Supply Chains

The last posting here was a bit of a crisis point for me.  I was looking down at what I was doing and I really, deeply was not feeling it.  I was wavering and wiggling all around trying to figure out why, within the context of what I was doing.  I was toying with dropping the whole thing, but not entirely seriously at that point.

Then, I made a trip to Barnes & Noble, because where else does a lost nerd go but to a place filled with information.  I went there to pick up a bullet journal, but of course, left with a new book on the Silk Road.  It's titled The Silk Road: A New History -- link takes you to B&N (I do not have sponsors; I get no personal gain from recommendations).

Normally, this would be an entirely unremarkable event.  When I go to book stores, I typically scour their Asian history section/subsection to see what they have within my research wheelhouse.  I have a decent digital archive, but I like actual books on real paper.  I'm a highlighter and margin note taker.  I can print out what I have digitally, but it's easier if it comes printed.

This time, though, it's caused a big shift.  But first, a little background.

In my real life, I work in supply chain.  I'm one of the many people who ensure that the products you want from a specific retailer is available for purchase in your area.  Shipping, lead time, demand and vendor of origin are all concepts and challenges I contend with on a daily basis for our modern infrastructure.  I love the intricacies of how products get from here to there -- manufacturer to end customer.  It's one of my main draws to the Silk Routes -- studying how all these goods and peoples changed each other over time.

This book, though "study" could be as easily applicable a word, looks at it from the angle of my current job.  The author looks at what moved along the Silk Roads in central and eastern Asia -- through sifting the old refuse pits for goods, wares and manifests.

It all unlocked at that point, for me. A specific focus on a specific hypothetical person is the wrong kind of narrow for me -- unfolding the character isn't what speaks to me.  What I love are the things that make his environment: what language or languages did he speak - what did they sound like and how did they operate grammatically; what stuff would he consider normal and where did it come from; who would he had bought it from; what would be exotic and interesting but not entire abnormal?

I've decided a change in focus would do me good, at least for now.  I'm going to dive into the operations of the Silk Routes and related trading routes.  How did they work?  How did folks typically travel before selling a good? What impact does political stability have on those distances?

I've already uncovered some clues -- the author of the book which kicked this off contends most traders traveled pretty exclusively between 2 to 3 cities (i.e. buy X, sell Y in New York; buy Y and sell X in Philadelphia).  I want to see what other people who study this have seen to see if this is a prevalent or niche idea.

I'm gripped and fascinated in a way I haven't been for a while.  This is a good sign to me, so I'm going to follow the road to see where it takes me.

Best Ideas at Night

There's a word-on-the-street maxium that says some of your best ideas and thoughts happen when you're least expecting them -- in the shower, right before falling asleep, when driving on the open road and the like.  Any time when your mind can bring those twisty-turny thoughts more to the front and start to do some untying and solving.

I had one of those moments last night while drifting to sleep related to research.

With the new direction, I've been feeling a bit adrift and so have lost a bit of my researching mojo.  I am still utterly fascinated by the Yuan dynasty era Mongols, so I'm not feeling a persona change or anything drastic.  It's more that I haven't been able to dedicate myself to making a game plan on incorporating new information and approaches.

It's made it especially difficult to read the newer research information I've compiled because I've been struggling with where it "fits" in what I'm looking at.  It feel both relevant and irrelevant to what I'm doing, and the ambiguity is sapping my ability to focus when I have the chance.  The little voice in my back of my head says "and this helps you how?" and I'm having a time understanding not only the "why" of the question but actually answering it.

Last night, I think I solved it, but it requires some work to make a frame on which to hang everything.

The new direction is more than just looking at stuff out of the ground.  I've oversimplified it because it's easier to talk about it that way, before refining the idea.

The new direction is a holistic look at the material and other cultural aspects of the idea of my persona.  So, more than "what all did you wear?" it's also "what all did you eat? what would your social standing be? how did you get there? what's your religious background? what languages would you speak?" and other related questions.

So, instead of a deep dive into a narrow subject, it's a deep dive into a narrow time.

What came to me last night was a pretty simple, though somewhat profound, idea. Literally organizing Erdene's life into departments.

Just like a real department store, they'll bleed into each other like how activewear and formalwear are separate, but the connect through casual clothing.

What I've come up with so far is:

Food: What did he eat? With whom did he eat it? How often could he expect to eat?  Would it have changed moving from the frontier to the heart of the Empire?

Faith: What would his religion probably have been?  What other religions would he had been exposed to?  How did they come together?  Who celebrated what faiths?  Would he have had a different faith than his neighbors? parents? siblings? What were the prevailing philosophies of the time?

Social: What social biases did he have? Would he have been considered a racist by modern standards? How would growing up on the Silk Routs have changed his view of outsiders? Would he be in an ethnically mixed environment, or would it have been homogenous?  Who would he consider 'his people'?  How would he identify his in-groups and his out-groups?

Government: How would he understand his government? Would the government be supportive or oppressive to his religious and other markers? What would have been his most probably role in government?  Who're the major players in the government?  What does the bureaucracy look like (since this is China)?  Who is eligible to be a Civil Servant?

Material: What did he own?  How would he have bought or gotten it?  What are his clothes made of? How are they constructed?  What does he live in?  Is it portable? Is he still nomadic or has he settled?

Again, all of these topics and questions overlap each other and inform each other.  Some can be answered by traditional archaeology, others will need historical study.  But, by having the archaeological study background first, I can use that to do gut-checking on the historian's interpretation of social structures and customs.

Temporary Pause in Updates

I know it's only been a couple weeks, but I wanted to take the opportunity to update you all on the goings on here.

I'm pursuing a new research direction for the Clothing Project and, as a result, I'm in the process of collecting resources and information for the new angle.

I'm shifting, at least for right now, from looking at art, to looking at what's been pulled out from the ground in archaeological digs.  The best way to know who wore what, is to pull it from a grave complex.

As is my typical, I am starting with China's Yuan dynasty.  It's more in my persona's realm, and I've always been more naturally drawn to China.  Persian is hugely interesting and I'm not looking to drop it, don't get me wrong, but my love of all things Sinology is deep and abiding.

This does mean I will need to take a pause while I read and digest what others have found, and their conclusions.  I like to make sure I have a good baseline before I walk off on my own, drawing conclusions and making hypotheses.

I am also in the very beginning stages of forming a class on basic construction of Mongol deel.  The earliest debut would be at Great Northeastern War this summer.  I'd use examples from my own failed garb closet to build on the case, and use a type of visual example not seen frequently: the own teacher's process in learning.

More on that, most likely, before anything else.

Thank you for your patience!

History Is Messy: lessons in research, the hard way

So, I did a little cursory grammatical searching based off of the leads I left myself in my last post on the Titles Project, because this blog is just as much for my own reference as it is for anyone who's reading it to dive into my insanely, esoterically quirky interests.

As a review, I mentioned exploiting the Wikipedia page for Middle Mongol's references.  I went back to that today and one of the links piqued my interest.

Lingua Mongolica is listed as a source on that page.

I was doing a read through on the intro page for them.  There was something that stuck out to me in particular:

The term 'classical Mongolian' technically refers only to the language of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the written Mongolian language was standardised in order to facilitate the translation of Buddhist literature. 

That stuck out to me because non-standard ways of writing, while not unique to Mongolian, means there's no one way, both in spelling and alphabet, to write pre-classical Mongolian.

Now, what that amounts to is a conceit that pre-classical Mongolian, in my case Middle Mongol, is entirely non-standard and, therefor, unreliable.  I had backtracked my way into figuring that out previously, but seeing a source explicitly state as much is both comforting and frustrating.

There's more that also piqued my interest here in the resource (emphasis mine):

The focus of Lingua Mongolia is not strictly the classical language but rather the literary language of the Mongols over the last eight hundred years; from the pre-classical Mongolian of the Secret History right up to modern literary Mongolian, as it still exists in Inner Mongolia. It is worth noting however that the term classical Mongolian is sometimes used to distinguish Uighur-script Mongolian from the Cyrillic Mongolian used by the Mongols north of the Gobi.

 With that in mind, I could, possibly, use Uighar vertical, sometimes also called Sogdian vertical, script and bring it to "close enough".  Introduction the first source is based specifically in Sogdian vertical, kicking it back into contention.

We'll see how much matches between the notes on Introduction I took and "Lingua Mongolica's" modelling of the language to see what I can suss out.  Introduction is a linguistic basis; I've yet to dig in far enough to see what "Lingua" has.

Continued Research in the Titles Project

I hit a snag with the resource I lifted from yesterday as far as being a truly period (read: pre-1600) resource. Classical Mongolian comes into real life around 1700.  That century is troublesome.

It provides some workable thoughts, but just like Old English, Middle English and Modern English are related, but significantly different, so also is Modern, Classical and Middle Mongolian would suffer many of the same problems.

It's a good launching pad, but I need to find a dictionary and grammatical syntax rules book like Introduction to Classical has.

In an attempt to get things rolling again in a more solid direction, I'm starting with Wikipedia's article on Middle Mongolian as a jumping point.  They list their sources and they're fairly extensive.  While I may find different information from those sources, this is Wikipedia after all, I can get in the dirt in the very least focusing on the language the Mongols of the SCA period actually spoke.

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.

Quick Update on the Quest

I had made a quick mention about checking the College of Heralds for information on what may already be listed.

It's sorely lacking, which is why I'm taking it on as a larger project.  There's clearly a need for this information and it has all come together.

Other, related, thoughts: I'm ditching the Crimean Khanate idea right now.  I may revisit it once I have more resources at my fingertips.

I've also decided to re-up my digital archives access with the Boston Public Library which gives access to all sorts of journals, including through JSTOR.

I'm also going to start putting out some feelers on other people who've done similar with other cultures to see what they've done with it, as well.

My Quest

As stated in my previous post, I was given a quest by Her Majesty to seek out period and persona appropriate titles for Mongol personae when I received my Award of Arms.

I am always looking for new ways to expand my knowledge, so I obliged the quest.  It intersects a lot of less-utilized aspects of my interests when it comes to the SCA. I have a big interest in linguistics, especially historical linguistics. Needless to say, this is entirely in a wheelhouse I never thought I'd ever be able to live in while playing, given the focus on material culture in the SCA.

With all that being said, there are several challenges I'm going to face when it comes to getting everything sufficiently equivalent for my tastes.  Below is a basic breakdown of what I know already, the challenges it's going to present and what I'm thinking right off for how I can overcome them.

First challenge:
Our game uses a European, especially a French/English, structure to titles based off of High Middle Ages Feudalism.  There is an influence of the trade guilds, as well, with Masters and Mistresses for highest level artisans and scholars.  They all come together right around the end of period, to my knowledge.  So, 1550s to early 1600s.  I am not an expert, by any means, in the timelines and the rises and falls of titles and social structures in Europe, given my own focus, but that's the understanding I have.

Added into that, the Mongol people were and, to some extent, still are a nomadic people.  Landed gentry, frankly, didn't exist in period that was home-grown.  Social structure was based off of cultural norms and the military structure.  As the SCA has an independent military structure, it would be less informative and absolutely be a shoe-horn to take military terms for non-military positions (i.e. not Knights and Squires).  The last thing I want to do is be controversial to the Chivalry -- making a new problem to solve an old one.

Strategy
I'm going to take a look at the Mongols who did settle, so post-Chinggis and see what I can find for the governmental structure.  The Mongols held, and held sway, in territories and kingdoms long after the conquests which brought about the Golden Age of Mongols.  In particular, I'm going to be looking at a couple different places and times to see what it has to offer:

(1)Persia
Persia offers a lot in terms of finding what I need.  The largest advantage to Persia is that they did have land owners and a more European style (than, say, Eastern or Indian style) court.  There was the Shah and then those who reported to him; there were levels of nobility and, most importantly, there was both a military and an artistic/scholarly culture home grown in Persia and its environs.

Additionally, when the Mongols invaded and overthrew the Persians, they didn't overthrow the government in its entirety.  What they did was they created what can be thought of as one of the first modern style shadow governments.  It's not an exact match to what we've seen in the Modern era, like with Vichy France during the Nazi Occupation (Did I just Godwin my blog?), but it's definitely a shadow government.

The way it worked, from what I've been able to find, is that the Mongols took the existing structure and added themselves into it.  This is shown in the miniatures (look, overlap) in that there are always Persians and Mongols together and in relatively reflective positions.  In my garb breakdown, which I'll be posting later today, I have a good example of what I mean.

So, what you have, in essence, is that the Mongols would have had their own positions and what I seek is if they would also have had their own titles to go with those positions.  If that's the case, then it's a Mongol-specific title system I can lift and adjust grammatically according to gender.

(2)The Timurids
The Timurids are one of the last great gasps of the Mongols as a huge force in Asia.  They had their own empire and then went on the conquer and become the antecedents to the Mughals in India.  Having land, they would have needed to structure themselves in a way in which I could use a mirror to find approximates.  Then, the same pattern applies as with the Persians -- figuring out how to make it grammatically sound through gender and post.

This is largely a guess in terms of it will work, but I know that Tamerlane had a court and his successors also had them.  It's also another way for an Indian persona to attribute the appropriate titles onto themselves, as India is neither a monolith nor even a single state area until modern times.  And, depending on what you're looking at as "India", it is still a three-state region with India, Pakistan (where the Indus River is actually located) and Bangladesh (former East Pakistan).

This would make the strongest arguments, if it proves out, because it's homegrown completely within the evolving Mongol culture throughout period and so doesn't fall victim to biases in the way that the Persians do.

(3)The Chinese
The Yuan dynasty, oh how I love you. You have given me so much inspiration and knowledge.  It's the material culture I know the most about and was the Mongol cultural area I was most familiar with even before I started in the SCA.

In all truthfulness, I don't know as much as I should about the social structures of Chinese court and dynastic life as I should.  I tend to focus more overall in figuring out where someone sits in a portrait for general social standing than I do with figuring out what all the iconography means beyond know "Emperor" or "Scholar".  The civil society in China goes back thousands of years and the Yuan dynasty is a funny period for China in terms of how it sees itself, largely being eschewed for native rule dynasties.

This would be similar to Persia in application in that the terms and titles would be adapted from the home culture.  The main difference is that the Chinese were subjects of the Mongols directly instead of shadowed by Mongol overseers (more or less).  The terms, however, would be in Chinese.  That works to the advantage that there is no grammatical gender in Chinese, nor is there real structure in number and tense.  The difficulty is that we have to use modern pronunciations to Middle Chinese because of a pictographic writing system.  There isn't an actual way to know if what we're using now were the actually pronounced ways of the language back that far.

(4)The Crimean Khanate 
The Crimean Khanate is a largely forgotten, semi-independent successor state to the Golden Horde.  It existed as a tribute to the Ottomans and was founded in the mid-late 15th century.  It dates to well within period and, with direct contact with the Ottomans as a tributary, would have had ample information if I can find it.

There are several problems with the Crimean Khanate that can cause issue.  First, its position was precarious.  Sandwiched between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, it was hot territory for the Russians to take over, which they eventually did in 1774 according to the linked article.  They existed as a trading outpost on, as you can guess, the Crimean peninsula and its environs.

interesting historical tidbit -- the reason why the area is primarily Russian and not primarily Turkic today is because the Soviets expelled the Turkic peoples to the PR Kazakhstan and then russified the area.  This resettlement makes the area Russian ethnically and is a bit of an antecedent to some of the problems that arouse a couple years ago.  See? History is still relevant, even to contemporary events!

Anyway, my main issue is I know basically nothing about the Crimean Khanate, aside from that it existed, they traded with the Ottomans and they were not liked by the Russians who wanted the warm water port.  It would require a ton of research and, I think, most of the information would be on the wars between the Ottomans and Russians and/or the Crimean Wars much, much later.  It looks, on face, as a historical dead zone.

Second Challenge:
Even if the Mongols were to have been a landed culture on their own, they were not a literate culture until the smashed into other folks by conquering them.  There simply is no way to have one, mass title database for everything that could possibly have been as oral traditions change with changes in cultures.  Think about how Grimm fairy tales changed in records, even when being written down sporadically through the times they were being told in medieval and early-modern Germany.

Lacking a real written record is, of course, a challenge I work around all the time.  I tend to rely on China and Persia, since the biases of the writers are well known.

Strategy
I'm going to continue to use the methods I'm already using. It will be trickier since, instead of using visual reference it will need to be written, but a process part of anything I submit as to how I worked around biases should cover those shortfalls.  It's not perfect, but it can work.

Third Challenge:
I don't know that much about Middle Mongol grammar.  This is a huge area that will require a good amount of study.  Once Mongolian was written down, it was written using Chinese character, Sogdian-Uyghir script and Persian-adapted Arabic.  Later, Mongolian used Cyrillic letters with additional home-grown lettering to capture the phonetics of the language.

Strategy
I've just got to learn the language.  I've already got a request out to Jacquemine van Bel who is not only a great and close pre-SCA friend of mine but a legitimate librarian with the paperwork to prove it.  We're already turning up helpful resources for me to use and, being in the higher education utopia of New England, we should be able to get some good access as she works for a college library.

Upcoming, I'll go more into what I've done so far to reach to these conclusions instead of do something smaller like just run to the College of Heralds site (spoiler: not as helpful as I'd have liked).

On the Class Depiction Thesis

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.

Research Resources and Chivalry

My father is currently involved in a Master's program and so I had asked him what academic databases he had access to for help with my current endeavor.  We're both residents in the greater Boston area and he told me that, with a Boston Public Library membership, I had access to JSTOR and other academic databases free of charge.

Back when I was first developing my persona, mostly doing research into names and Middle Mongolian grammar structures and naming practices (of which I'm still not entirely confident, but that is a project I will delve into at a later time), I spent a great afternoon in the records and journals archive of the BPL and, since I was there I joined the system.  My membership had, in all honestly, languishing as just another card in my wallet until he reminded me of this access.

That night, I went on a JSTOR binge and pulled resources on Persian miniatures, culture and biases before, during and just after the Il-Khanid period.

At the same time, I was reaching out to other contacts I had within Society for help in direction.  I owe a debt of gratitude to Facebook for making it so much easier for me to get going in everything.

From my contacts on Facebook who're playing in the SCA, I was able to get some help both directly and through "telephone".

I've been a longtime internet friend with Jabra'il Attar, who currently resides in the Outlands but is originally from Calontir.  As you can imagine from his persona name, he has a Persian persona and I knew he draws his inspiration for garb from Persian miniatures, with many books -- whether academic or "coffee table" -- on the artform.  He has provided me with some images of foreigners, in particular Mongols, from miniatures.

At the same time, I'm close friends with (the newly) Mistress Elinor Strangewayes.  She's already proven to be a great moral support, given the size of the project I'm undertaking.  I owe the ambitiousness of the project, really, to her encouragement.  She's been a great sounding board for me, especially about my nerves about the project (which will get its own post).

As a recently elevated Laurel, she is still has strong contacts with her former Apprentice Siblings, some of whom are also researching Mongol cultural and arts aspects, and she is close with her former Mistress, Mistress Bess of the Northern Shores.

Mistress Elinor was chatting with Mistress Bess about my research interests and my intentions, and Mistress Bess was kind enough to send some of her research using Persian Miniature as a reference for my research.

I've chatted occasionally with Mistress Bess, but never anything in depth or serious, so I am sincerely thankful for her help, as well.

I'm finding this process, already, to be an eye opening experience regarding the helpfulness, the community and the chivalry of the Society.  I've reached out for guidance and reassurance and I've gotten more than I could even ask for.

I'm humbled by the amazing qualities of everyone who's help me.

Genesis

This blog is dedicated to my research exploits related to the Society for Creative Anachronism.  In Society, I go by Erdene Qadajin, a resident of the East Kingdom residing in the Shire of Quintavia but primarily playing in the Barony of Stonemarche.  I currently have the persona of a 14th to 16th century Mongol from deep in the Asian steppe, but no particular location as of yet.

My latest project came about from a couple different areas.  First, I am admittedly a junky for being authentic.  I like to know what I'm creating and putting on my body is as accurate as can be or can be afforded.  I like to know that that I'm doing and how I'm doing it is a best can be represented in the culture I'm displaying.  It's especially compounded by being one of a small number of the populace with a primary of persona from the Mongol tribes.

Second, I haven't been able to find very many specific resources in the SCA.  Many are introductory and, while that is useful for someone who's "dipping their toes" into making Mongol garb, it becomes less useful as I've tried to develop my persona.  There is extensive research and exampling on European cultures, especially Western Europe and there's a fair amount of research in Islamic cultures (Persian, Mamluk, Abbasyd, Ottoman) with its recent surge in popularity.  However, the resources on an important European contact culture like the Mongols are difficult, if not impossible to find without academic library and database access.

So, I turned to Pinterest for initial inspiration.  Pinterest has a wide array of visual information on Mongols in period (pre-1600) -- from extant examples to Chinese and Persian manuscripts.

As I have assembled my army of resources I noticed something peculiar:
in depictions of Mongols, they are typically shown in plain clothing.  A single color deel, sometimes even lacking the second (short sleeved) deel layer.
in extant Mongol clothing from grave finds, the clothing is rich in color and pattern, often blindingly so even after centuries of degradation of fabric.

My goal in my research is two-fold and broken into large "stages".

Goal one is to figure out why the miniatures depict the Mongols in the way that they do.  My primary focuses are on Persian and Chinese manuscripts -- in particular paintings -- contemporary to the Mongol invasions and occupations of those cultures.

My current theories, which are based on general guidelines, are three-fold.
First, did the artist have enough space to make the patterns associated with extant finds, in the case of miniatures
Second, did the Mongols have Court versus "Day Wear" clothing depending on the task at hand, or is this a symbolism of an emergent Mongol class system
Third, is this propaganda on the part of these cultures to prove their superiority through the arts they created.

My plan is to first start with Persian miniatures, as my personal connections within the SCA are stronger for finding examples.  I need to learn how the Persians depicted social classes and foreigners within their miniatures, and how those models are transplanted onto the pictured Mongols.

If necessary and possible, I will then take that information and cross-compare the miniatures with size dimension to determine if space may also be a factor in details.

Second, I will repeat the process through learning about the Chinese style and applying the same precepts and principles and that culture.

Third, I will take those two cultures and what I've learned and apply it to the extants and what can be learned about the social circumstances of those who wore the garments.

Finally, is an analysis for what this means in terms of SCA persona building and Mongol re-enactors for the focus time period in general.