Comment on Khand warriors by TurnerMohan
You sum up my general assumptions on Khand's social structure exactly, I always thought of the majority of the Khandian population (as with the people of near harad and) as living a rather bedouin-like existence - tribes and families of shepherds under basically abrahamic style patriarchs - basically since the dawn of time (or of man anyway) and lorded over (though having next to no contact with unless called to battle) a more "civilized" upper caste, possibly consisting of the descendants of forigen conquerers such as the variags (like the real life Aryans in India, or the nordic Rus who became the ruling class in russia, over a largely slavic population) living in great cites comparable to ancient babylon or nineveh.
to take it one step farther (though this is a thoroughly unnescesary flourish and nowhere indicated by tolkiens very scant writings on khand) I sometimes think of the people of khand, even the non-variag original inhabitants, as being themselves more closely related to the rather indo-european edain than the more "arabic" people of Near Harad, or diverse though largely central asian/turkick easterlings (though i tend to think, encompassed in the term "easterling," you would have to find some populations of slavic - and therefore indo-european - type people, I usually think of these as the easterlings from the first age: wolf haired, mustached, and slant eyed, but related to the edain nonetheless) This little theorization of mine about khand is just based mostly on its location, to the southeast (as opposed to the more directly southern haradrim or eastern easterlings) which overlays rather nicely with the long, diagonal line of the persian empire, from anatolia to india, I could see the khandians falling into the southeastern "indo/iranian" branch of the indo-european language family (or, once again, the ME equivalent thereof) with the roughly Italic, Celtic, and Nordic people of, respectively, Beor, Haleth and Hador (and I do think that parallel was very intentional) making up the northeastern branch.
(me and elrondperedhel had a lot of back and forth about that in the comments for the "harad cavalryman" piece)
to take it one step farther (though this is a thoroughly unnescesary flourish and nowhere indicated by tolkiens very scant writings on khand) I sometimes think of the people of khand, even the non-variag original inhabitants, as being themselves more closely related to the rather indo-european edain than the more "arabic" people of Near Harad, or diverse though largely central asian/turkick easterlings (though i tend to think, encompassed in the term "easterling," you would have to find some populations of slavic - and therefore indo-european - type people, I usually think of these as the easterlings from the first age: wolf haired, mustached, and slant eyed, but related to the edain nonetheless) This little theorization of mine about khand is just based mostly on its location, to the southeast (as opposed to the more directly southern haradrim or eastern easterlings) which overlays rather nicely with the long, diagonal line of the persian empire, from anatolia to india, I could see the khandians falling into the southeastern "indo/iranian" branch of the indo-european language family (or, once again, the ME equivalent thereof) with the roughly Italic, Celtic, and Nordic people of, respectively, Beor, Haleth and Hador (and I do think that parallel was very intentional) making up the northeastern branch.
(me and elrondperedhel had a lot of back and forth about that in the comments for the "harad cavalryman" piece)
I fully agree that the Variags might originally have been a type of men we would normally define as "Western". Sauron had begun to corrupt Men even before he approached Celebrimbor to forge the rings of power. The Oathbreakers of the White Mountains were Dunnish-style men who despite their dealings and alliance with Gondor still refused to face the Dark Lord for fear of his wrath. And this was west of Mordor, not to its immediate south or east. (The White Mountains were not that far from Mordor as the crow flies either.) Plus as Tolkien states, people are responsible for their own choices, whatever talk of Fate might be. SOme Northmen or DUnnish stock or quasi-Turkish folk could have chosen poorly based on greed or fear, and been drawn in.
well I've got some opinions about the largely antagonistic, haleth-descended men of dunland, and tolkien's treatment of them (more extensive than i really care to reiterate at the moment, but if you're interested there's a long back and forth between me and elrond peredhel about that in the comments for "Harad Cavalryman")