# Tracing nomadic flows: the discovery of the Nazre

by Jebra Gizlem

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Sometimes legends are mere historical remnants of people and ways of life that are too hard to capture but as mere hints or fanciful speculations. The legend of the Nazre, a highly advanced nomadic tribe of the Fertile Crescent, is an attempt by the agriculturalist of the Euphrates to create a history out of the lack of any archaelogical ground.

They left traces of their brief presence all over the basin that led to civilization and these traces are what Iranian historian [[Kamran Malzar]] has tried to connect and recosntruct into a map of their nomadic existance. This was hard however because there was no narrative to hold on to and the traces were too scattered and too distributed, which led him to the neccesity of innovating on historical methodology and what it means to do reconstructive anthropological work. It is through his encounter with von Djikes, a Dutch anthropologist that [[Malzar]] realized that a more suitable method would be to follow the indirect marks indicating flows of materials left in the settlements around the extended nexus of the tribe's activity. And so he did for a whole decade of self-sacrificing research. Out of this period of scientific sainthood came a plethora of novel recinceptualization of human history, technology, social systems and cognition. In the following chapters, I pay tribute to the depth and richness of Malzar's framework and his coneptual innovations.

### Geographical Recycling

There are three things the Nazre mastered early on, technology, long-distance coordination and trade. The origin story of the Nazre traces their prehistory to the hunter-gatherer native tribes along the Euphrates river without an initial identity or scale. Their emergence starts out of their racial mixing with early transitionary populations moving towards the sedentary cultivation of wheat, but after a certain point, population growth would give way to disputes and conflicts, so they started forming small groups of dissensus and disagreement that would pull themselves apart and start roaming around mostly in the direction of the flow of the river. This is the earliest sign of non-violent system of conflict resolution. Despite their division however they would still hold a memory of identity and the ones that stayed behind would send some gifts in the form of baskets of fruit, or baskets of artifacts like a beloved person's hair which they would recognize through odour. So in this way, they developed a system of water transportation through rudimentary floation tools based either on air-filled goat's lungs and tripe or floater plants, such as lillies strapped to the baskets.

The social formations if the Nazre were based on social deformations, with some of the disbanded groups following a pattern of growing and further iterative disbanding, especially after children were grown to keep the population going. The youngeat and oldest members would coalesce and form small bands that would go north, against the flow of the river, while the rest would continue down, creating a system of geographical feedback loops of recycling population.

The nomadic settlements the furthest up the river which would stay behind, would also move through a pattern of grouping and disbanding sending convoys both north and south and in that creating a nomadic system that managed to be geographically stable while also constantly moving. The way the would move is by being attuned to the fruiting cycles of various plants, the movement of the fish species in the river and also the seasonal changes in water levels and humidity of the soil. The latter is a variable that they Nazre were especially highly attuned to, having developed songs and words that would function as a way to monitor the condition of the soil. However, in contrast to the agriculture-based cities, they would not monitor and track so as to control the yield but in order to follow and know when to move.

### Devices and Engineering

An interesting effect is that as part of that they were able to create loops of cumulative technical development and build technologies that were inspired by their nomadic needs, such as floatation devices for sending goods. But what they became infamous for and therefore be mixed with legends and myths, is that they developed robot-like machinery based on perishable materials. The most profound was the discovery from [[Kamran Malzar]] that they had developed technologies akin to passive dynamic walkers, or other physics based robots based on mimicking of natural movement rather than having a central control. Most convoys would have with them at least one. The way they are hypothesized to work is by having a horizontal pulley system with a delay (like a rowing machine) that the people would strap around their back that would provide the kinetic energy needed to move the legs which when put into motion would walk in an uncanny manner like human legs. [[Kamran Malzar]] says that this is what was behind the tales and mythological images of the torsoless legs from local folklore because some of the village people would often think they are alive. For these achievements [[Kamran Malzar]] has called them, "the first engineers".

These walkers would be able to also carry substantial amount of weight but were used mostly for basket of fruit and goods. There were other mobile technologies however such as a variety of carts, mostly to carry babies and infants. These carts were mostly build with a technology resembling the wheels of tanks, an outer chain from low friction materials that would pull the whole cart. But the interesting thing about these was that they were built not like a wheel, but in a way that the wheels would bent according to the shape of the terrain and would retain energy by means of a elastic pressure system that would contract and expand. When the cart would hit rock for example and pulled it would slightly project it itself forward with additional energy. This is at least the theory for the technology because its reconstruction has been difficult. We know however that the Nazre used this because they would traverse such terrains to eventually get to mountainous areas where legends of carrier people's exist that brought treasures and gold (which might be not the case as they didn't carry that much). These would be especially mounted to the small horses they usually had with them (among other animals).

### Distributed Barter System

The other cornerstone of their development was their nuanced system of trade based on barter. Nazre convoys would always carry with them baskets of mixed goods that they would find and for which they would try to engineer preservation solutions. For example, they had created early form of containers with caps that would fit and create a seal where they would pickle and ferment food. When coming across cities and villages they would all offer thing they carried as gifts in exchange with whatever the local populations gave them. They were not interested in grains, coins or anything they couldn't re-use or use as spare parts so they usually kept them so as to exchange with other villages. After their visits they would redistribute their acquirement equally between them, mostly based on weight, so they could move easily. Then they would try to give as much as they could to other villages they came across in weight as the previous. The outcome was that they create an inventory of constantly diversifying items which made it easier for them to trade for what they wanted further down the line and bypassing the "double coincidence of wants" problem in economics because they almost always had something the local sedentary populations wanted or were willing to trade.

Sometimes they would meet roaming groups of their same tribe and when they did and realized they are the same (which was not always the case), they would try to again redistribute goods between themselves equally in terms of weights and also diversity. Once they recognized each other, they would form a bigger temporary roaming band and sit in circles where people would demonstrate new knowledge gained from their travels. These demonstrations were like science project contests were some people had to present a materialized project. Because of this nature, people were called that had no way of sharing the knowledge and were provided all resources to sit and develop something that either worked or didn't. Sometimes they were mere marginal improvement to the technologies or practices they carries along with them and sometimes they would be completely novel ideas, a committee of elders would assess. These circle rituals would therefore act as places of experimentation and innovation for the tribe that would feed into their technologies. When they disbanded again each they would divide from scratch, without keeping the original memory of the formations of the groups before they met and gathered together into a bigger unit. This aspects of fluid composability and decomposability was common in the way the Nazre dealt with the whole world, with goods, people and with the way they developed technologies an systems.

What was usually the case with the Nazre is that they also left people behind as exchanges when they visited villages and cities. [[[Murqastani]] conjectures that this is because of two reasons: a) some locals would not welcome them and their gifts without suspicion and would attack them, capture some as slaves or attempt to buy their women (which the Nazre wouldn't understand, they never left women behind). b) they left people who would exhibit signs of sickness, weakness, old age and antisocial behaviour in cities so that their roaming convoy would not get burdened. This is especially true for the problem of old age although the Nazre old would most likely be very healthy because of the exercise and varied diet. But the people left would also act as traces for other convoys and would act as ambassadors in the meanwhile if they were not used as slaves or exploited in other ways. But even when they were used as slaves, sometimes other convoys that visit and had the resources would try to buy them by with the goods in their baskets.

In that way, [[Kamran Malzar]] says, the Nazre function as a distributed social system utilizing phenomena of self-organization. He likened their distributed geographical coordination based on "thing left behind" to the way ants and other social insects work in their food foraging behaviours. The Nazre exhibited stigmergy, a means of indirect coordination by stimulation of further actions based on traces and marks.

### What happened to the Nazre

Theories about their extinction:
1. They started carrying so much weight and wealth that they needed to settle down and incorporate themselves in sedentary life.
2. They were killed by wild animals or other tribes because they didn't focus on developing weaponry.
3. They started dividing convoys in smaller snd smaller groups that would become unsustainable and unable to defend themselves.
4. They were struck by famine and diseases.

[[Kamran Malzar]] says that all are legitimate reasons and maybe their extinction is a combination of all the above.

### The archeonomadological methodology

How do we know of all these from a tribe with no recorded history, no distinct unity and perishable goods and technologies? This where [[Kamran Malzar]] really made a discovery by radically rethinking our approaches to historical reconstruction and the incorporation of graph representations as well as a system of natural multimodal semiotics is very important in the research he pioneered. The gist is that the activity of the Nazre has left traces in a variety of systems that can act as indirect record-keepers of their trajectories. For example, because they cut trees to make tools and gadgets, trajectories of their travels can be traced in the tree trunks of very old trees as stress signals to the plant. Then their routes can be traced based on looking at these markers on various trees around to start mapping their movement in space. This can then be compared to traces left in folklore and legend which can be compared to the histories of the local regions and archaeological findings in them.