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Does the Bush Protect the
Little Bird?
For little birds hoping for
refuge, by and large, the odds are not really good. Cao Zhi and Prince
Rakoczi escaped with their lives, but the Chinese poet had to sit
helplessly and watch while his friends, one by one, were murdered by the
his brother the Emperor. (The almost mawkish pathos of the poem here is
very rare in the Chinese poetry). Temujin escaped too, but he
devoted his life to tracking his enemies down and killing them. He was
not a sparrow, but the fiercest of sparrowhawks, and from him there was
no refuge.
700 year old jokes from a
Syrian bishop
Bar Hebraeus’
Chronography, one of the major sources on Mongol Persia, is also
multi-cultural, relating the histories of the Hebrews, the Chaldeans,
the Medes, the Persians, the pagan Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines,
the Arabs, and the Mongols -- called Huns. (Another historian of Mongol
Persia, Rashid ad-din, also wrote histories of China and Western
Europe). A peculiarity of the Chronography is that it uses two
dating systems, the Muslim system and a second system which dated events
from the foundation of Alexander’s Greek Empire in Persia -- which had
been defunct for 1400 years. (Presumably because of their Monophysite
Christology, the Jacobites did not start their calendar with the birth
of Christ).
Why Marco Polo Didn't See
the Great Wall
One of the Wood's arguments is that
Polo doesn't mention the Great Wall of China. However, the wall we know
was built by the succeeding Ming Dynasty, after the Mongol Yuan dynasty
had collapsed, and Waldron has argued that the "Great Wall" as such did
not exist before the Ming. . There were, in fact, military walls in
existence at the time of the Mongol conquest, but they were differently
located than the Ming wall and much less impressive. Furthermore, since
these walls were built to protect China from the Mongols, the Mongols
tore many of them down.
Gabriel Ronay: The Lost
King of England
The usurping minister Harold Godwinson became the
leader of the Anglo-Saxon party in court, and ultimately became King --
though he almost immediately lost his throne to one of the other
claimant, William the Conqueror of Normandy. (The fourth claimant was
Harald Hadrada of Norway -- and Constantinople -- who was defeated at
Stamford Bridge a few days before the Battle of Hastings). Before I read
this book I already knew a fair amount about 1066 and all that, but I
never had heard of Edward and Edgar. Ronay’s book fleshes out their
story, and in the process gives us a vivid picture of the
eleventh-century northern-European world.
The Politics of Genghis Khan:
Conclusions
Genghis’s Mongols had a unique
and paradoxical position in the world described by Tilly: the lowest
accumulation and concentration of capital of any nation, combined with the
highest concentration of coercive power of any nation. They were coercion
specialists who produced barely enough to keep themselves alive. But
because of their military skills and organizations, they were able to
reconfigure the Eurasian political world.
The Coming of the Age of Iron
This book, together with Robert Drews’
The End of the Bronze Age (Princeton, 1993) makes it pretty clear
that iron and steel didn’t make anything happen. The rise of iron roughly
coincided with a series of invasions which brought down many of the
empires of the Eastern Mediterranean (notably Troy), but the evidence
tells us that the invasions came first, and that the heavily militarized
conquering nations afterwards developed steel technology for military
uses. During the nineteenth century it was often thought that
technological changes (or access to resources) caused social changes, but
nowadays it is more often thought, as in this case, that the social
changes led to the increased exploitation of already-existing technology
and resources.
Drakon and Solon
From a contemporary ideological point of view, the Athenian venture is
interesting. In Athens the republican state and the individual (and to a
degree, the market society) emerged simultaneously -- at the expense of
myth, tradition, and the extended family. Individualism was made possible
by the new state form, but this state form also forbade citizens to act on
their desires for revenge and required them to restrain their
impulses toward self-assertion. And finally, in Athens equality
consisted of extending to commoners the old rights or privileges of the
nobility (e.g. jury service, and the right to bring cases to trial),
rather than simply stripping the nobles of their privileges and thus
attaining a servile equality.
Silk and memes
Relic-worship and related
practices are not part of the scriptures of Buddhism, Christianity, or
Islam, and insofar as they relate to these three doctrines, they seem more
to be contrary to it than otherwise. And in fact these practices, which
were heavily intertwined with magic and superstition, were often condemned
by the orthodox when they first appeared
Starting from Greenland
(or, the Turkish Kayak)
"Kayak" is probably a
Turkish word, and the word "caique" has entered the European languages
from Turkish as the name of an entirely different boat. The two words met
in Scandinavia ca. 1700, having circumnavigated the globe between them. The Ivory Road
from Greenland to China ca. 1000 AD. The Varangian (Norse) circumnavigation of Europe
at the time of the Fourth Crusade.
Rome and Turkey
The migrations of Rome, and where did
the turkey get its names, and why do some peoples call Turkey "Rome",
and what's the difference between "Romanian" and "Rumanian" in Romanian,
and where is Guinea, anyway?
Murder Most Foul:
Chinggis Qan's Mother Speaks
The first recorded act of Temujin
(the future Chinggis Qan) was the murder of his half-brother Bekter.
In the Secret History we can read the eloquent speech his
mother Ho'elün made when she heard the news. It seems like a bitter
denunciation, but in the context of the book as a whole it functions as a
prophecy that Temujin would prove overwhelming and irresistible, and
become the greatest of Qans. (Includes Mongol text of
Ho'elün's oration.)
2000 years of
Barbarians
My 4000-word attempt to summarize
the role of the Steppe Barbarians in the military and political history of
Eurasia from 700 BC to 1300 AD. For
2000 years, the steppe brought order and disorder to the civilized world.
The Barbarian Reservoir:
The barbarian invaders from the steppe have been compared to reservoirs
(geothermal, electrostatic, or thermodynamic), volcanoes,
lightning, storms, black holes,
and wombs. Their real nature and their actual relationship to civilized
society have been properly understood by very few. For two thousand
years they shaped civilized society from the uncontrolled steppe as a
threat, and between about 200 A.D. and about 1300 A.D. almost all of the
civilized world came under barbarian control.
"History
of the Caucasian Albanians"
"Bestial, gold-loving tribes of
hairy men.... demented in their satanically deluded tree-worshipping
errors in accordance with their northern dull-witted stupidity, addicted
to their fictitious and deceptive religion....They also had drinking horns
and gourd-shaped utensils from which they lapped their broth and similar
greasy, congealed, unwashed abominations. Two or three of them to one cup,
they greedily and bestially poured neat wine into their insatiable bellies
which had the appearance of bloated goatskins..... Possessing completely
anarchical minds, they stumble into every sort of error, beating drums and
whistling over corpses, inflicting bloody sabre and dagger cuts on their
cheeks and limbs, and engaging naked in sword fights – oh hellish sight! –
at the graves, man against man and troop against troop, all stripped for
battle.
Pre-Idiocentrism Writings:
The Nomads of
Eurasia:
(To be revised; partly superseded by "The Barbarian Reservoir" and "2000
Years of Barbarians" above.)
Who were the Mongols?
How should the term "Mongol" be
understood when speaking of the Mongol Empire?
Master Bibliography
on The Mongol Empire, Central Asia, Eurasian Travellers, the History of
War, and the Barbarian World
Sheng-wu Qin-zheng
Lu:
An annotated translation of the Sheng-wu Qin-zheng Lu beginning where
Pelliot and Hambis left off, and continuing as far as Temujin's
proclamation as Chinggis Qan.
The Steppe
Barbarians in Eurasia: a sketch:
(mostly superseded by "The Nomads in
Eurasia" and "Who were the Mongols?" above)
The Rise of
Chinggis Qan
A very tentative sketch.
The Secret History
of the Mongols as a Historical Source:
Delivered at the 2002 ASPAC Conference, and heavily revised.
The
Secret History of the Mongols and Western Literature
(published
as
Sino-Platonic Papers
#135, May, 2004.): some stories in the
Secret History which relate to stories in the Western tradition -- with a
closing comparison between the Western European feudal aristocracy and the
nomads.
All original material copyright John J.
Emerson
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