The word nomad began as ancient Greek for a pasture
Nomad traces back through Latin to a Greek word for pasture, and grazing still explains much nomadic movement. Mongolian herding families typically relocate just twice a year, between summer grassland and a sheltered winter valley. Yet one society of such herders built the largest land empire in history.
Nomads are communities without a fixed home who travel regularly between places. The category covers foragers chasing game, plants and water, such as Aboriginal Australians, the Negritos of Southeast Asia and the San of Africa; pastoralists driving camels, cattle, goats, horses, sheep or yaks; and peripatetic groups who sell crafts or services to settled people, including the Gadia Lohar blacksmiths of India, Roma traders and Scottish and Irish travellers. By 1995 there were an estimated 30 to 40 million nomads worldwide, after a slow decline in pastoral populations over the twentieth century.
Mobility is a smart answer to scarcity. Steppe, tundra, ice and sand support few people in one spot, so moving herds lets pasture recover instead of being stripped. Tundra reindeer herders follow forage for their animals, the Fulani take cattle through the grasslands of Niger, and Bedouin, Somalis, Oromo and Khoikhoi all herd in dry lands. Travel has relied on camels, horses, dogs, alpacas, canoes, sleighs and feet, and today sometimes motor vehicles.
Social life usually rests on families, bands or tribes held together by kinship, marriage or formal pacts, with decisions often made by a council of adult men, though some groups have chiefs. In Mongolia, most families keep a fixed winter spot near the mountains with shelter for animals, and others leave it alone while they are away. Households rarely range far, staying within a region and often within a couple of kilometres of one another for mutual help.
Genghis Khan united the loosely organised tribes of Mongolia, Manchuria and Siberia in the late twelfth century, founding an empire that eventually spanned Asia. The wider trend has run the other way: many states have turned grazing land into fields and forced nomads to settle, and labels applied to mobile people today are often derogatory.
Source: Nomad
