The Mechanics of Nomad Invasions
Bruce Chatwin describes how the dispute between Abel and Cain, the nomadic shepherd and the city-dwelling planter, has continued throughout history.
During the spring of A.D. 376 the Roman garrisons on the Danube frontier learned of a fresh threat. Nomad peoples were on the move. Over the steppe lands that stretched to the east came news that the Gothic kingdom of Ermanarich in the Crimea had fallen to the Huns, an unknown people of mounted archers, bestial in appearance, whose home lay close to the icebound ocean.
‘No one ever ploughs a field in their country,’ wrote the contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus, ‘or touches a plough handle. They are ignorant of home, law or settled existence, and they keep roaming from places in their waggons. If you ask one of their children where he comes from, he was conceived in one place, born far away and brought up still farther off.’
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