You're Byoodiful in Your Wraff

 

Genghis Khan.  The name conjures up blood-lust and plunder, barbarism and cruelty.  Deservedly so, in some respects.  But historically, the Mongol horde brought a lot less proverbial rape and pillage and a lot more cultural synthesis, engineering skills, and adaptive political function than the popular imagination credits them with.  Absent the Mongols, we quite possibly would never have witnessed the Russian, Indian, or Chinese empires, or the European Renaissance – what we think of, in other words, as the birth of the modern world. 

I picked up a couple of books, lately.  Following on my recent interest in the Ottomans (provoked, I imagine, by Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague), and because nobody seems to know where the Ottomans came from, or how they got where they got, beforehand, I went back a little in time, to the nomadic horse tribes of the Great Steppe.  This biome reaches from Ukraine to Manchuria, and it’s figured for centuries in proto-European history.  In one instance, the Achaeans, the Homeric Greek warriors of the Trojan War, were driven south out of the grasslands above the Black Sea and the Caspian by somebody even more ferocious, and those Greek tribes settled along the coast, driving out or assimilating the earlier Mycenaeans, whose mother culture was Crete.  There have been successive historic waves of predatory nomad armies, Scythians, Huns, Mongols, and the peopling of Europe and India (the Celts, the Mughals) is one result.  Looking beyond a Euro-centric view of history, we see not the barbarian periphery, but a creation myth. 

The two books I’ve been reading, not back-to-back, but in tandem, are Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford, and Empires of the Steppes by Kenneth Harl.  Weatherford’s book is the more readable, in part because it’s more manageable, even though it includes most of the 13^th century.  Harl’s book is more unwieldy, covering more ground, in time from Cyrus the Great to Tamerlane, but also literally, across Eurasia.  Reminiscent of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, they take it as a given that human migration – cultures, tools, and diseases – move on an east-west axis, like the animal herds before them.

I was fascinated by the Mongols after I read Harold Lamb’s bio of Genghis.  (I was ten or eleven, I’m guessing.)  They rode with their knees, their arms and hands free, and they shot from horseback with compound bows, reinforced with horn, more powerful than the English longbow that defeated the French cavalry at Crecy.  On forced march, legend had it, Mongol horsemen would open a vein in their horse’s neck and drink the blood rather than stop and pitch camp.  They were beyond imagining.  It wasn’t that they were savage, or not that alone; it was that they were implacable.

I’d be the first to admit that The Conqueror (1956) was a disappointment.  Everybody makes fun of the casting, of course.  Wayne is just not the right actor, and he was later embarrassed when anybody brought the picture up.  The only person whose dignity survives even partly intact is Pedro Armendariz, and that’s being charitable.  Still, did we expect historical accuracy?  Robert Taylor in Ivanhoe.  I rest my case.  (Or for jaw-droppingly atrocious, there’s the Omar Sharif version of Genghis, best passed over in silence.)  The real problem with The Conqueror is that it trivializes the whole Mongol thing: the blood-drinking and fermented mare’s milk; riding bareback by the age of six; surviving every season of weather, from snow squalls to burning thirst, in a single day - the Eastern Steppe has the greatest extremes of temperature anywhere in the world – because what’s so fascinating about the Mongols is that they thrived in that environment, and created a social, religious, and military culture conditioned by life on the steppe.  And as poor an imitation as The Conqueror was, I still tore the ears off my Mickey Mouseketeers hat, and pinned a square of black scarf on it to hang down in back, which was the closest I could get to the Mongol costumes in the movie. 

This recent development seems, first of all, like a kind of vindication.  Maybe we all go through a dinosaur phase, when we’re a certain age, or science fiction (which a lot of us never outgrow), but I’m pleased that the Mongols have come back around into fashion.  There are two parallel strands of historiography going on, here.  One is the movement away from Caesar and Napoleon, and an emphasis on the farriers and quartermasters that kept armies on the move.  There’s a famous French guy, Braudel, the founder of the Annales school, who believes the groundlings give us a better picture of the past than the emperors.  This idea led me to a book called The Lisle Letters, about a merchant family’s rise to power under the Tudors, and a revealing social portrait of the era.  The second shift in thinking about history is a de-emphasis of the European.  This appears to have taken hold only since around the year 2000.  We see, for example, new histories of the Americas that don’t talk primarily about what happened after Columbus and the conquest.  And looking east of the Urals, we discover our own deeper heritage.  The horse tribes of the steppe are in our race memory, back behind the curtain, and we can pull it aside. 

Who wouldn’t want to have these people in their genealogy?  It’s not just opening a vein in the horse’s neck, or the fact that they conquered the known world, it’s that they’re us.  This myth, this memory, is ours.

Tsagaan Sar

Our traditional New Year has come and gone. Some of us sat at home watching celebrations from various parts of the globe on TV and tried to keep our eyes open long enough for the clock to say it was midnight somewhere and that a new year had rolled in. Others, no doubt, went to parties and celebrated this year's turnover to the next with friends, libation, snacks and loud noise making. Either way, the past was hopefully behind us and we looked forward to a good future. New Year's resolutions were probably made with the best of intentions and then sometimes broken before the week was out. And that pretty much covered most of the Western World as we know it.

Musician with Horse Head Fiddle

On the other side of Mother Earth, in the vast northern steppes of Asia, is an ancient celebration continued on into present times for their new year. For centuries, the Mongols have gathered in large groups to sing, eat, dance and drink to celebrate an occasion known to them as Tsagaan Sar, or the white moon, the first day of their new year. One of their biggest festivals, it comes during January or February, and is celebrated two months after the first new moon following the winter solstice.

At these large gatherings, small bands of people see relatives again after long absences and also meet other Mongols they had not previously known. Many times, a celebrant met his or her future spouse at one of the Tsagaan Sar celebrations. The traditional greeting at this festival can be roughly translated as "Are you rested?" [NOTE: In the old days, if I were resting on New Year's Day, it was probably because I had been over-served, but then that has been Western tradition.]

Days in advance, the women prepare buuz, a dumpling stuffed with minced beef or minced mutton seasoned with salt and onion or garlic. Some flavor their's with rice or cabbage or various herbs according to personal tastes. The dumplings are then frozen until ready for eating, at which time they are steamed. Other dishes eaten are dairy products, rice with curds or raisins, a grilled side of sheep and a large platter filled with traditional cookies formed into a mountain or pyramid. Airag, fermented mare's milk, is served and gifts are exchanged.

The Communist government once banned Tsagaan Sar and tried to replace it with a Collective Herder's Day, but after the 1990 Democratic Revolution in Mongolia, the Mongols returned to their old holiday and they still celebrate it today.

A Ger, or traditional Mongol residence

Bituun, the name for their day prior to the new year day, is a time for cleaning around the home and for herders to clean their livestock buildings in order to have a clean start. This day is also a time for the immediate family to be together before the large celebration of Tsagaan Sar begins. Candles are burned and three pieces of ice are placed near the doorway so that the horse of the deity who visits each household that night can have something to drink. All old issues for the Mongols are settled and all debts for the year repaid by this day, so as to start out the new year with a clean slate.

My reason for researching the Mongols was that early on I had inserted a little Nogai boy into my Armenian series as a piece of local flavor for some of the many peoples residing on the steppes along the Terek River during the mid-1800's. Then later at a breakfast with my editor in NYC one April, I happened to ask if there was anything she would like to see in my future writing. She immediately replied, "Yes, a story from the POV of the little Nogai boy." Prior to that, the kid only had a few lines of narrative at best in any of the stories. Now, he had to have his own story. Much research soon followed.

SHORT HISTORY: After the death of Genghis Khan, the Mongols separated into two groups: the greater horde also known as the Golden Horde, and the lesser horde also known as the Nogai Horde which carried the name of their general. Now you know where the name Nogai came from.

Anyway, this once-minor character, the little Nogai boy, soon ended up with his own story. Being an orphan on the frontier, he needed to be tough, so I named him Timur, the old Turkish word for iron. The editor bought this story and it became a Derringer Nominee in 2011. Well, there's your history lesson on Mongol culture and one of the characters in my Armenian series.

Hope all of you have an excellent and prosperous new year.