13 August 2016

Challenges of Researching Mongols, and Strategies I Employ

I'm going to take a second to talk through why I usually take what probably looks like a ludicrously roundabout way to piece together information for my persona.  I think it's a good reminder that not all topics are created equal, and also to demonstrate that sometimes you've just got to work smart to get where you want to be.

The Big Thing to Remember about the Mongols is that for much of their early history, even into the start of their Golden Age, they were an illiterate culture.  That's not to say that they didn't have any culture, or stories, or beliefs.  It is only to point out that they used oral tradition to pass these stories, information and skills between generations.

The lack of a first-person written record does not typically come from the Mongols, but rather their enemies and subjects from settled (and literate) cultures.

Towards the end of Temujin (aka Genghis Khan's) life, there is evidence of a growing literacy, and the use of different alphabets, with a preference in some places to use the alphabet used by the Uighars, others the Chinese and many places Arabic.  The Chinese and Arabic are the ones I see most often in my own research, given when I look at and when it is, but it's not uncommon to see Sogdian (Uighar, in the reference above) Vertical on some artifacts, like the Mongol "Passport".

In some ways, what that leaves a researcher with is a couple options.  The first is to just focus on when the Achievement Unlock screen pops up and study only after Mongol literacy.  It makes things easier in terms of knowing you have some good in-culture sources, but it also is like in Legend of Zelda when you suddenly get the hook shot and the entire game is changed for how you play.  You were a bad Zelda player before, but you've got a new and highly useful tool now.

In all honesty, it's what I'm going to have to do for the Mongol Titles project which has evolved out of my Queen's Quest I've written about previously.  The Mongols would have had to have settled before they would have the structure necessary for equivalents, so I have to use well-post grappling hook resources to flesh out the equivalencies chart.  It's frustrating because it's well after I've seen most people declare their Mongol personae (including me), but it's the best I've got to work with at my disposable.  Hopefully, a future Mongol will come along with better access and resources, and more research will be done by the professional academics that us amateur historians can rely on.  Until then, that's where that is.

Focusing back, though, the biggest roadblock I usually encounter is that I have to use other people's accounts and depictions to figure out what is going on with Mongol "stuff".  It's something I've written a bit on before, but it's worth retouching.

There's a great example of the strain a researcher has to go through when looking at "unskewing" a resource, as much as that's impossible. When Americans first began knocking on the door of Japan for trade, their looks were copied onto woodcuts.  You can see some here.

This is what analyzing another culture's clothes look like when you're been completely ignorant to their existing in the first place.  All you have is what you already wear to compare it to, so you make your best guess and hope.

This is pretty well expressed in Persian miniatures.  The Mongols came roaring through, sacked a bunch of their cities, took over their empire and installed themselves in a governmental system.  It was highly traumatic for any culture and country, but especially since the knowledge of the Mongols was minimal at best.

So, you need to depict your new leaders, but you don't know what they're wearing?  Well, that's where some license comes in.  You can see some basic construction, but their weaving is odd to you, the fit is a little different and there are other things.  So, you make an exaggeration -- a sleeve here, a waist there -- until you've got something of a hybrid.  Not quite Persian, but not quite Mongol, either.

This means that you need to look at many sources from different places and see what they have in common.  That's why my Mongol tends to be baggier with a definite square construction.  It's the most in-common aspects of the trends I see across the miniatures.

This also translates to needing more resources to feel confident, if you're like me.  In my best garb and garb ideas, I pull from multiple sources, in multiple cultures and sometimes across time.  Part of that is a cultural sensitivity concern (Mongol express tribal affiliation through their deel) and part of it is to generically show what a Mongol of the 13th to 14th century could have looked like.  There's scant graves and there's even fewer Mongol first-person depictions, especially with pictures.

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