My early research into this theory is getting off to a little bit of a slow start, admittedly. It's turned into a bigger undertaking than I was imagining.
As with any culture, I'm recoiling to treat it as a monolith. Having seen the misconceptions of a monolithic and unchanging Mongolian culture permeate not only history texts but also SCA reenacting, I want to make sure I have a good understanding of the basic precepts, while also not getting into the real intricacies of a culture which isn't my entire focus.
As any hobbyist, I'm prone to fall down rabbit holes of research, as well, taking me off course. I'm deeply and sincerely interested in all of the aspects of what I'm looking at, but I need to keep my focus so I'm not chasing ducks and losing where I want to go and what I really want to accomplish with this project.
To that end, I found a great article from my JSTOR searching which has given a great baseline for how Persians depicted social class during the transitional period into the Il-Khanate.
Not only does the author give the physical positioning and its relation to understood implications of social class, but also he describes the clothing (with the miniatures' images) which also help in decoding the ways in which differing classes dressed. He does this with both Persians and Mongols within the text.
I plan to use this resource to compare with my own collection of Mongols in miniatures I've cultivated on Pinterest.
I'm hoping, using the same journal's archives, to find a more recent source which does the same breakdowns. While fantastic, the source was published in 1959 and I'd like to find out if theories and practices for decoding miniatures has changed over the ensuing decades.
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