But the matter is more complicated. Just as a farmer may have to defend his crops against human and nonhuman predators, so state elites have an overwhelming interest in safeguarding the sinews of their own power: a cultivating population and its grain stores, its privileges and wealth, and its political and ritual powers. As Owen Lattimore and others have observed for the Great Wall(s) of China: they were built quite as much to keep Chinese taxpaying cultivators inside as to keep the barbarians (nomads) outside.
