An 8,000-kilometre grassland once outranked the Silk Road
The Eurasian Steppe, or Great Steppe, stretches some 8,000 kilometres of temperate grassland from Manchuria through Mongolia to the mouth of the Danube. Long before the Silk Road, travellers used this Steppe Route to link Europe, the Middle East, India, and China, and horse nomads made it their highway.
Geographers split the belt into three parts: the Pannonian pocket west of the Carpathians, mostly in Hungary; a continuous ribbon of about 2,500 miles from the Danube mouth to the Altai; and the Mongolian plateau. The Pontic–Caspian end swings from the Danube toward Kazan and the southern Urals, once edged by forest-steppe that is now mostly ploughed. About 650 km northeast of the Caspian, the Ural-Caspian Narrowing joins it to the Kazakh Steppe, which runs to Dzungaria and fades south into deserts crossed by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya.
Farther east, mountains along the old Sino-Soviet border almost touch the forest zone, leaving only Dzungaria’s grass to connect Central and East Asia, and the Tian Shan separate Dzungaria from the Tarim Basin. The Mongolian-Manchurian steppe covers much of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, split by the drier Gobi, and reaches into Manchuria as the Liao Xi steppe before giving way to forest short of the Pacific.
Grasses such as Stipa feather grasses and Festuca dominate, though shrubs are spreading into parts of the Black Sea–Kazakh and Central Asian steppe. Big native mammals include Przewalski’s horse, the saiga, the Mongolian gazelle, the wild Bactrian camel, and the onager, hunted by grey wolves, corsac foxes, and Pallas’s cats; imperial eagles and great bustards are among its threatened birds.
Herders raised mostly sheep and goats, used camels as far west as Astrakhan, and relied on horses for travel and war, sometimes tolerating captive farmers who grew grain for them. The leading Kurgan hypothesis places the Indo-European homeland on the Pontic–Caspian steppe, and Tocharians carried an early branch to the Tarim. Tengrism came with Turko-Mongol nomads, while Nestorian and Manichaean missions and Buddhism travelled the same routes.
Source: Eurasian Steppe
