were Eurasian horse nomads generally scum?
such groups are almost always described as savages by authors from settled groups who interacted with them. chinese and russian sources use 'tartar' and 'mongol' as an insult, Eastern Europeans always describe groups like the Cumanians as thugs who would ride into their territories, trying to steal their stuff, livestock and women. true, horse nomads were always characterised as excellent fighters, but also as lazy (using slaves or subservient groups to do any production), violent, ignorant, disregarding of human life and private property.
their history seems to fit this characterization. nomadic lifestyle generally involved pillaging your settled neighbours. when they created major empires, they just took this mindset to a new level. just read some quotes from Ghengis Khan: his conquests didn't even have any ideolgical basis, he basically said that they are conquering nations, destroying cities and killing millions because they can. and this was one of the more solid nomadic empire. most of them (such as the Hunnic or Timurid empires) just involved an army storming through lands and forcing locals to pay tribute. it's debatable if those even qualify as empires, or just lands raided by a very large and well organized group of brigands.
there is also no known cultural achivement by horse nomads. sure, they cannot be expected to create great buildings, but what about literature or religion? whenever they stayed somewhere for a long time, they quickly adopted local culture (see Ghengis Khan's successors in Persia and China). or look at the Huns: we know pretty much nothign about them, apart from a few artifacts there is no such thing as Hunnic art, we don't even know what there religion was like.
horse nomads really look like the most worthless type of people in history, who only ever managed to destroy or steal other people's stuff while creating nothing.
Literal bandits and marauders and little else. So yeah, scum.
>>862494
> vikings murder, pillage, loot, and rape.
> greatest people ever.
> Mongols murder, pillage, loot, rape, and turn (what was at the time) Eastern Europe into Asia.
> worst people ever.
>>862519
>false dichotomy + strawman: the post
They weren't much worse than the settled people who raped, killed, pillaged, and enslaved each other
>judging medieval warlords by modern western standards
would you believe people write a lot of shit about their enemies
They dindu nuthin.
>>862530
Settled people could go without doing so.
>>862606
Racism is not allowed on blue boards.
>>862606
Horseniggers like the proto-indo-europeans established cultural trends which would have enormous impact worldwide
>>862494
The Parthians would disagree with your claims.
>>862632
nomad group adopting the culture of a settled nation, wow, what a unique accomplishment!
>>862778
Ok then, lets go even further back then to the other iranian nomadic tribes that migrated to the iranian plataeu around 2nd millennium BCE to settle there around the Caspian sea and become known as the Medes civilization.
What culture did they adopt considering the closest one were the elamites all the way down bordering Mesopotamia whom were already almost completely wiped out by the Assyrians by the time they settled there?
>>862494
>his conquests didn't even have any ideolgical basis, he basically said that they are conquering nations, destroying cities and killing millions because they can.
That's precisely one thing they have on their favour. At least they were honest about it and didn't produce the copious amounts of bullshit sweetened propaganda other "civilized" nations produced about nice they were and what an immense altruistic favour they were doing to others by conquering them.
Nomads/raiders vs settled urban/agricultural peoples has always been a thing in history. Asian raiders get a lot of shit for doing the raping whereas vikings get praised and highleghted for doing the same shit. Seems to be nothing more than an ethnic prejudice.
Besides, it's simply false that migrant/nomadic/wandering group didn't contribute anything from any point of view. I can think as far the hicsos wrecking the egyptians, the supposedly most advanced civilization at the time, and even they learned a thing or two from these marauders, iron working for starters and a nice humbling lesson that woke them up and made them come down from their 'we're-oh-so-cool' golden tower of delusion and sele-absorbement and force them to pay attention to the world around them.
We'd be in the space age by now if Genghis Khan didn't survive childhood. Prove me wrong.
>>862934
Stop believing in the great man theory, if not Genghis then some other horsenigger would force the Mongols to go apeshit on everyone. People like Genghis and Attila are not sculptors but products of their time.
>>862494
No, anon, you can't judge them by modern standards. Remember that absolutely nobody thought that slaughtering millions was wrong before the 20th century. If you asked all those Chinese/Persian peasants the Mongols murdered what they thought of their killers, they'd probably just say something along the lines of
>Well, it's not like they know what they're doing. It's just their culture, can't blame them really. And they opened trade routes, so it's fine. Plus, they let us bury our dead however we want! So tolerant.
>>862632
That's Sassanid, not Parthian. Sassanids were an urban culture.
>>862888
>Medes
>didn't adopt settled culture
>accomplished absolutely nothing, barely even existed
>Achaemenids
>adopted urban, literate Mesopotamian culture
>built the greatest and probably most benevolent empire the world had ever seen up to that point
>>862494
The Huns singlehandedly lead to the destruction of the WRE by causing nomads to migrate in far larger numbers and far quicker than the climate would've, and the Mongols destroyed centuries of Islamic writing turning it into the reactionary shithole it is today and destroyed the Song in the midst of industrialization. The Mongols are the reason why Europe, which was the laughingstock backwater of the world, managed to get ahead of others. Song had fucking factories for god's sake. Instead, all of those production techniques were traded to europe, and since it was never invaded and leveled like China and the Middle East were, they managed to finally do something two centuries later.
Mongols are literally the reason why Russia is such a shithole.
>>862616
What about the native indian genocide? Why didn't the settled nations stay in their own countries?
You just got BTFO
>>863001
Dude Russia is a frozen shithole they would stay that even without mongols.
Their civilization was never on par with for example Yangtze river civilization.
>>862934
Remember who was Timur and how he saved Constantinople's ass when Bayezid was besieging it.
Without Genghis the Muslims would expand even faster.
>>862974
>Remember that absolutely nobody thought that slaughtering millions was wrong before the 20th century
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTrbVf6SrCc
>>862494
>his conquests didn't even have any ideolgical basis, he basically said that they are conquering nations, destroying cities and killing millions because they can.
Just like every other conqueror in history... without the pseudo-justificatory BS
>>862997
Hi there John Green.
>the Mongols destroyed centuries of Islamic writing turning it into the reactionary shithole it is today
>What are the Ottomans
>What are the Safavids and Timurids
>What are the Mughals.
>>864035
>>What are the Ottomans
>>What are the Safavids and Timurids
>>What are the Mughals.
Products of the Mongol conquests whose courts flowered with lots of poetry and literature, but intellectually were dominated by xenophobic holy warrior traditions that had replaced much of what was lost to the Mongols and ending centuries of Nestorian Christianity and Zoroastrianism throughout Anatolia, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan, not to mention their devastating wars against the Balkan and Caucasian Christian powers as well as the Hindu princes of India.
>>862494
>his conquests didn't even have any ideological basis
Better than making up one
>Non white ppl can't govern themselves!
>We gotz to spread Catholicism!
>>862997
What about places like Egypt, Morocco and Andalusia as well as the Southern Arabian pensuela? THey were never touched by Mongol hands.
>>862494
When you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail.
Raiding on horseback just went together back in the day. When you're talking about more primitive times, people far removed from your land of origin are going to be easily treated as subhumans to exploit. Eurasia, being the massive ethnically diverse place it is, only made long distance horseback raiding and dehumanizing of obscure peoples that much more tempting.
Raiding and pillaging on horseback was the easy way to potentially make it big in the lawless frontier of the medieval world.
>>864035
The poster below you covered it. To continue, the knowledge destroyed in Baghdad had to be rediscovered, so it invariably set us back. Just because some people rediscovered bits of what we knew before doesn't mean the Mongol destruction didn't set us back. Rape yourself you Mongol sympathizer.
>>867042
Andalusia was destroyed by Christians. Literally depopulated. Most of what was left was taken by Jews to the Ottoman Empire, the rest of North Africa, while it contributed, it still relied on the core Muslim territory when it came to knowledge to build off of.
