Questions of the history of nomadic peoples, their role in the general historical process and their position in the modern world occupy a prominent place in the works of A. Toynbee. In the most complete and systematic form, his concept on these issues is presented in the third volume of "Studies in History", where there are a number of special essays on nomadism and nomads .1Toynbee's review of the history of nomads begins with those distant times when man first learned to tame wild animals, which made the transition of primitive hunters and farmers to nomadic cattle breeding possible in the future. In the steppes of Eurasia and Africa, this happened, according to him, 5-6 thousand years ago. After reviewing the thousands-year history of nomads, their relationship with the natural environment and sedentary neighbors, Toynbee came to the conclusion that in our time nomadism is doomed to be forcibly displaced by sedentary peoples, which in the Eurasian steppe zone began in the XVII century, and in modern society, led and guided by "Western civilization", is close to its full completion. "This Western civilization," he writes, " is erasing nomadism from the face of the earth ... as one of the episodes of that grandiose social revolution, during which over the past 150 years all the inhabited lands on our planet, all navigable seas, all generations of people were united into a single world economic order... In this global society with its dynamic economy, there is no place for an underdeveloped civilization and a stagnant economy of nomadic hordes. " 2The conclusion about the inevitable displacement of nomadism by the carriers of settled cultures is a logical consequence of its entire concept, the main place in which is occupied by the thesis about the eternal opposition and irreconcilability of the material and spiritual interests of nomadic inhabitants of the steppes and the population of settled oases, which is caused by supposedly objective, independent of the will ... Читать далее