The daily life of a nomad horde is a training school for military organization.  In the evening the flocks and herds are distributed with system around the camp to prevent confusion.  The difficult art of a well ordered march, of making and breaking camp, and of foraging is practiced almost daily in their constant migrations.[1094] The usual order of the Bedouin march could scarcely be surpassed by an army.  In advance of the caravan moves a body of armed horsemen, five or seven kilometers ahead; then follows the main body of the tribesmen mounted on horses and camels, then the female camels, and after these the beasts of burden with the women and children.  The encampment of tents with the places for men, arms and herds is also carefully regulated.  More than this, the horde is organized into companies with their superior and subordinate leaders.[1095] John de Carpini describes Genghis Khan’s military organization of his vast Tartar horde by tens, hundreds and thousands, his absolute dominion over his conquered subjects, and prompt absorption of them into his fighting force, by the compulsory enlistment of soldiers out of every freshly subjugated nation.[1096] In the same way the Hebrew tribes, when preparing for the conquest of Canaan, adopted from the desert Midianites the organization of the horde into tens, hundreds and thousands under judges, who were also military leaders in time of war.

[Sidenote:  Capacity for conquest and political consolidation.]

Thus certain geographic conditions produce directly the habitual and systematic migration of the nomads, and through this indirectly that military and political organization which has given the shepherd races of the earth their great historical mission of political consolidation.  Agriculture, though underlying all permanent advance in civilization, is handicapped by the lack of courage, mobility, enterprise and large political outlook characterizing early tillers of the soil.  All these qualities the nomad possesses.  Hence the union of these two elements, imperious pastor superimposed upon peaceful tiller, has made the only stable governments among savage and semi-civilized races.[1097] The politically invertebrate peoples of dark Africa have secured the back-bone to erect states only from nomad conquerors.  The history of the Sudan cannot be understood apart from a knowledge of the Sahara and its peoples.  All the Sudanese states were formed by invaders from the northern desert, Hamitic or Semitic. [See map page 487.] The Galla or Wahuma herdsmen of East Africa founded and maintained the relatively stable states of Uganda, Kittara, Karague, and Uzinza in the equatorial district; the conquerors remained herders while they lorded it over the agricultural aborigines.[1098] In prehistoric times when the various peoples of the Aryan linguistic family were spreading over Europe and southern Asia, the superiority of the shepherd races must have been especially marked, because in that era only the unobstructed surface of the steppes permitted the concentration of men on a vast scale for migration and conquest.  Everywhere else regions of broken relief and dense forests harbored small, isolated peoples, to whom both the idea and the technique of combined movement were foreign.