the bridle, the wagon, the tribal union, the burial with horses. The Iranian nomads of the Scytho-Saka world stood in the lead of that culture for a millennium. Elements of them, the Sogdians above all, were later absorbed into the Turkic world, not the reverse. Finally, the ethnic labels of the Chinese and Greek sources for this age describe bands, elites and confederations at least as often as peoples. The Xiongnu were the first steppe polity of which the sources say enough for the question to be asked at all. Some scholars survey the Chinese notices and find wheat and millet among the Xiongnu and the Göktürks from early times, as a native practice and not only as a gift or tribute from settled neighbours.[6]
References
Literature
- Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
- İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk Millî Kültürü (1997)
- Bahaeddin Ögel, İslâmiyetten Önce Türk Kültür Tarihi. Orta Asya Kaynak ve Buluntularına Göre (1984)
- Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş II: Türklerde ziraat kültürü (2000)
What links here3
Cite this article
Yavuz, Emre-E. “The steppe before the Xiongnu.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/historiography/steppe-before-the-xiongnu/
Last revised: 8 November 2026
