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A Spectator Book of the Year
‘Sweeping . . . Poetic . . . Not only readable but also vital’ Literary Review
‘A terrific storyteller’ New York Times
‘Exceptional . . . tender and beautifully written’ Country Life
The groundbreaking story of Nomadic peoples on the move across history.
Tracing the epic paths of wanderers across twelve thousand years, acclaimed travel writer Anthony Sattin recovers the stories of tribes who lived beyond imperial borders and created their own kingdoms and empires: Scythian, Xiongnu, Persian, Hun, Arab, Mongul, Mughal, Ottoman and others. With their embrace of multiculturalism, respect for nature’s rhythms, and need for free movement, wandering peoples brought a glorious cultural flourishing to Eurasia, enabling the Renaissance and changing the human story. This sweeping narrative reconnects us with our deepest mythology, our unrecorded antiquity and our natural world. Nomads is the untold history of civilisation, told through its outsiders.
‘Sweeping . . . Poetic . . . Not only readable but also vital’ Literary Review
‘A terrific storyteller’ New York Times
‘Exceptional . . . tender and beautifully written’ Country Life
The groundbreaking story of Nomadic peoples on the move across history.
Tracing the epic paths of wanderers across twelve thousand years, acclaimed travel writer Anthony Sattin recovers the stories of tribes who lived beyond imperial borders and created their own kingdoms and empires: Scythian, Xiongnu, Persian, Hun, Arab, Mongul, Mughal, Ottoman and others. With their embrace of multiculturalism, respect for nature’s rhythms, and need for free movement, wandering peoples brought a glorious cultural flourishing to Eurasia, enabling the Renaissance and changing the human story. This sweeping narrative reconnects us with our deepest mythology, our unrecorded antiquity and our natural world. Nomads is the untold history of civilisation, told through its outsiders.
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Reviews
A fabulous piece of evocative writing, mixing personal stories with an epic sweep of history, the unique insight of location and an intimate connection to the subject. I loved it
I was riveted by the shifts to nomadic culture, Sapiens-like, and by the feeling of learning lightly worn and deftly transmitted. This is a major book
The saga of the lost mobile cultures and empires that have impacted global history . . . a spirited defence of freedom of conscience, freedom of movement and migration, a romantic tribute to independence and to free spirit, and to being in tune with the rhythms of nature
Anthony Sattin's Nomads spreads before us a sweeping panorama of nomadism
that resonates through the past and echoes poignantly even in the present
Thoughtful, lyrical yet ambitiously panoramic . . . As fleet and light-footed as its subject, it takes us along a dizzying path, over many of the highest ridges of human history . . . An important, generous and beautifully-written book
An incredible work combining brilliant scholarship with an epic, page-turning narrative . . . His landmark book
In a book of sensitivity and grace, Sattin does not just describe the nomadic way of life, but also evokes it . . . This is a book of beauty and beguiling rhythm that offers unsettling lessons about our present-day world of borders
Sweeping . . . Poetic . . . Sattin brings together a huge range of material with great elegance, making it not only readable but also vital
Exceptional . . . tender and beautifully written
Nomads is a kind of rhapsody on how this aspect of human nature has contributed as much, if not more, to civilization, than the tillers of the soil
Nomads is a monumental work, exhaustively researched that sets out to explain nomadism, its importance, rise and decline over the centuries in the minutest detail
A terrific storyteller
Not only readable but also vital
Triumphantly tells the story of another way of living . . . This is a book that does not labour in the fields but gallops full stretch towards the horizon
A much-needed act of historical revisionism
An unashamedly impressionistic paean to nomadic life interwoven with travelogue and memoir