Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
History of the central steppe
Summary
This is a short History of the central steppe, an area roughly equivalent to modern Kazakhstan. Because the history is complex it is mainly an outline and index to the more detailed articles given in the links. It is a companion to History of the western steppe and History of the eastern steppe and is parallel to the History of Kazakhstan and the History of central Asia.
"Central steppe" is an informal term for the middle part of the Eurasian steppe. It is grassland with some semi-desert and becomes dryer toward the south. On the east it is separated from Dzungaria and the eastern steppe by the low mountains along the current Chinese border. On the west it merges into the western steppe along the narrowing between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea. On the north it is bounded by the forests of Siberia. The southern boundary has three sections. In the east the Tian Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan extend about 650 kilometres west and give the steppe a sharp southern boundary. The center is approximately the line of the Syr Darya which runs from the eastern mountains northwest to the Aral Sea. South of the Syr Darya the steppe grades into semi-desert but there are cities based on irrigation agriculture which give the area a different history. The western part between the Aral and Caspian Seas is dry and thinly populated. The Syr Darya and the area between the Urals and Caspian were not significant barriers and the low mountains of Dzungaria were fairly easy to cross. The other boundaries were significant barriers to movement.
The central steppe is far from the areas of literate civilization and is therefore poorly documented. Most of the "peoples" mentioned were some tribe or clan that gained power over its neighbors and became important enough to be noticed by literate historians. Some were definite ethnic groups and some movements were genuine folk migrations, but in most cases it is uncertain. Most dates are circa because they were processes or ill-documented. There are two major facts which theorists have not explained.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.