>>25351
Now the people's whose stories we know and historians base/based their works had only limited contact with them, they met them as they broke into their territory with many horses, sometimes just with herders, other times war parties (each warrior went with several horses to campaigns - this might be the reason some sources give us inflated data of their numbers). So they only met these guys, so only gained impressions of them.
Looking through the borders into their territory was also useless, since their settlements weren't close to the border, due to their practice of leaving a wide stripe of land unpopulated (maybe because on horseback a neighbouring tribe could pounce them fast and the empty space gave some time to catch them coming) around their domain.
So these neighbouring folks had only seen a little out of them and the idea that they roam around like nomads was born. This was the historians later read in the sources those folks left behind. So they classified the steppe people nomads. Then came archeology and they found all kinds of stuff, and later (some medieval, especially Arabs - what I know of) sources also give some more hint. And this new data didn't fit. So they came up with the idea of half nomadism, and said it's the next level in their development to become sedentary (and feudal - as if that type of sedentism and feudalism would embody some higher quality, but since these were western scientists, motivated by their nationalism and oftentimes even chauvinism, they naturally considered their ancestor's ways superior - sometimes even went as far as calling steppe people gypsies).
But what development? In the Carpathian basin steppe people lived with little pauses from the 7th century BC actually from a little earlier to the 10th century AD or even later if we count the Cumans who were settled among us in the 13th and during these 1500+ years they lived pretty much the same, how I described previously. This land here is absolutely unsuitable for nomadism.

Ofc I acknowledge different steppe folk lived a little differently. Those south, southwest of the Aral built cities, with adobe brick walls, big temples, and irrigation systems in that deserty land. This wasn't the case north of there around the southern slopes of the Ural. For example.