GRASSLAND AND FARMLAND—SMITH SLE 
Goths, Vandals, Huns, Alans, Bulgars in turn punished the provinces 
of Rome both east and west for having been prosperous enough to 
produce material worthy of pillage. 
The Bulgars remain as a name—their language has been absorbed 
by that of the Slavs whom they conquered and ruled. The Alans melted 
away as did the Scythians in the fat lands of Mesopotamia a thousand 
years earlier, and as the Mongols did in China a thousand years later. 
Many of the Huns of Attila’s empire merged with the conquered, but 
one group went back to the grasslands of south Russia. Some 400 
years later they returned to the plain of Hungary, where today they are 
the only remaining citadel of their language. 
THE ARABIAN GRASSLAND EXPLODES 
The seventh and eighth centuries of the Christian era witnessed the 
entry of the Arabian grasslands into the history of Eurasia in a large 
way. It was not the first time that Arabia had played a part in the 
history of lands beyond its border. One of the first recorded conquerors 
of Mesopotamia was Sargon the Akkadian, 3800 B. C. Sargon was a 
Semite, presumably from Arabia. Arabia is regarded as the original 
Semite nest. 
In Roman times succeeding generations of Arab horsemen harried 
the Roman Empire. As the seventh century A. D. opened, Arabia was 
a political chaos of independent oasis settlements and endlessly 
quarreling nomad tribes. 
A genius appeared upon the scene in the person of Mohammed, who 
preached patriotism and religion. He used the sword to advance his 
precepts and when he died in A. D. 632 Arabia was united. 
The followers of Mohammed started a career of wider conquest. The 
Arab horsemen and camelmen rode east, west, and north. In a few 
years they had conquered Mesopotamia, Persia, Syria, Palestine, and 
Egypt. In less than a century they had crossed the Ganges and the 
Pyrenees, conquering all the lands between. Their defeat at Tours in 
France in 732 by Charles Martel, who drove them back into Spain, is 
one of the very important turning points of history. 
THE MONGOLS AND THE TATARS 
The eruption of the Arabs from their grassland was unrelated to 
similar happenings in the greater grassland of the present Russian do- 
main. The central grassland of Eurasia kept on producing horses and 
men and marauding. In the ninth century a Russian chronicler re- 
corded one of their many pillaging raids. “Whence they came,” he 
lamented, “God. only knows, and whither they went, God only knows, 
but while they were here they were terrible.” 
