Dynasty. Metal. Horse. Volume I. Genesis. The Birth of the Eurasian Nomadic Civilization

One Ancestor, Two Lineages — and the Birth of a Nomadic Civilization

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On a high plateau in the spurs of the Mongolian Altai, where the wind off the glaciers meets the steppe, there stands a stone. It is some three thousand years old. At its top, a solar disc; below, deer drawn out in flight, their antlers turning into the branches of a world-tree; at the base, a belt with a dagger, a bow and the paired hooks of a charioteer.

There are hundreds of such stones, from southern Siberia to Transbaikalia, from Tuva to Semirechye, from the Altai to the Mongolian plateau. They were raised by people who spoke different languages, followed different burial rites and belonged to different genetic lineages. And yet they recognized one another by these stones. They belonged to one world.

This book is about how that world came into being — and about why it cannot be understood if the story begins where it is usually begun: with the Scythians, the kurgans, the classical chronicles. By the time classical authors first wrote down the word ‘Scythians’, this world had already existed for more than fifteen hundred years.

I. The Deep Past

The history of humankind is most often told as a succession of states, wars and empires; less often as a history of languages and cultures; and almost never as a history of the deep demographic lineages that diverge across space and time, only to meet again tens of millennia later and become the precondition for new forms of society.

Some thirty-five to forty thousand years ago, in the space of Central Asia and southern Siberia, the Y-chromosomal macro-lineage P-M45 takes shape. About thirty to thirty-three thousand years ago two of its great daughter branches diverge within it — R and Q. This was not merely a genetic event: it was a fork in historical trajectories. The bearers of lineage R would in time become one of the key components of the Indo-European world; the bearers of lineage Q would settle, among other places, the New World; and their later reunion in inner Eurasia would become the demographic precondition for a new form of society — nomadic civilization. The oldest known bearer of lineage R is the Mal’ta boy near Lake Baikal, who lived some twenty-four thousand years ago; his genome already combines western and eastern components, forming that Ancient North Eurasian core which would play so great a role in the continent’s later history.

But deep genetic antiquity is only the backdrop of this book, not its plot. Genes here are not an explanation of civilization. They are merely the routes by which people came into the space of a future synthesis; what they built there is explained not by the origin of lineages but by the institutions they created.

II. Two Lineages, Two Landscapes

The fate of a historical lineage is determined not only by origin but by the landscape in which it gains stability.

Lineage R, having taken hold in the steppes and forest-steppes of Eurasia, divided early into R1a and R1b. The R1b branch moved predominantly west, sharing in the formation of the populations of Western Europe. R1a met a more complex fate: one part spread into Eastern Europe, Iran and India, becoming a component of the Indo-Iranian world, while another — the bearers of the eastern branch R1a-Z93 — moved east, into southern Siberia, the Altai and the Sayan. Thus within a single macro-lineage two civilizational vectors arose: in the west and south, the Indo-European world; in the east, the preconditions of a different, autonomous system.

But the picture would be incomplete without the second lineage. Some bearers of Q remained in the Sayan-Altai region, adapting to the mountain-taiga and steppe landscape; others went far to the north-east and, by way of Beringia, reached America, where their descendants became part of the complex societies of the pre-Columbian age. Two lineages that had diverged tens of millennia earlier followed two different historical trajectories — only to meet again millennia later.

III. Encounter and Synthesis

The place of this encounter is the Minusinsk Basin. Here the bearers of the eastern branch R1a-Z93 — linked to the Sintashta — Andronovo circle of the Bronze Age, with its developed metallurgy, chariot technology and military organization — meet the autochthonous population, the descendants of the Okunev world, in which lineages of Q played a significant role.

And a rare historical phenomenon occurs. Not displacement. Not simple assimilation. But synthesis. Recent archaeogenetics records the coexistence of different Y-chromosomal lineages in the same cemeteries, mixed maternal lines, stable exogamy and the prolonged reproduction of an allied structure. This is no longer chance contact — it is the formation of a new institutional model, which we designate DAEX.

DAEX: Dynasty · Alliance · Exogamy · Exchange.

Here a supra-clan system begins to take shape, one able to reproduce itself across vast spaces without cities, bureaucracy or written archives. It must be stressed at once: what is born here is not a ‘new people’ but a new institution. The meeting of lineages is only a demographic precondition; the civilization itself is a configuration of institutions, not a combination of haplogroups.

IV. Space as a Factor

This process unfolds in a particular space: the Sayan — the Altai — the Tian Shan. This is not a border. It is a zone of integration.

European historiography long regarded the steppe as a periphery — an empty space between the ‘real’ centres of history. But Eurasia is built otherwise. The steppe does not divide; it connects. Several great centres of sedentary civilization — the Mediterranean, the Near East, India, China — are joined here by an unbroken belt of steppe and mountain pasture more than eight thousand kilometres long. This is not the margin of the continent but its connective belt.

It is here that the Infrastructure of Speed arises: whoever controls the passes, the pastures and the routes of vertical transhumance gains the advantage in continental communication. A distinctive mobile economy takes shape, based on the seasonal movement of herds between winter valleys and summer highlands — and such an economy demands not only mobility but planning: the coordination of routes, the distribution of resources, the reconciliation of group interests, stable rules of alliance and exchange. Thus a new type of elite arises — one whose power rests not on the control of a city but on the management of space.

V. The Birth of the System

The archaeological expression of this system is the complex of deer stones and khirgisuurs — in international nomenclature, the DSKC. Deer stones sharing a single symbolic language, ritual enclosures, horse sacrifices and a standardized iconography of the elite spread across thousands of kilometres. This is no longer a local culture — it is a macro-system: people of different tribes and lineages begin to recognize one another through a single ritual and symbolic code, and an infrastructure for the reproduction of the steppe elite comes into being.

From this core the model begins to diverge: west, into the Scytho-Saka world; east, into Mongolia and Transbaikalia; south, into the Tian Shan and Xinjiang. In this perspective the Pontic Scythians prove to be not the beginning of steppe civilization but one of its later projections — a reflection of a more ancient eastern world.

VI. Entry into Written History

For most of its early history this world exists without writing. It is visible in archaeology, in burial complexes, in symbolism, in routes, in mobile elites, in archaeogenetic links — but it remains nameless for the written memory of humankind.

This is why the tenth century BCE matters so much. It is then that the steppe world first comes to be reflected in the written tradition of China. In the narrative of the Mu Tianzi Zhuan — a complex, many-layered, partly mythologized text about the expedition of King Mu of Zhou — there appears, for the first time, a description of a distant north-western space, of contacts with steppe societies, of the exchange of gifts and of political relations between the Zhou world and the northern steppe. The text would later be reworked and set down anew, but the memory of the northern world is preserved within it.

And if Yu Taishan’s hypothesis, linking the name Juanhan with the later forms Gekun and Jiankun, has a historical basis, then before us is one of the earliest written reflections of a world later associated with the ancient Kyrgyz. The present volume does not pass this hypothesis off as a demonstrated fact: it poses it as a research horizon and tests it, step by step, in Chapter 7.

VII. A New Perspective

In this light nomadic civilization appears not as a secondary or ‘parasitic’ form dependent on its sedentary neighbours, but as an autonomous historical system — with its own logic, its own institutional structure, its mechanisms of reproduction, its infrastructure of mobility and its own ideology of space. It was not a periphery of world history. It was one of the great continental systems of Eurasia — a system that endured for millennia, from the Late Bronze Age to the Turkic khaganates and the Mongol empires.

VIII. What This Book Is About

The central question of this work is not only who descended from whom. It is how, in the depths of Eurasia, there arose a system able to shape the dynamics of the continent for millennia.

The present volume is devoted to the moment of that system’s birth — from Sintashta to Juanhan; from the first chariot elites to the first written reflection of the steppe world. It is a book about dynasty and metal, about the horse and space, about alliance and exchange, about memory and mobility — about the birth of one of the greatest civilizational systems of Eurasia. Volume I is complete as a self-contained book; the later fortunes of the matrix — its unfolding through the Scythian world, the Xiongnu empire and the Turkic khaganates — are taken up in the subsequent volumes of the trilogy.

Postscript: On Method

The book’s approach rests on the principle of convergence: the coincidence of independent lines of evidence — genetics, archaeology, linguistics, climatic history and written sources. No single line is sufficient on its own; preference goes to the interpretation that better explains all the data at once. The detailed operational account of the method is given in Chapter 1.

Three obligatory caveats follow, without which the book’s argument may be misread.

First. The use of Y-chromosomal markers here is operational in character and does not imply that worldview models are biologically determined. The markers R-Z93, Q-M120 and others are used as indicators of demographic flows, not as ‘codes of culture’.

Second. Ethnographic parallels — with the Kyrgyz sanjyra, with the Altai transhumance cycle, with Khakas clan reckoning — function as structural resonators, comparative models of a pastoral logic, and not as proof of the biological continuity of an ethnos across millennia.

Third. Between the Sintashta of the twenty-first century BCE and present-day ethnography lie not centuries of continuity but millennia mediated by migrations, language shifts, political collapses and population restructurings. We trace the continuity of an institutional matrix — DAEX itself — and not of an ethnos.

This frame holds the book back from two equally dangerous extremes — romantic primordialism and radical scepticism. It does not reduce steppe history to the categories of the state; it grants the steppe its own logic and its own institutions, which worked without a state.

If the reader comes to see in the Altai, the Sayan, the Yenisei and the Tian Shan not a margin but one of the most ancient nodes of world history — then the purpose of this work has been achieved.

The Authors Bishkek — Berlin, 2026

Picture a belt of land eight thousand kilometres long.

It runs from the Danube to Manchuria, from Hungary to the Pacific — eight thousand kilometres of steppe, mountain and pasture binding the Mediterranean to China and the Near East to Siberia. For most of the twentieth century this belt was treated as intermediate space: a transit corridor across which waves of ‘barbarians’ periodically rolled, disturbing the repose of the great civilizations. Yet that view leaves one fact unexplained. Across these eight thousand kilometres, over several millennia, structurally similar polities arose again and again — from the steppe confederations of the Bronze Age to the medieval khaganates. What secured this reproducibility?

This book — the first part of a trilogy — addresses the moment at which that institutional form was born, in the era spanning the twenty-first to the tenth century BCE. Archaeogenetic evidence, available only in the past decade, allows steppe Eurasia to be seen differently: not as a periphery, but as one of the principal regions in which alternative forms of social and political complexity took shape. Our concern is with the moment of emergence — the time when its original institutional framework was assembled.

The Problem

The twentieth century viewed steppe Eurasia through a single optic. Steppe societies were interpreted chiefly as migratory pressures bearing upon the agrarian states of the continent (McNeill 1963; Lattimore 1940). ‘Civilization’ was associated above all with the markers of sedentary life — writing, urban infrastructure, monumental architecture, bureaucracy — and nomadic societies, lacking most of these markers, were consigned to the margins.

But Eurasia is built differently from any other continent. The steppe is not a periphery; it is a ligature. Eurasia joins several independent centres of sedentary civilization — the Mediterranean, the Near East, South Asia and East Asia — through an unbroken band of steppe and mountain pasture more than eight thousand kilometres long. This is a unique continental configuration. Steppe zones exist on other continents too — the Great Plains of North America, the South American pampa, the African savannahs — yet none produced anything comparable to the polities of the Eurasian steppe, from the Scythian confederations to the empire of Chinggis Khan. A steppe environment creates the preconditions for mobility, but it does not determine institutional integration. To explain the latter one needs a wider context: the very structure of the Eurasian landmass, in which the steppe served as the connective tissue between sedentary civilizations.

Yet this wider context lies not only in the extent of the steppe belt as a connecting band. For millennia the space of the Sayan, the Altai, Mongolia and the Tian Shan remained a zone of contact between distinct human flows, economic regimes and cultural worlds. The exceptional position of this region was already noticed in the nineteenth century, when, in the idiom of the day, it was described as a ‘frontier’ between the Indo-European and East Asian worlds. But where the science of that era saw a line of racial division, the present evidence shows something else — not a boundary between ‘races’, but a zone of high demographic, technological and institutional turbulence.

Like an atmospheric front, where colliding air masses generate cyclones and new weather regimes, the mountain-steppe belt of Central Eurasia became a space of prolonged interaction between different systems. Here the metallurgical and chariot traditions of the steppe Bronze Age met autochthonous mountain-taiga communities, dissimilar models of mobility, and divergent forms of social organization and exchange. New and durable orders tend, historically, to arise precisely in such contact zones — not within a homogeneous milieu, but at the intersection of flows: demographic, technological, economic, ecological and cultural.

Seen in this light, the Sayan-Altai node appears not as a civilizational backwater but as one of the great generators of historical synthesis in inner Eurasia. It was here that the environment gradually took shape in which a new institutional model of mobile society could emerge — one able to integrate heterogeneous groups without a single sedentary centre, without urban bureaucracy, and without rigid territorial borders. The earlier schools, to which we now turn, each saw separate facets of this process; to bring them together required both new data and a different analytical language.

What the Existing Schools Left Unexplained

Over the past four decades several approaches to steppe power have taken shape. Each has illuminated an important facet; none has offered a complete mechanism for long-term reproduction.

Thomas Barfield (1989) described steppe empires as ‘shadow’ formations arising in response to the consolidation of sedentary states. This accounts well for the synchrony of the rise of the Xiongnu and the Han, or of the Türks and the Tang; it does not account for the eastern Scythian horizon, which existed before any unified Chinese state. David Sneath (2007) treated steppe societies as aristocratic networks without centralized bureaucracy — capturing the networked character of power (our Alliance component) but not the persistence of a patrilineal core across millennia. Nicola Di Cosmo (2002) emphasized military leadership and the distribution of spoils, explaining the military mechanism of consolidation but not how a confederation survives the death of a charismatic leader. Christopher Beckwith (2009), through the concept of the comitatus — the retinue core — illuminated the opening phase of a steppe empire, but not its long-term reproduction. Michael Frachetti (2008; 2012), with his account of ‘non-uniform institutional complexity’ generated by networked interaction in mountain-steppe corridors, supplied the ecological frame but not the internal institutional mechanisms of durability.

Each theory describes a single aspect: Barfield, dependence on external resources; Sneath, network structure; Di Cosmo, the military mechanism; Beckwith, the retinue principle; Frachetti, the ecological frame. But steppe power endured for more than a thousand years, and no one of these accounts, taken alone, is sufficient to explain reproduction across that depth of time.

The Russian School:

A Question without an Instrument

The Russian school of nomadology made decisive contributions to the understanding of steppe societies. N. N. Kradin (1992; 2007; 2020) showed that nomadic empires constitute supercomplex chiefdoms with a stable, reproducible structure. A.M. Khazanov (1994) analysed the dependence of nomads upon sedentary societies. S. G. Klyashtorny, G. E. Markov, V. V. Trepavlov and T. D. Skrynnikova developed key aspects of the political anthropology of the steppe and of the handling of written sources.

One question, however, remained open: do genetic lineages outlive the turnover of political formations? Before the advent of archaeogenetics there was no instrument with which to answer it. Today there is.

The Central Hypothesis

This book examines the mountain-steppe continuum of Central Eurasia — the spatial arc running from the Altai and the Sayan through Mongolia and Dzungaria to Zhetysu, the Tian Shan and the Pamir — through the lens of long-term institutional continuity.

Figure 1. The mountain-steppe continuum and the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (IAMC · Frachetti): the geographic frame of Central Eurasia, twenty-first to tenth centuries BCE.

The working hypothesis may be stated thus: within the mountain-steppe continuum of Central Eurasia a stable institutional configuration of mobile power was reproduced; durable patrilineal lines of elite succession can be traced within it as one diagnostic indicator — not as its cause, and not as its ethnic content.