Abstract
Cities within a steppe environment and in societies based on pastoral nomadism are an often overlooked theme in the anthropological literature. Yet, with Karakorum, the first capital of the Mongol Empire (AD 1206–1368), we have a supreme example of such a city in the central landscape of the Orkhon valley in Mongolia. In this paper, we ask, what is the city in the steppes? Taking Karakorum as our starting point and case of reference and to attain a better comprehension of the characteristics of urbanism in the steppe, we apply a list of urban attributes compiled by Michael E. Smith (2016) to provide a thick description of Karakorum. The discussion not only comprises comparisons to other contemporary sites in Russia and Mongolia, but also addresses in detail the question of city–hinterland relations as a fundamental necessity for the survival of the city in an anti-urban environment. The analysis shows that during the Mongol period we can identify urbanism but no urbanization: there is no process of independent, natural growth of cities carried out by the population, but cities are “political” in the sense that they are deeply intertwined with the authority and have therefore much to tell about the relation between power and authority on the one hand and the ruled on the other.
Highlights
Cities within a steppe environment and in societies based on pastoral nomadism are an often overlooked theme in the anthropological literature
Gordon Childe in his seminal paper on the so-called Urban Revolution is all the more true if we look at urban settings within the steppe environment of eastern Asia
As far as we know there is no book, no special volume of a journal, no conference proceeding that focuses on urban sites in the Eastern Eurasian steppes
Summary
“The concept of ‘city’ is notoriously hard to define” (Childe 1950: 3). This initial statement by V. Comparative archaeological debates of urban settings (Cowgill 2004; Smith 2011) and handbooks on early cities (Marcus and Sabloff 2008b; Clark 2013; Yoffee 2015) more or less neglect the constructed centers of nomadic empires in the Eurasian Steppes. In the opinion of many scholars, strongly connected with the rise of early states In his recent book, Killing Civilization, Justin Jennings explains why we should refrain from using this term and why the two concepts of emerging statehood and urbanism need to be disentangled (Jennings 2016). We apply a list of urban attributes compiled by Smith (2016) to provide a thick description of Karakorum (sensu Geertz 1973: 3–30) We concentrate on Karakorum because compared to other sites in Mongolia, many studies and a variety of source
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