From Sapiens, May 2, 2018:
Centuries before the Mongols took over the Eurasian steppe, the horse nomads of the Uyghur Empire responded to an epic drought through clever trade deals and unlikely alliances.
The bitterly cold, dry air of the Central Asian steppe is a boon to researchers who study the region. The frigid climate “freeze-dries” everything, including centuries-old trees that once grew on lava flows in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley. A recent study of the tree-ring record, published in March, from some of these archaic logs reveals a drought that lasted nearly seven decades—one of the longest in a 1,700-year span of steppe history—from A.D. 783–850.
Decades of prolonged drought would have killed much of the grass that the Orkhon Valley’s domesticated horses relied upon. Yet the dominant steppe civilization of the era, an empire of Turkic horse nomads called the Uyghurs, somehow survived nearly 60 years of the drought, a period about seven times longer than the Dust Bowl that devastated the central U.S. in the 1930s.
Based on surviving Chinese and Uyghur documents from the drought years, the study’s authors concluded that the Uyghurs survived by diversifying their economy and using international diplomacy to boost trade.
Rather than driving the Uyghurs to plunder neighboring territories—as other steppe empires tended to do—the drought led them to take advantage of their location on the Silk Road and reinvent their economy. The Uyghurs’ relatively peaceful strategies seem to have staved off total collapse for a surprisingly long time. “They were champs,” says physical geographer and study co-author Amy Hessl of West Virginia University.
Prior to this paper, no one knew that the Uyghurs faced an “epic drought,” Hessl says. The recognition that they did may change the way historians interpret the social, political, and economic strategies of the Uyghurs.
Instead of clashing with the Chinese Empire to their south, the Uyghurs forged a durable but uneasy alliance with the Tang dynasty in China, a rare feat for a steppe empire. The Uyghurs traded their surplus horses with the Chinese in exchange for silk. They then traded that silk with merchant allies in the fertile lands to their west....MUCH MORE
The Uyghur Empire may have been better able to navigate the challenges of an extended drought by relying on political, economic, and religious ties. LamassuDesign Gurdjieff/ Wikimedia Commons
China without the conquests is actually surprisingly tiny:
Although I suppose you could say the same about the U.S. as well.
