Nomads, The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World
Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Anthony Sattin is an author, journalist and broadcaster, as well as contributing editor to Condé Nast Traveller and editorial advisor on Geographical Magazine. He lives between London and the Middle East. His highly acclaimed books of history and travel include Young Lawrence, A Winter on the Nile, The Pharaoh’s Shadow, The Gates of Africa and Lifting the Veil. His latest book, Nomads, The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World (Les Nomades, Editions Noir sur Blanc, 2024) is a work of history that looks at the shifting relations between nomadic and settled people over the past 12,000 years, since the time when we all lived on the move. Often overlooked in history, the story of the umbilical connections between these two very different ways of living presents a radical new view of human civilization. From the Neolithic revolution to the twenty-first century via the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the great nomadic empires of the Arabs and Mongols, the Mughals and the development of the Silk Road, nomads have been a perpetual counterbalance to the empires created by the power of human cities. Exploring the evolutionary biology and psychology of restlessness that makes us human, Anthony Sattin’s sweeping history charts the power of nomadism from before the Bible to its decline in the present day. Connecting us to mythology and the records of antiquity, Nomads is the history of civilization as told through its outsiders.