The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.28

c10.s5.28

It would seem, then, that if the movement was really due to the operation of a climatic cycle, that cycle must have operated by starting the Yueh-chi on the long trek which was the cause of all the disturbance. But as the Yueh-chi and the Hiung-nu had long been neighbours, climatic changes which affected the one people should have affected the other; nevertheless the historical record (p. 276) is that the Yueh-chi had cared nothing for the Hiung-nu (*i.e.* were too strong for them) until in the final struggle they suffered a great defeat at their hands and were driven from their grazing grounds, which started the whole movement. The Hiung-nu followed this up by the creation of a regular empire, which might mean that *their* motive force was not so much hunger as imperialism; it looks, too, as if the cause of the final defeat of the Yueh-chi, previously the stronger horde, was not that the Hiung-nu were starving but that they had received a large accession of strength by incorporating some other people or peoples. I have neither the desire nor the knowledge to question either the fact or the potency of the climatic cycle, and the Saca peoples, who were not all nomads but included cultivators and oasis-dwellers, had obviously become too numerous for their lands and were ripe for trouble; I only wish to point out that the whole of the events to be described in this chapter could be accounted for quite simply by Hiung-nu imperialism, a foretaste of that of Chingis and his Mongols later, which would mean that the whole thing originated not in natural causes but in the mental processes of some individual man or group of men.