Been working on something like that for 10 years now, part time. It's not easy and it's let me to understanding Christianity quite well, and you are not off in that we need something similar to that in one book as I've found there are several books out there but don't hit to the core as you describe.

This breakdown will help answer your question.

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Check out the sources I cite in this answer and those cited by the illumminating u/crab4apple in their excellent answer here.

Its a fun question, one i can try to give a speculative answer to as not a real historian but just a lover of history and to a degree anthropology. Because your question relates more to human nature it seems to me, and about the social psychological factors that makes them settle or not.

I guess the answer simply lies foremost in our materialist desires and the fact that overal settled societys have more luxuries to provide. Youre roaming nomads live in less productive societies that are decentralized and hard to maintain control over. Nomadic tribes often sought to plunder or exact tribute on settled societies rather than try to conquer them outright. They sometimes enjoyed ruling over them if such was easy and rewarding in terms of acquiring wealth withought having to involve themselves in the more mundane elements of ruling over settled societies.

Geography seemed to have played a big role in the choice of where to settle as civilizations. Early civilizations were often settled in highly productive riverlands or puninsular regions that had a large coastal border often on 3 sides leaving less land directions from where nomadic invaders could come from.

The steppes in contrast are very hard to settle and control, where other civilizations have relative dense population clusters there its all spread out over a sea of empty space, any new settlements in such regions would be vulnerable lest supported by a strong power. Its not desimilar in terms of natural lawlessness as the "wild west" was, its just hard to keep order over large regions with spread out populations where hardly anyone lives.

So basically, settled society is more attractive but you couldnt have it in the steppes the way you could have it in productive riverlands in ancient times.

Historians will generally be reluctant to stake a claim on the question of when a "majority" of people started doing anything in the wake of Arab conquests, whether that's converting to Islam, speaking Arabic or anything else. Don't get me wrong, historians have tried to estimate these things, but in general, the estimates have not been salutary for understanding what is going on in the past because it is not helpful to say a region has been "Arabized" without defining what we mean by that term, what "speaking Arabic" would have looked like in practice, and (crucially) how the processes looked very different based on gender or class.

For instance, an enslaved person brought from East Africa to, say, Egypt would learn very quickly that his survival depended on learning the strange language and customs that he found around him. What about a Jewish woman in the Levant who does not receive formal education? Maybe she uses Aramaic and Greek words in her vernacular without even realizing it, but perhaps her son does receive a formal Arabic education. All these people are "speaking Arabic," but while calling all these things "Arabization" or assimilation is convenient, it doesn't actually tell us a whole lot about social processes.

I know this might be a frustrating answer because obviously we clearly have Aramaic speakers on one end during the Roman period and we clearly have Arabic speakers on the other end by, say, the 11th century. But we do not know how that change happened and on what scale because the evidence for the intervening centuries is spotty and always biased towards people who could write.

The question you didn't ask but I will answer anyway is that Aramaic itself enjoyed a stint as an imperial language during the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, it would remain the vernacular in the region, although Greek enjoyed a place of prestige as the language of education and empire. In many ways, it was a deliberate choice that the Hebrew Bible was not written in the vernacular but rather in this other language that enjoyed continued ritual and intra-communal significance for Jews for millennia but was never a Jewish spoken language the way Aramaic, Greek or Arabic were.

Now onto your question of until when Aramaic was an important language. That one's easy. Very clearly until today. Aramaic is the language of the Talmuds (yes, there are two). The Aramaic dialect of Syriac still occupies a crucial place in the liturgy of Syriac churches. There are still speakers of Neo-Aramaic in the Levant today although their numbers are rapidly dwindling, and many have left the region.

The broader point here is that languages don't rise and fall of their own accord. Although we cannot answer when a "majority" of people spoke Arabic, my point here is that historians increasingly have replaced that question with questions about the institutions (formal and informal) and social contexts in which people learned Arabic. I will speculate a little bit and say that at least for people who lived basically where they were born, there probably was a shift between the times when someone *chose* to learn Arabic and the times when it was just something they did because everyone did it. For enslaved people who came from far away, it was always a very different calculus of how language could facilitate their survival.

Thanks for the question!

There were five "parties" in the medieval Republic of Novgorod, although they were based more around the five districts which made up the city. The "prime minister" (figure of posadnik) needed the support of one or a coalition of two parties to remain in power. Over a period of 352 years there were 147 general elections of a posadnik and the historical results were spread quite evenly over the representatives of the five parties.

It is always worth considering that even though various forms of corruption like politicking are more likely to derail talented scientists and designers, this is not always the case. The Soviet union, when placing a high priority on arms procurement, was able to support more design bureaus with more resources than modern Russia. As an example, the Morozov design bureau in Ukraine was responsible for several of the most innovative and successful tank designs of the soviet union, including both the T-64 and T-80. Despite being a cutting edge and expensive tank to produce, significant quantities were nonetheless procured. After the fall of the Soviet union, both the knowledge base and production base for these designs left the union entirely with the departure of Ukraine.

Thus, post soviet Russia, in attempting to design upgrades, is working with a smaller tax base (e.g. more limited funding), with fewer scientists and designers (especially following the substantial exodus of talented scientists after the fall of the union), and must even build their knowledge base from scratch. As such, building improvements to soviet era designs has proven immensely difficult for modern Russia.

Consider also that old designs still being useful today does not mean that the designs were somehow decades better than those from other counties. The overwhelming majority of equipment being used in Ukraine in both sides is soviet. So, it is not necessarily that the T-80 was decades ahead and that is why it is useful - or is more that the T-80 was a good design for its time, and is largely competing against designs from a similar era. There are also further factors - such as increased lethality from modern anti tank systems rendering many armor improvements ineffective. So, even if a subsequent design offered improved protection at its inception (e.g. the T-90 series) the modern battlefield has increasingly negated the value of its improvements.