The Development of Cities

[Kingmaker]

HiHi

Eeek!!! I've been bounced.

Sorry Rune just got some sort of answer to an earlier point you raised yesterday (see below) and found the above waiting for me, fraid will have to come back on that tomorrow; but I would seriously question When people move, they usually have a specific reason for doing so, they ususally don´t move very far, and they don´t do so in large numbers., I'll try and free up more time tomorrow to answer your points.
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HiHi

There is no evidence that anything "drove" any tribes anywhere. Least of all into the Roman empire. The barbarians entered the Roman empire for various specific reasons (some of which are today wholly unclear to us), not because they were conditioned to do so by the climate or any racially conditioned "wanderlust" Sheee, there’s a lot to deal with there so I’m gonna have to simplify it rather drastically.

c5000BC the last interglacial period ended, the grass lands of the Steppe started to diminish, the Steppe tribes were Pastoral nomads who depended on grass to feed their herds, as population levels rose greater demands were placed on steadily diminishing resources.
The lifestyle of pastoral Nomads is often supplemented by raiding settled agricultural lands, as the fear of Nomadic incursions increase this can be turned from simple raiding for booty into a more sophisticated settlement whereby tribute is paid to avoid Nomad incursions.

The problem for the Steppe dwellers is that as their numbers increase and the local Economic sustainability of their lands decreases they need more & more external wealth to maintain their lifestyle. When overtime the established settled Agriculture based communities were weakened by raiding & tribute the Steppe tribes could (and did) move in and colonise (a similar pattern can be seen with the Germanic invasions of Celtic Britain), in effect, temporally relieving the overpopulation in the Steppe homelands, but, given humanities predisposition to breed then in time the Steppe population would again reach critical mass and if a strong enough leader came to the fore the whole process would begin again.
As far as the Roman empire is concerned once the Danube river line was breached (308AD ?) then a sort of domino effect could be said to have taken place, with succeeding waves of Gothic/Germanic/Hun/Avans etc etc moving in, some admittedly as Federatii, others as conquerors.

I know the above is a somewhat glib rendition of several thousand years worth of History, and the process would have been either slowed of hastened by local shorter term climatic changes in the Steppe lands however we do have empirical evidence for it in that it is what happened, not just to the Roman empire, but to China & India all of which experienced Hun incursions, to name just one. In some cases we have written records other egs include linguistics clues or battlefield sites or in the case of China a recently discovered Hun city.

Dunno if you can lay your hands on ‘The Times, Atlas of World History’ or somesuch but it’s a fascinating read, the movements of the tribes pictorially laid out with dates etc.

Nuff for now.

All the Best
Peter