2010 Volume 74 Issue 4 Pages 585-612
This is an attempt, rather than a study of a particular culture, to reconsider the history of human civilization from the basis of my long-term studies concentrating on the dry-land civilizations of the African Sub-Sahara. The vast dry inner land ranging from Sahara to Mongolia through the Middle East and Central Asia, that we call "Afro-Eurasian inner dry land," is the historical heartland of the human great civilizations. We call them the "Afro-Eurasian inner dry-land civilizations." Certainly the power of irrigation exploiting dry-land rivers cannot be denied. But we focus here rather on the importance of pastoral power, because animal power was the most important disposable energy for humankind before the exploitation of fossil fuels such as petroleum, gas, and coal. Transporting men and goods, animals became the basis of commercial and urban civilization, and as a military means, they became the basis of political domination and expansion. I discovered animal power through my studies of Sub-Sahara dry-land civilizations, based on long-distance trans-Sahara trade and pastoralist political initiatives. I also found that that power has not been studied thoroughly. However, the ecological conditions of the Afro-Eurasian inner dry land, and the mode of the pastoralists, are not homogenous. The religious civilizations are also similarly disparate. One is Islamic, one is Buddhist, and the other Christian. As a way of analyzing the internal heterogeneous structure of the civilizations, we attempt to elaborate four typologies as its sub-systems. The ecological conditions of the Afro-Eurasian inner dry-land civilizations can be first divided into four types: (1) cool temperate meadow areas (Central Asia and Mongolia), (2) tropical desert area (Sahara), (3) tropical savanna areas (sub-Sahara), and (4) mountainous oasis areas (Middle East). There is a dominant domestic animal particular to each type: horses, dromedaries, cattle, sheep and goats. That is, although the basic five animals are raised almost everywhere, each serves as the main pastoralist animal in its respective region. The cultures or civilizations elaborated from this basis each has its particularities, though they can be to some extent explainable from more advanced studies prepared with epistemological training. The idea of Afro-Eurasian inner dry-land civilizations is only one step to get a more integrated vision of Afro-Eurasian civilizations studied separately. That idea will contribute, I hope, to a new reconsideration of human history.
