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There’s a couple of other glaring exceptions. One of them is a way of life for over a billion people today- Islam. Islam spread mostly by conquest by camel herders. And attempting to apply perfectly reasonable and sensible camel herder laws to agricultural societies explain partly why Islamic societies are so messed up in the present day. Sharia law is actually, by 700 AD standards, reasonably fair and just, and the facial injustice is mostly things that can be routed around by later societies. Even Saudi Arabia doesn’t have slavery or execute homosexuals anymore. No, applying pastoralist law to agrarian peasant societies creates conditions which make life suckier; the structures of islamic inheritance, for example, incentivize poor treatment of women when applied to land, but not livestock.
Persia is a partially separate exception; it just kept getting conquered by nomads, one of those with the bigger mark being those same Islamic Arabs.
The indo-European expansion came in waves, was carried out by pastoralists, and beat up on settled agrarians quite a bit. Today, all of Europe and most of the Indian subcontinent are the result. For that matter India is almost like Persia in getting conquered by steppe nomads a lot, with lasting import.
Doesn’t it have to switch over at some point? Medieval Europe had clearly left any pastoral roots behind.
Same for early Islam. I’m willing to believe that Muhammad and his earliest followers were nomadic raiders. But by the time you’re getting planned cities, raising peasant levies, and digging canals to irrigate, you’ve clearly adopted agriculture.
Large parts of medieval Europe seem to be in the process of becoming meaningfully less steppe-nomad influenced right as the historical record starts becoming adequate. The Catholic Church(really the Orthodox Church too, but I'm assuming you're discussing western Europe) really wanted Germanic peoples to adopt the mores associated with more settled Roman society, with a few Christian twists. In England this process is better documented than most and also much starker; Anglo-Saxon law bore unmistakable nomadic influences around things like property, inheritance, and the like, as well as the tendency to use a fine for literally everything(and these fines were too high for individuals to pay, with precise details spelled out in statute of who paid what the convicted could not based on relation- a logical adaptation for a nomadic society in which geographic administration of justice is prima facie impossible, but rather counterproductive in an agrarian society). This last part is knowably part of other pre-Christian Germanic societies eg the Vikings; boring details about inheritance and possession don't get recorded in epic poems but crime and punishment often do. Christendom seems to really hate steppe-nomad laws and customs, though, so the middle ages is in large part a time when all that stuff is getting replaced. I'm not sure if northern Indian Hindus have much steppe influence on their culture beyond language today, or if it can be separated from Persian and Mughal influence.
Islam by contrast both A) has steppe nomad raider mores written into the religion and B) achieved most of its expansion under the leadership of nomads who had not switched to agriculture yet(as they tended to do once they had good enough land). The Mughals, Seljuks, etc all spread Islam after joining it as steppe nomads. To say nothing of much of the Islamic heartland being captured in the first wave of conquest before Muhammed's(really Abu Bakr's) followers had learnt to farm.
That A) is a pretty big feature that keeps causing problems in settled-down Islamic societies; the Ottoman empire notoriously had constant secession disputes that it resolved by murdering the shit out of princes because Islamic inheritance rules(based on steppe tradition) prevented primogeniture. Desert camel-herder inheritance rules are also the reason for Islamic societies' very high rates of cousin marriage today.
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Certain Muslim societies seem to retain features of Arab pastoral culture that are either irrelevant to or harmful to their modern day prosperity e.g. cousin marriage in Pakistan.
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