The article is about remarkable Russian scientist, great orientalist, traveler, thinker Yu.N. Roerich. The author points to diversity of his scientific interests and focuses on the major direction of his activities, characterizing his achievements in each of them. One of the Roerich’s works was the article “Alan squads in the Mongol epoch”, published in the French magazine “Ossetia” in 1933. In this work Roerich praised the military skills of Alans in the Mongol conquest period.