Combined with this private property in land there is a brisk trade up and down the coast, and a tendency toward feudalism in the village communities, owing to the association of power and social distinction with wealth and property in land.[96] [Sidenote: Land bond in pastoral societies.] Among pastoral nomads, among whom a systematic use of their territory begins to appear, and therefore a more definite relation between land and people, we find a more distinct notion than among wandering hunters of territorial ownership, the right of communal use, and the distinct obligation of common defense.

Hence the social bond is drawn closer.

The nomad identifies himself with a certain district, which belongs to his tribe by tradition or conquest, and has its clearly defined boundaries.
Here he roams between its summer and winter pastures, possibly one hundred and fifty miles apart, visits its small arable patches in the spring for his limited agricultural ventures, and returns to them in the fall to reap their meager harvest.

Its springs, streams, or wells assume enhanced value, are things to be fought for, owing to the prevailing aridity of summer; while ownership of a certain tract of desert or grassland carries with it a certain right in the bordering settled district as an area of plunder.[97] The Kara-Kirghis stock, who have been located since the sixteenth century on Lake Issik-Kul, long ago portioned out the land among the separate families, and determined their limits by natural features of the landscape.[98] Sven Hedin found on the Tarim River poles set up to mark the boundary between the Shah-yar and Kuchar tribal pastures.[99] John de Plano Carpini, traveling over southern Russia in 1246, immediately after the Tartar conquest, found that the Dnieper, Don, Volga and Ural rivers were all boundaries between domains of the various millionaries or thousands, into which the Tartar horde was organized.[100] The population of this vast country was distributed according to the different degrees of fertility and the size of the pastoral groups.[101] Volney observed the same distinction in the distribution of the Bedouins of Syria.

He found the barren cantons held by small, widely scattered tribes, as in the Desert of Suez; but the cultivable cantons, like the Hauran and the Pachalic of Aleppo, closely dotted by the encampments of the pastoral owners.[102] The large range of territory held by a nomadic tribe is all successively occupied in the course of a year, but each part only for a short period of time.