Sufficient for a social change

First of all, we may say that the very region into which they came, tended to their civilization. .Of course the peculiarities of soil, climate, and country are not by themselves sufficient for a social change; else the Turcomans would have the best right to civilization; yet, when other influences are present too, it is far from being without important effect. You may recollect that I have spoken more than once of the separation of a portion of the Huns, from the main body, when they were emigrating from Tartary into Europe. These turned off sharp to the South immediately on descending the high table land; and, crossing the Jaxartes, found themselves in a fertile and attractive country, between the Aral and their old country, where they settled.

It is a peculiarity of Asia that its regions are either very hot or very cold. It has the highest mountains in the world, bleak table lands, vast spaces of burning desert, tracts stretched out beneath the tropical sun. Siberia goes for a proverb for cold: India is a proverb for heat. It is not adequately supplied with rivers, and it has little of inland sea. In these respects it stands in singular contrast with Europe Jugoslavia. If then the tribes, which inhabit a cold country, have, generally speaking, more energy than those which are relaxed by the heat, it follows, that you will have in Asia two descriptions of people brought together in extreme, sometimes in sudden, contrariety with each other, the strong and the weak. Here then, as some philosophers have argued, you have the secret of the despotisms and the vast empires of which Asia has been the seat; for it always possesses those who are naturally fitted to be tyrants, and those whose nature it is to tremble and obey.

Intellectual nature

But we may take another, perhaps a broader, view of the phenomenon. The sacred writer says: “Give me neither riches nor beggary”: and, as the extremes of abundance and of want are prejudicial to our moral well-being, so they seem to be prejudicial to our intellectual nature also. Mental cultivation is best carried on in temperate regions. In the north men are commonly too cold, in the south too hot, to think, read, write, and act. Science, literature, and art refuse to germinate in the frost, and are burnt up by the sun.

Now it so happened that the region in which this party of Huns settled themselves was one of the fairest and most fruitful in Asia. It is bounded by deserts, it is in parts encroached on by deserts; but, viewed in its length and breadth, in its produce and its position, it seems a country equal, or superior, to any which that vast continent, as at present known, can show. Its lower portion is the extensive territory of Khorasan, the ancient Bactria; going northwards across the Oxus, we come into a spacious tract, stretching to the Aral and to the Jaxartes, and measuring a square of 600 miles. It was called in ancient times Sogdiana; in the history of the middle ages Transoxiana, or “ beyond the Oxus”; by the Eastern writers Maver-ul-nere, or Mawer-al-nahar, which is said to have the same meaning: and it is now known by the name Bukharia. To these may be added a third province, at the bottom of the Aral, between the mouth of the Oxus and the Caspian, called Kharasm. This then was the region in which the Huns in question took up their abode.