Eurasian Steppe
The Steppe route is a predecessor not only of the Silk Road, which developed during antiquity and the Middle Ages, but also of the Eurasian Land Bridge in the modern era.
The Eurasian Steppe extends for 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles) from near the mouth of the Danube in Romania to the western edge of Manchuria.
Its northern edge was a broad band of forest steppe which has now been obliterated by the conversion of the whole area to agricultural land.
In the southeast is the densely populated Fergana Valley and west of it the great oasis cities of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara along the Zeravshan River.
However, along its periphery, rivers descend from the mountains, creating a circle of cities that thrived on irrigation agriculture and engaged in east-west trade.
The Northern Silk Road went along the north and south sides of the Tarim Basin and then crossed the mountains west to the Fergana Valley.
The northern edge of the plateau is the Gansu or Hexi Corridor, a belt of moderately dense population that connects China proper with the Tarim Basin.
The central area of forest-steppe was inhabited by pastoral and agricultural peoples, while to the north and east was a thin population of hunting tribes of the Siberian type.
[2][3][4][5][6][7] The gray wolf, corsac fox, Pallas's cat and occasionally the brown bear are predators roaming the steppe.
Threatened bird species living there are for example the imperial eagle, the lesser kestrel, the great bustard, the pale-back pigeon and the white-throated bushchat.
The horse was first domesticated on the Pontic–Caspian or Kazakh steppe sometime before 3000 BC, but it took a long time for mounted archery to develop and the process is not fully understood.
All these regions are connected directly or indirectly by the Eurasian Steppe route which was an active predecessor of the Silk Road.
The fact that most of the Russian steppe is not irrigated implies that it was maintained as grasslands as a result of the military strength of the nomads.
Additionally, Hungarian speakers, a branch of the Uralic language family, who previously lived in the steppe in what is now Southern Russia, settled in the Carpathian basin in year 895.
[citation needed] By about 1600 AD, Islam was established in the Tarim Basin while Dzungaria and Mongolia had adopted Tibetan Buddhism.
[citation needed] This relates to the ease with which a defeated enemy's flocks and herds can be driven away, making raiding profitable.
Outside of Europe and parts of the Middle East, agrarian societies had difficulty raising a sufficient supply of war horses and often had to enlist cavalry from their nomadic enemies (as mercenaries).
But the steppe nomads were relatively few and their rulers had difficulty holding together enough clans and tribes to field a large army.
If they tried to hold agrarian land they gradually absorbed the civilization of their subjects, lost their nomadic skills and were either assimilated or driven out.
[citation needed] Along the northern fringe of the Eurasian steppe, nomads would collect tribute from and blend with the forest tribes (see Khanate of Sibir, Buryats).
There was a sharp cultural divide between Mongolia and China and almost constant warfare from the dawn of history until the Qing conquest of Dzungaria in 1757.
Perhaps because of the mixture of agriculture and pastoralism in Manchuria its inhabitants, the Manchu knew how to deal with both nomads and the settled populations and therefore were able to conquer much of northern China[when?]
