At its heart, and then at the heart of the political organisations which it inspired and which succeeded it, we can imagine the existence of political and social lines of transmission which influenced military practices in this geographical zone as a whole. The Turkish period is one such historical era: the expanses of the steppe were indeed unified during the second half of the sixth century, part of the framework of the trans-Asiatic Turkish empire and its tremendous prestige. One way to resolve this impasse is to identify the historically coherent periods individually within this continuum, and to restrict sources to this specific group of periods. Yet despite these undoubtedly important points of resemblance, the analysis should not be limited to them by ignoring developmental variations and interaction with different contexts and societies.
Indeed, the sustained similarities between the different descriptions that have survived, from the Xiongnu to the Mongols, are certainly very strong: the type of weapon, the tactic of the ‘Parthian shot’, the small horses, the decimal organisation of the army – over a long period these various elements have contributed to a unified pattern of nomadic warfare. Examination of the art of war among the nomad peoples of the steppe could easily lead to archetypes.
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