The Universe of the steppe...
The word steppe was directly brought in from the Russian СТЕПЬ, together with other vocables like “mujik” or “Cossack”.
To the exception of Antarctica, all continents comprise steppe. The latter consists in a dry environment speckled with a short and scarce grass. This environment also cradles the development of ligneous plants, more or less densely scattered across the land. Given that trees are rather seldom or inexistent, the steppe is also a world for winds.
Steppes are usually located far from the oceans, or shielded by mountain ranges – like in North America – and only in geographical areas of low precipitations. An increased pluviometry in such a space makes the latter turn into forest; a decreased pluviometry makes it progress up to desert. Traversing Mongolia by train, from the South up to the North, will enable you to witness the impact of these precipitations on the land. Indeed, you would cross in the South a desert, the Gobi, then steppes before, with kilometres passing, reaching an increasingly wooden land becoming in turn the Siberian taiga.
The Eurasian steppes have seen the dawn and development of many nomadic civilisations. These civilisations were not artefacts of some archaic lifestyles, in a pointless comparison to the sedentary world, which would then be considered as a “true civilisation”. This evolution, which, as it seems, dates back to the Iron Age, was rather an adaptation to the specific biotope these peoples were populating. The first nomadic tribes of Eurasia seem to have gradually dumped agriculture, rather fruitless in such territories, and favoured extensive farming, much more advantageous and principally more profitable. Nomadism is by no means backtracking to a rougher lifestyle; it is a mere expression of specialisation and adaptation to the steppe and its harshness.
Quoted in Homer’s poems and Assyrian sources (722-715 BC), the Cimmerians constituted the first nomadic people, in our known European History, to crowd the Eurasian steppes
