Book review: The wandering spirit that is the foundation of civilisation

Anthony Sattin is a veteran traveller and storyteller.

• Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World
• Anthony Sattin
• John Murray, hb €29.50

Anthony Sattin’s website describes him as a cross between “Indiana Jones and a John Buchan hero”. He is also one of the key influences on travel writing today. Visualise a sunburnt, craggy-faced, handsome hero whose travels immerse him into exotic worlds, discovering lost cultures, eliciting gems of history that throw new light on the human story.

A veteran traveller and storyteller, whose fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies, while his prolific non-fiction oeuvre includes the search for Timbuktu that became The Gates of Africa, and the widely acclaimed A Winter on the Nile charting fascinating parallel journeys to Egypt taken by Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert. He is also the author of Young Lawrence, a revealing excellent biography that explores the complicated character of the young TE Lawrence, son of Anglo Irish aristocracy better known as enigmatic desert hero Lawrence of Arabia.

Sattin has earned his credentials as a modern leading light of travel literature, up there with the likes of the late Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, and William Dalrymple, among the greats. This versatile author, broadcaster, and journalist is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, editorial advisor on Geographical magazine and also a contributing editor to luxury glossy Conde Nast Traveller. He was given access to Bruce Chatwin’s unpublished book about nomads to write this history.

Described as the groundbreaking story of nomadic peoples on the move across history, Nomads is a monumental work, exhaustively researched that sets out to explain nomadism, its importance, rise and decline over the centuries in the minutest detail.

Travel writer Anthony Sattin. Picture: Felix Sattin

Sattin trawls through the very depths of antiquity, drawing also on his own extensive experience, having lived and travelled in the Middle East and the Arab World, to relay the important role played by wandering peoples down through the ages.

He wonders why their contribution was ignored and forgotten over decennia. But as we know prejudice and suspicion about wanderers, their lifestyles and ‘otherness’ colour society’s views and upsets their comfort zone. We need look no further than discrimination against indigenous peoples from the furthest remotest regions of Canada to the hot plains of the United States, elsewhere in the world or indeed at our own Traveller community for answers.

Nomadic Mongol khans built their empire across Eurasia and fostered and controlled the routes that connected China with the Mediterranean. Long ahead of their time these nomadic peoples had created open markets and global trade, championing movement and migration.

“They redistributed capital to create new ventures and help older ones to flourish,” Sattin writes. “And they championed freedom of conscience, and a specific though limited kind of democracy.”

Yet, he writes, by the 17th century Mongols in particular and nomads, in general, had disappeared from the European view.” Samuel Johnson’s first English dictionary published in 1755 chose to omit the word nomad from his great work of scholarship. When the word nomad does finally appear in the 1827 edition it is with the negative connotation of ‘rude, savage; having no fixed abode’.

“For most of our history, we humans lived on the move, which is why most of our world, our culture, what we call civilisation, has been shaped by nomads,”he writes. “Our activities are all linked to journeys, from that first one out of the womb to the last one into the grave, and evolution really did intend us to travel.”

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by  Anthony Sattin

One of the best quotes in the book is from French poet Arthur Rimbaud who wrote ‘I had to travel, to distract the enchantments gathered in my brain’.

Delving into nomadism — pretty much as far back as post the Garden of Eden — we are taken on a journey of their contribution from the beginning of time. Wandering people constructed the first great stone monuments at Gobekli Tepi, in present-day Turkey, 7,000 years earlier than the pyramids. 

Many more examples of their accomplishments have been documented. They are credited with first taming the horse, creating complicated sure-fire weapons, understanding and using science, composing, and loving poetry and storytelling.

Early Nomads were multi- cultural and tolerant of other religions, fostering trade and commerce while moving freely in touch with worlds beyond theirs. Stattin notes: “We have followed the achievements of some of the greatest empires and cultural flourishing the world has seen, and we now know there is more to nomad empires than tents and herds, battered walls and pyramids of skulls.”

The nomadic gene has been identified in children and adults with ADHD. “In a nomadic setting, someone with this variant of gene may be better at protecting herds against rustlers or finding food and water. Some older people find it hard to sit still and stay happy within four walls," Sattin writes: “If that is you, it may be something you can explain in relation to genetics. It is also something you can blame on evolution because 12,000 years ago, before a group of us got together and started constructing monuments at Gobekli Tepe, we all lived a wandering life where this genetic variant and the diverse set of thoughts and responses it seems to encourage, was useful, perhaps even essential for survival.”

We have settled down to live in our towns and cities, huddled together in urban and rural communities. But there’s still the dormant nomad in many of us. Who hasn’t occasionally fantasised about heading for the open road, the promise of a new city, a fresh landscape, a different life or the next partner? Nomads, about the wanderers who shaped our world will turn a key of understanding.