I’ve often been asked how did the Mongols and other Eurasian steppe nomadic peoples
produce metal weapons and armour; or were they totally dependent on China and the Islamic
world for these things?
Many people struggle to comprehend how nomads, with supposedly no permanent settlements,
had the means to make tools, let alone weapons for war.
In this series, I will answer as many of these questions as I can, combining recent research,
textual and archaeological evidence to demonstrate how these mobile pastoralist societies, from
the Xiongnu to the Türks and the Mongols, had their own metal production, for daily
use and war.
This first part begins by looking at the nature of steppe societies and how they supplied
their furnaces, while in the videos to follow in the next weeks we will trace it through
history with specific sites associated with the Xiongnu, Türks, Mongols and others.
There is a tendency in writing both modern and medieval to downplay any sort of crafts
production in the steppe whatsoever, portraying them as incapable of anything other than destruction.
However, YES!
nomads of the steppe did have mining, smelting, forging, their own weapon production, and
a host of other crafts.
In this series we are going to detail this process, demonstrating how life in the Eurasian
steppes was much more socially, culturally, economically and technologically complex than
the popular image suggests.
Most of the material I will discuss here is focused around what is today Mongolia, Southern
Siberia and Transbaikalia, and the Altai Mountains, but will be broadly applicable across the
steppes through Kazakhstan and into Ukraine.
So fret thee not; the Scythians were famous for their metalworking; the Khazars had forges
in their settlements, and when the Magyars crossed the Carpathians they already had the
means to produce metal tools and arms.
Before we can discuss the forge, we need to talk society and a few misconceptions.
For many people, any sort of craft production in the steppe is difficult to comprehend,
as they imagine steppe society to be composed of small bands constantly raiding each other,
wandering wherever they pleased and causing havoc.
Naturally, such an environment is not conducive to many crafts.
But that image is not reflective of steppe life.
While there certainly was raiding and violence, as I have discussed in these videos the popular
“tribal” image is inaccurate.
It was a rather more feudal-like structure; people did not wander in a no-man’s land,
but were assigned to specific pastures which they herded their animals between seasonally,
with distinct types and subtypes of pastoralism depending on the region, involving different
animals and distances covered.
It had to be done like this: if it wasn’t, then pastures-designated for winter were overgrazed
in summer.
People then moved to the next pastures, displacing or starving those people, and so on, until
you end up with wars or population displacement.
This did occur, but was undesirable, and there were systems enforced to prevent it.
Life in the steppe was much more regulated than the popular image suggests; periods that
upset this were exceptions rather than the rule.
What we see in periods of imperial unity, such as the Xiongnu, Türks and the Mongol
Empire, is a strict enforcement of these divisions and active encouragement of trade.
To make comparison to another group of famed ferocity: while Vikings were famous for raids,
Scandinavian society was not restricted to the longboat or the burning monastery, and
when there were strong Kings or jarls, they directed violent energies against external
foes to promote internal stability and peace in the homeland.
With our nomads moving along designated, predictable, seasonal routes, we attack the second-common
claim; that the steppes held no permanent structures.
While only given sporadic attention in the textual record, they are well attested archaeologically.
We start small: dug-out homes that were inhabited during part of the year and surrounded by
small-scale farmland; palaces for Khans and princes set up along their migratory routes,
with a few permanent structures to provide for the lord and entourage, that would be
surrounded by a town of felt tents when they arrived.
And finally, true towns, forts and cities in the steppe, inhabited permanently or seasonally.
Often they were modified forms of both Chinese and Central-Asian town-layouts and building
designs, adapted to reflect nomadic cultures.
So while the actual buildings show influence of Chinese, Tibetan, Sogdian or Central Asian
designs, reflecting the origins of labourers, architects and engineers, generally the orientation
mirrored that of the nomad’s encampment at a larger scale.
While the thirteenth century Mongol imperial capital of Qaraqorum is the most famous, it
was not alone.
We find many settlements from the Xiongnu period, through the Xianbei, Türkic Khaganates,
Uighurs, the Mongol Empire and its successors.
These range from great capitals like Qaraqorum or the Uighur capital of Ordu-Baliq in the
Orkhon valley, to smaller sites consisting of a citadel and a few outlying buildings.
Qaraqorum was not even the only city in Mongolia during the days of the Chinggisids.
Sites of the Xiongnu and Xianbei tend to be smaller, but still feature fortifications
and palaces.
Some appear to have been inhabited only part of a year, perhaps in winter when walls served
as defense not against attacks, but the fierce winds of the steppe.
Many of these structures also feature kang-style heating systems, where hot air from a fire
passes through ducts in the floor or benches, thus keeping the Khan nice and toasty.
We see that steppe lords' migratory routes were repeated yearly, and involved stops at
a number of fortified and unfortified locations on that path.
We know them quite well for Mongol Great Khans in the 13th century, who only stopped in Qaraqorum
or other capitals briefly each year, spending the rest of the year between other cities,
palaces, and campsites, accompanied by their huge mobile court.
Khans like Ögedei, for example, are specifically recorded building palaces of varying designs
at all of their halting points.
Likely such structures had staffs to maintain them, providing habitation or other services
to the khan and his entourage, while felt tents sheltered the rest of the party.
This is a pattern mirrored across much of the steppe throughout history, though the
Chinggisids were the most extreme example.
For another Chinggisid example, we can look at the Golden Horde, where an entire network
of large cities developed in this manner, especially along the Volga River, the migratory
route for the Jochid Khans as they moved from winter to summer pastures.
The enforcement of stability by the Mongol Empire allowed the promotion of trade and
ferrying of materials to build these sites.
Some grew very large.
Estimates for the population of Qaraqorum range from 18-30,000, with perhaps 100,000
people in the Orkhon valley in the imperial period: the likely site for Sarai al-Jadid
in the Golden Horde, by some estimates, held a population of 75,000, with Ibn Battuta calling
it one of the largest cities he visited.
And regardless of size, a routine feature of these sites is evidence for a variety of
craft productions, including iron working.
Evidence for metal-working in the steppes is old, perhaps even predating horse riding.
Some of the oldest evidence comes from the so-called Afanasievo culture in southern Siberia,
which shows evidence for local copper-metallurgical production, both mining and smelting, over
3,000 years before the Mongol Empire.
Bronze was used, as it was everywhere at the time, for tools, weapons and armour, and slightly
later, the Scythians became famed workers of bronze and gold.
Perhaps as early as 800 BCE we see gold worked in Siberia and the Altai mountains, and sometime
between the seventh-third centuries BCE iron work began in the Altai, but not until the
rise of Xiongnu around the first centuries BCE-CE did it spread across the region.
The Xiongnu highly valued iron-production, and made so many demands on their subjects
to produce it, that under them iron began to replace bronze as a primary material for
weapons and tools, though bronze production didn’t disappear.
But how do we know these items were locally produced, and not merely imports?
Well, we find at these sites either the furnaces themselves, the tools, or at least the slag,
the waste produced in the iron-smelting process, indicating on-site production.
Analysis of the chemical composition of the ores also gives a rough idea of their origin.
In a sense, every iron-deposit on earth has its own specific chemical makeup which can
clue to its origins and confirm these items were not made in China.
While we do find imported items, in the early period they tend to be restricted to elite
burials, rather than in the cultural layers we find the slag and other items.
The volume of metal goods found even in Xiongnu burials and habitation sites was greater than
could be provided through import.
The metallurgical traditions that emerged in the steppe are utterly distinct from China.
At a most basic, the design in wares was generally distinctive, but even production differed
greatly.
For example, for bronze before and during Xiongnu times, arsenic was the major alloy,
with minimal or no additions of lead and tin; in contrast, Chinese bronze production used
tin and lead in great volume, but not arsenic.
For iron working in the steppe, bloomery-type furnaces dominated, whereas in China cast-iron
reached near-industrial level outputs rather early on.
The high-shaft furnaces of Chinese bloomeries are also distinct, while furnaces in Mongolia
are relatively close in form to those across Siberia, Altai and even Central Asia, leading
to suggestions that metal-working technology arose independently in the eastern steppes,
or was introduced from Central Asia, and only later came into contact with the tradition
developing in China.
The specific organization of Chinese-metal production was just one that did not translate
to the steppe environment.
So how did nomads turn iron-ore into an object?
This requires locating iron-ore, and this isn’t that difficult, as iron is a relatively
abundant material on Earth’s surface, the fourth most common element on our planet’s
crust.
Rich deposits in southern Siberia and the Altai are accessed simply at the surface or
via open-pit mining.
Iron ore could, basically, be found by walking around, looking for natural outcrops, swamps
or especially along river banks.
Some geographic naming reflects local resources: the Dzhida River, a tributary of the Selenge
River, means copper in both Turkic and Mongolic.
In the Altai Mountains, the Kuektanar River means “to make a maille shirt,” and of
course, anything with temür in the name refers to iron.
For a good vein held in harder rock, a fire was started on top of it to heat and crack
it.
Then, with picks, it was chipped out and transported to the work site.
Despite its popularity in some legends and online discussions, meteoric iron had a very
minimal role and was comparatively rarely used.
To turn iron-ore into a tasty material that can actually be hammered into shape, it needs
to be melted, removing non-desirable rock and other elements that accompanied it from
the Earth’s embrace.
This was most commonly done in a type of furnace known as a bloomery.
Across the ancient and medieval world, a bloomery was the preferred way to render ore into a
workable material.
A furnace built of clay or stone was filled with layers of ore and charcoal and heated
for hours, reaching temperatures over 1000 degrees celsius.
The impurities are melted out, becoming a mass of material at the bottom of the furnace
known as slag, which in larger furnaces was tapped to pour out of the bottom.
The remaining iron, not yet at its melting point, coalesced into a bloom, low in carbon
and rich in metallic iron; this is the start of a workable product.
Remains of hundreds of bloomeries are found across Mongolia, southern Siberia and the
Altai.
Dating them precisely is difficult, but they were in use at least by the third century
BCE, with their spread across the region roughly corresponding to the expansion of the Xiongnu
state.
Over 300 such furnaces have been identified archaeologically in this Siberia-Altai-Mongolia
zone, with many more destroyed over time or waiting to be uncovered.
Researchers place them into 9 distinct types of varying size, some only a few centimetres
across.
Such designs are known archaeologically and are close in form to those identified by European
observers of Mongols, Siberian Tatars and Sakhas in the 1700s, suggesting a continuous
tradition in small, easily constructed forges that could be assembled on site.
Other examples are larger, permanent structures, with chambers over a metre across or high,
built of stone and clay.
Tuyeres, or clay pipes cleverly built into the bloomery, provided air flow, controlled
by bellows, of which there several designs, with skin from the rear legs of a horse being
a popular choice.
This whole process, though, requires a lot of fuel.
A bloomery needs a lot of charcoal, and a lot of charcoal means a lot of trees.
The amount varies on the type of tree, efficiency of the process and its overseer, so the final
output varies considerably.
While charcoal today can come in nice briquettes, pre-modern charcoal is a flaky substance that
does not transport well over distance.
The rocking of a journey may disintegrate the charcoal, and some estimates put the realistic
range of transporting it as low as 5-6 km.
Much of the Eurasian steppe is also very tree sparse: it’s no coincidence that most of
our examples are in the Altai, Southern Siberia, northern Mongolia and the Orkhon Valley, areas
with greater tree coverage or river access compared to most of the region, which is dry
grassland with few navigable rivers.
This leaves the medieval nomadic metallurgist with two solutions: organize the labour to
move huge volumes of wood, or transport the ore closer to where the trees and charcoal
are.
The Romans did the latter, preferring to ship the ore over sea rather than ship the wood.
The ideal situation was to have the ore, the trees, and the production site in close proximity.
There are numerous estimates from different societies and types of furnaces for how much
material is needed or iron produced.
Some of the examples on screen now come from estimates for ancient Rome, and some based
on reconstructions of Siberian, Altai or Mongolian forges.
Depending on the furnace, wood and technique, this can vary substantially.
Generally speaking, 100 kg of iron ore produces a 10-20 kg bloom, which still needs to be
worked to remove impurities and further reduces the final volume.
The volume of charcoal needs to be comparable to the volume of iron ore, but to produce
that much charcoal requires lots of wood.
Not only that, but fuel for fire is also needed at every stage of the process.
I find this example by Bret Devereaux illustrative, where he suggests some 4.6 million kilograms
of wood was needed to supply 5,000 Romans with 44,000 kg of iron for their weapons and
armour and that’s not even counting the tools and other equipment that accompanied
them on campaign!
As Devereaux notes these requirements resulted in the deforestation of the island of Elba
in the Roman period, and may have put an end to smelting in Roman Britain as well.
Deveraux also has a great series introducing ancient and medieval European iron-production,
if you wish to read more on that.
In most cases, the hindrance to iron-production was not a lack of knowledge or furnaces, or
the nomadic lifestyle, but rather, access to enough fuel or the manpower to transport
it.
And yet, all this was overcome.
They simply found the means to transport the charcoal, wood, ore or all three.
The early fourteenth century historian of the Ilkhanate, Rashid al-Dīn, describes ancient
Turkic workers bringing both “kindling and charcoal” from the forest, perhaps with
the seventy horses and oxen that were then slaughtered to make bellows.
For peoples in Siberia like the Sakhas, we see archaeologically that they lived 6-10
km from the nearest iron ore outcrops; in the Altai Mountains, distances up to 30-40
km between outcroppings and production sites have been suggested, while in the Mongol Empire
we see material ferried hundreds of kilometres across Mongolia.
While weapons of war grab the most attention, most iron production was tools for everyday
use; for farming, cooking, or for horse-tack, belts, knives, arrowheads, where only a small
forge and less fuel was needed.
We see evidence for communal production not just in settlements, but in the nomadic encampment
itself.
From remains of campsites across Mongolia there is slag left over from these small,
mobile forges, dating from Xiongnu times through to the twentieth century, and across the steppes
in Hungary.
Only a few centimetres across, these small, clay forges were perhaps single-use things,
and do not survive well archaeologically compared to their larger cousins.
At the Tsagaan Ereg site in northern Mongolia’s Tarvagatai valley, we find thirteenth and
fourteenth century dug-out homes which had furnaces built into them and remains of slag.
At the larger end, the Sakha and Siberian Tatars in the 1700s were observed building
huge log-framed furnaces, filled with clay, 110 cm high, 160 cm wide, to produce iron
for their own needs; many of them paid tax to the Russian Empire in the form of their
iron output.
This has only been the briefest of surveys on the matter of nomadic blacksmithing, and
is by no means exhaustive.
We see throughout the history of this Mongolian, Altai, and southern Siberian region, a continuous
tradition of local metal production, working alongside or in conjunction with crafts networks
in larger settlements and cities.
While the output of these furnaces may have been limited at times due to fuel requirements,
it’s still an unbroken tradition.
Eurasian steppe nomads lived in societies as rich and complex as we find everywhere
else on our world.
Next week, we return to look in more detail at sites associated with specific nomadic
peoples, beginning with the Xiongnu, and tracing it through time.