#mongol women

[city-of-ladies]

Mongol women at work

"No records account for women specifically working on the postal roads as couriers, although Mongol women often had physically demanding jobs. Alongside elite women sometimes participating in hunting and warfare, women at all levels of society would herd animals and were in charge of packing up wagons to move camp.

Additionally, Yuan governmental policy assigned specific jobs required for the smooth running of the empire to households (for example, post-road couriers), which meant that if a man was not available to do a job (due to absence or death), women would be obliged to step into the role assigned to her family.

In the record Heida Shilüe 黑韃事畧 (A Sketch of the Black Tatars), the Song dynasty envoy Peng Daya’s 彭大雅 observations from a visit to the Mongol territories in 1233, expanded upon by Xu Ting’s 徐霆 (another Song envoy) record from 1235–1236, both men note that Mongol women did many tasks on horseback. Peng writes, “In horsemanship and archery, babies are tied with cords onto plats which then are fastened onto horses’ backs, so they can go about with their mothers”. Xu Ting elaborates on Peng’s observations with this anecdote:

I saw an old Tatar lady, when she had finished giving birth to a baby in the wilderness. She used sheep’s wool to wipe off the child, then used a sheepskin for swaddling clothes. Binding the baby up in a little cart, four or five feet long and one foot wide, the old lady thereupon tucked the cart crosswise under her arm and straightaway rode off on horseback.

This is a strange story—why would Xu Ting have been in a position to witness a woman giving birth? As his account of the Mongols highlights, the Mongol population that Xu Ting interacted with were post-road couriers during his travels within the empire and personnel at the Mongol court, and it is unlikely that he witnessed a woman giving birth and immediately riding off on her horse to take up courtly duties, so it is plausible that this was a woman he saw who was working along the postal road, filling in for an absent male relative. Therefore, while no specific accounts of women postal couriers exist, in reading between the lines of Xu Ting’s narrative, the possibility of women postal workers in the Yuan becomes more likely."

Riders in the Tomb: Women Equestrians in North Chinese Funerary Art (10th–14th Centuries), Eiren L. Shea

[meirimerens]

the pathologic Kin is largely fictionalized with a created language that takes from multiple sources to be its own, a cosmogony & spirituality that does not correlate to the faiths (mostly Tengrist & Buddhist) practiced by the peoples it takes inspirations from, has customs, mores and roles invented for the purposes of the game, and even just a style of dress that does not resemble any of these peoples', but it is fascinating looking into specifically to me the sigils and see where they come from... watch this:

P2 Layers glyphs take from the mongolian script:

while the in-game words for Blood, Bones and Nerves are mongolian directly, it is interesting to note that their glyphs do not have a phonetic affiliation to the words (ex. the "Yas" layer of Bones having for glyph the equivalent of the letter F, the "Medrel" layer of Nerves having a glyph the equivalent of the letter È,...)

the leatherworks on the Kayura models', with their uses of angles and extending lines, remind me of the Phags Pa Script (used for Tibetan, Mongolian, Chineses, Uyghur language, and others)

some of the sigils also look either in part or fully inspired by Phags Pa script letters...

some look closer to the mongolian or vagindra (buryat) script

looking at the Herb Brides & their concept art, we can see bodypainting that looks like vertical buryat or mongolian script (oh hi (crossed out: Mark) Phags Pa script):

shaped and reshaped...

[ra-horakhty-art]

Happy women's day!

And today mongolian princess Khutulun congratulates you. She was Haidu's daughter, who was a grand grandson of Genghis Khan. Khutulun struggled like a man and ruled armies. She and her father took part in the Civil war in Mongolian Empire.

[mothiir]

Since the Thousand Sons are inspired by the Ancient Egyptians, wouldn't their Primach, Magnus, also have multiple wives, since the pharaohs also did?

Again apologies for the incoming history lore dump but I’ve got to get my moneys worth from my undergrad.

Ancient Egypt covers thousands of years of history - it was an ancient empire when Rome was young, and old enough for there to be ancient Egyptian archaeologists studying even more ancient Egypt. Cleopatra is closer to us than the pyramids timeline wise. All that to say that sweeping statements about Egypt always come with the caveat that it was around for A LONG ASS TIME and therefore morals and behaviours changed as it went on and anything I say isn’t applicable to all of the kingdoms.

having said that: yes pharaohs had multiple wives. They lived in the harem, which was way more than just a collection of consorts for the pharaohs sexual pleasure - the harem was a deeply political institution, where women schemed and plotted and sometimes even murdered to ensure that their son got onto the throne. Women in ancient Egypt had more political power than you might think - they were ofc subject to their husband or son, but it was considered perfectly normal for a woman to rule as regent while her kid matured and sometimes after.

So yes, if Magnus is acting like a pharaoh and if prospero was ancient Egypt (I really don’t know enough about the lore to say if it is or not) he wouldn’t just have multiple wives from the tribes he had conquered or allied with; he would have a harem of women, some of whom served as advisors; others just as mistresses. His sexual prowess would be an important part of his image - because what use is a pharaoh that can’t maintain his harem? In ancient Egypt that ofc meant lots of children, but in 40k it could manifest differently

also just realising that Magnus and leman really are perfectly opposite. Ancient Egypt was a prosperous society governed by the predictable fertile tides of the Nile crescent and thus could maintain a culture unchanged for centuries. Viking era Scandinavia on the other hand was a hard and brutal land, forcing migration and change. Not sure if it’s reflected in canon - again, not read the books - but if they were acting true to their respective cultural influences, Magnus would probably think leman is a strange, changeable creature and leman would see him as an uptight bastard stuck in his ritual and tradition.

[molkolsdal]

“Afghanistan's Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban”

Edited by Nile Green, 2017

[thejackmeister-mongolhistory]

THE MONGOL WOMAN WARRIOR AT MARAGHA, 1221

Ibn al-Athir is one of our key sources on the Mongol invasion of the Khwarezmian Empire. Writing in the 1220s in Mosul, northern Iraq, he was not an eyewitness to the invasion, but was a contemporary who received almost daily reports of Mongol movements and all manner of rumours.

He reports for us a short tale of a Mongol woman who partook in the sack of Maragha in 1221:

"I was told that a Tatar woman entered a house and killed several of its inhabitants, who thought that she was a man. She put down her arms and armour and - there was a woman! A man whom she had taken prisoner killed her." (Ibn al-Athir/D.S. Richards, vol. III, pg. 378.

We have no other clues to the identity of this woman, or if this is anything more than a rumour. A few things broadly support it though;

1) evidently, this woman was so well-armoured that it covered most of her body. Maragha was sacked by Jebe and Subedei; Jebe is in other sources like Zhao Gong (writing around 1221, almost exactly contemporary to the event) noted as "supervising Chinggis' heaviest troops," and was often left in charge of the heavily-armoured vanguard (manglai).

2) In general, the sources note that well-armoured Mongols were the wealthier parts of the army. When Mongol women are noted taking part in combat in some form in these sources, they are almost all Chinggisid princesses and other high-ranking women (Qutulun of course being the most famous example). It seems a privilege allowed to elite women, and it would support her also affording good equipment that almost entirely covered her.

Are we any closer to identifying her? No. If the story is even true (which it might not be!), we might suspect this was a woman of some relative status; not high enough that she would be reported as missing in a chronicle like Juvaini's, but perhaps a daughter of some Noyan who accompanied Jebe in his pursuit of Muhammad Khwarezmshah? As the Mongols would say, only Tengri knows.

I talk about Mongol heavy cavalry in the war against Khwarezm in my latest video:

[nereb-and-dungalef]

when you're doing research for one class and your blorbo from a different class comes up <33

[liberty1776]

What Did Genghis Khan Do With Captured Women?

[fierce-little-miana]

Statue of Hö'elün (Genghis Khan’s mother) in Tsonjin Boldog, Mongolia, not far from her son’s equestrian statue.

[nyc-uws]

Grand Empress Börte (left) and Genghis Khan, more accurately called Chinggis Khan, from a 16th-century book commissioned by Mughal emperor Akbar the Great, who claimed descent from the khan. The Metropolitan Museum/Public Domain

The Women Who Ran Genghis Khan’s Empire From fighting in the army to managing the kingdom, women were key players in every aspect of the Mongol Empire. by Sarah Durn May 26, 2022

In 1178, a 17-year-old Mongol woman married a man she hardly knew. And while her husband traveled and fought and conquered, she ruled those who remained in Mongolia, managing every aspect of daily life in a massive nomadic camp. Commanders and shepherds alike reported to her, and she coordinated complex seasonal migrations of thousands of people and their livestock. At 28, she became the Grand Empress of the Mongol Empire; her name was Börte.

Börte’s husband, Chinggis Khan (also known, based on the Arabic transliteration, as Genghis Khan), receives all the glory for founding the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known, but Börte and her immense contributions have been largely forgotten. While their husbands fought in distant, years-long military campaigns, Börte and other Mongol women kept the empire running. Some women also rode to war. Khutulun, Chinggis Khan’s great-great-granddaughter, would swoop down on the enemy “as deftly as a hawk,” wrote Marco Polo.

Atlas Obscura spoke with Central Asia scholar Anne Broadbridge, author of Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire, about the many roles women had in the Mongol Empire, how society perceived them, and the rise of perhaps the most powerful woman of the medieval world: Töregene.

What were the responsibilities and tasks of the Mongol women in charge of camps?

The better question would be what weren’t their tasks. I think we could put it all in the general category of management. [For example,] Chinggis Khan’s senior wife, Börte, is responsible for a camp. She’s responsible for their home, the yurt or ger that they live in. She’s responsible for the kids. If merchants come through, she’s going to talk to them about economic activity. She is going to oversee or perform the typical daily herding activities. There’s food preparation. There’s clothing preparation. There are religious rituals. There’s entertainment. It’s often a woman’s job to be the hospitable partner, to bring in food and welcome guests. And then there’s all the thousand and one little things that everyone does every day—mending things, checking in with people, checking on kids, making sure that the kids aren’t fighting too much, etc.

Furthermore, when the camp had to move from point A to point B, which it did regularly according to season and pasture, women were in charge of that. They organized the procession of carts. They’d drive that long line of carts, often drawn by oxen or yaks. When they arrived, they would place the yurts in the correct order, set them up, etc. So without women running the place where Mongols lived, there wouldn’t have been a camp for the Mongol men to return to from their military campaigns.

After Chinggis Khan’s death in 1227, many women rose to power. Why?

Succession is very complicated. But women can take over, in theory temporarily but sometimes not really temporarily, on behalf of some man, usually a son of their own.

So in the case of Töregene, who became regent of the entire Mongol Empire after the death of Chinggis Khan’s son Ögedei, or in the case of Sorghaghtani, who maneuvered her son to be the ruler of the entire empire, they’re functioning as senior widows who are regents for men. That’s perfectly acceptable in (their) nomadic society.

Khutulun, the great-great-granddaughter of Chinggis Khan and a fierce warrior, inspired the 20th-century opera Turandot. Public Domain

How did Töregene become regent of all Mongolia, around the year 1241?

She had remarkable skills. She enters the family in a very disadvantageous position. Chinggis Khan’s army kills her husband and she becomes a trophy wife for the third son of Chinggis Khan and Börte, Ögedei, who succeeds his father as overall Great Khan. Töregene isn’t even the senior wife (but) she produces five living sons. The senior wife produced no children. So sort of by default Töregene rises up. By the time Ögedei himself died, she was in a position to take over as the actual senior wife. So she wrote to all of the senior members of the family when her husband died and said, “Oh my goodness. We have this situation. What shall I do?” They wrote back and said you should be regent until we can get together and decide who will be the next ruler. So she worked the system very well in her own favor.

Ögedei, her dead husband, had a preference for who should be the next Great Khan. Töregene had a different preference. She wanted her oldest son to be Khan. And so at this big general assembly that she called and hosted and paid for, she managed to lobby successfully for her son to take over—even though this was in opposition to her dead husband’s express will.

A 13th-century stone turtle marks the site of Karakorum, the Mongol Empire’s capital, built in 1235 by Ögedei Khan. After his death, his wife Töregene ruled from here as regent. Wolfgang Kaehler/Getty Images

What was Mongol society’s perception of these powerful women?

We don’t have much [historical material from the Mongols], but what we do have implies acceptance. This is the way things are. Women have authority. They do certain things. You check in with them. You ask their advice. You listen to them when they speak. This is normal. So although outside observers see the amount of authority that some women have in these societies as unusual, for people living in those societies it was normal.

Did Mongol women fight in armies?

[Historians] have indeed found evidence that more than we thought of the Mongol armed forces were, in fact, women—maybe as much as 20 percent. We’re not talking half, but they were there.

What would you like the world to know about Mongol women?

I want people to know how much they mattered. They’re half the story at least. Without Mongol women, there would have been no Mongol conquest, no Mongol empire. There would have been nothing. In Mongol society, you have something like 90 percent of men able to mobilize and engage in warfare. No other contemporary society—not medieval China, not medieval Iran, not medieval Europe—can do that, because men have to do other jobs. They have to be priests, farmers, administrators. In Mongol society, women do all of that stuff. So without women behind the scenes running everything else, men would not have gone anywhere.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

-https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mongol-empire-women?utm_source=pocket-newtab

In Atlas Obscura’s Q&A series She Was There, we talk to female scholars who are writing long-forgotten women back into history.

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[lightdancer1]

Last in today's list is Terkhen Khatun:

She was one of the duo that ruled the Empire of Khwarezym, which was a fairly newly consolidated and still fragile great Iranian Islamic state that had the misfortune under her son of executing a couple of Mongolian merchants as the spies they were. She was by far bolder and more heroic than he was, but it did no good and left her to die in isolation and poverty as a prisoner in the Mongolian steppe, where her son was tied into a carpet and stomped to death.

The cruel irony is that being taken alive to die in poverty was a gesture of respect, where turning the coward and fleeing meant that her son, the dude stomped to death in the carpet, earned both scorn and contempt from the hordes of Genghis Khan.

And with the Middle East, as with China and a significant part of Asia the Mongol era can be taken as a watershed between the medieval and modern worlds and the start of the modern age.

[city-of-ladies]

“In the early days of the Eurasian steppe, knowing how to use a bow and ride a horse could be the difference between survival or death. Wolves, enemy tribes, and other dangers lurked everywhere. “You’re pretty much out on the steppe by yourself [so] the men had to learn how to do the women’s jobs and the women had to learn how to do the men’s job,” says May. While men traditionally protected the camp and women cared for the tribe’s herds, everyone had to be ready to pick up the slack, especially if an enemy tribe decided to raid your own. “If you’re living in a group of 20 people and another 20 people ride over the hill and they want what you have, whether that be water or sheep or you name it, anything, it would be silly to have ten of [your] people just sitting on the ground,” says Greenland.

(...)

Before the late 12th century, tribes scattered across the steppe often fought each other, so every warrior mattered. If an enemy tribe decided to raid your camp, everyone, men and women, took up their bows and battle axes to defend their home.”

[meirimerens]

you know i must have been bone-tired when this part of the herb brides lore didn't come to my mind when i discussed how the Kin fundamentally differs from the cultures it is inspired by um There Is The Human Sacrifice part. like it's an important part of pathologic 2 that you are doing human, or anthropomorphic (if you want to see the Herb Brides as closer to spirits, which comes with its own set of problematics regarding how to approach their oppression) sacrifice. it's an important part of pathologic 2 that you kill a woman, as part of the journey and in direct resonance with you ritualistically killing cattle earlier, and she offers herself to you with cultural and religious significance.

human sacrifices have been done across the globe for millennia, but i cannot, for the life of me, find any source at all that mentions the Buryats (since that was the discussion point) partaking in human sacrifices by the turn of the 19th-early 20th century (or even anything past the 16th). every single source mentioning offerings and sacrifices i've read mentions animals, things such as milk and vodka, and often both at once. would love to read anything about these rituals if papers exist, but i'm personally drawing a blank.

the Kin has Obvious and very Visible influences but it also differs from specific (in this discussion's case, the Buryats) or wider (here, turkic/mongolic as a whole) cultures from the area by so many pieces, big and small, that i wouldn't have enough appendages on my whole body to count them all. and sister. i have plenty of appendages.

[american-denim-parano]

[skydaemon]

so we (and by we, i mean the very specific overlap of jews and nerds among whom i make my home) talk a lot about how tolkien's dwarves, in both the books and movies, were likely influenced by certain jewish stereotypes. obsessed with gold/wealth, secretive (especially about their language and religion), refugees from their ancestral home, portrayed with big, sometimes hooked, noses and interesting facial hair, and most specifically: the favourite little meow meows of one particular god, causing them to be shunned and persecuted by other races and creeds. this is likely unintentional, coming from the subconscious of tolkien in the same way orcs were "based on mongols" (ew colonialism) and activating subconscious biases/stereotypes in the people who designed the dwarves for the movies. it's subtext, albeit subtext that influenced the next eighty years of fantasy.

but what i don't see much discussion of is the fact that in terry pratchett's discworld, it's intentional. terry pratchett's dwarves are, more or less, jews.

carrot is a human adopted by dwarves, based on human standards. but within dwarf culture, he IS a dwarf. specifically, he has undergone specific rituals and memorised certain passages, making him LEGALLY a dwarf. this is basically how conversion works in judaism. indeed, as in judaism, it's considered rude to even mention that carrot is six feet tall and obviously wasn't born into the culture he has adopted.

the dwarves also have internal rifts - there are a group of 'orthodox' dwarves who consider the dwarves in ankh-morpork (who have adopted other customs and don't follow traditional roles) not to be dwarves at all, and don't recognise carrot as a dwarf for the same reason. they believe that the way to be a dwarf is to live in an all-dwarf community and follow their traditional rules, while other dwarves believe they need to change with the times and integrate (at least somewhat) with larger society. jewish as fuck.

there's also the interaction of dwarves with gender. when cherie comes out as female (which isn't a recognised gender by dwarvish society) she is ostracised for taking on the feminine roles common to other discworld races. however, she could never THINK of cutting off her beard, because she is still a dwarf. i see parallels with women in judaism taking on roles traditionally considered 'masculine' (e.g., as rabbis, wearing tallit and kippot) and the acceptance of queer people into jewish communities. there's lots of great discussion about cherie as a trans character on tumblr, btw.

finally, something that particularly strikes me is the line from carrot in tfe, where he says that the biggest dwarf city on the disc is ankh-morpork. obviously all diaspora communities can relate, but it's really something to know that new york is the city with the most jews in the world (960k to jerusalem's 570k. btw, 3rd is LA!).

i just love that, again, consciously or unconsciously, pratchett incorporated more positive elements of jewish culture into his portrayal of the dwarves.

[carigradmergen]

Three girls from across the vast Eurasian steppe, and their really, really tall headdresses!

From left to right: the Russian kokoshnik, the Kazakh saukele, and the Mongol boqtaq.

BTW boqtaqs and kokoshniks could be worn by both married women and brides, while saukeles are normally only worn by brides in their weddings.