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Nomadic Empires
Question
What is meant by the term ‘barbarian’?
Solution
The term ‘barbarian’ is derived from the Greek barbaros which meant a non-Greek, someone whose language sounded like a random noise: ‘bar-bar’. In Greek texts, barbarians were depicted like children, unable to speak or reason properly, cowardly, effeminate, luxurious, cruel, slothful, greed and politically unable to govern themselves.
The stereotype passed to the Romans who used the term for the Germanic tribes, the Gauls and the Huns. The Chinese had different terms for the steppe barbarians but none of them carried a positive meaning.
Question
What are the sources of nomadic societies?
Solution
The steppe dwellers themselves usually produced no literature, so our knowledge of nomadic societies comes mainly from chronicles, travelogues and documents produced by city-based litterateurs.
These authors often produced extremely ignorant and biased reports of nomadic life.
Question
Who had done the most valuable research on the Mongols? Describe.
Solution
Perhaps the most valuable research on the Mongols was done by Russian scholars starting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the Tsarist regime consolidated its control over Central Asia.
This work was produced within a colonial milieu and was largely survey notes produced by travellers, soliders, merchants and antiquarian scholars.
In the early twentieth century, after the extension of the the soviet republics in the regime, a new Marxist historiography argued that the prevalent mode of production determined the nature of social relations.
Question
What is also mean by the transcontinental span of the Mongol empire?
Solution
The transcontinental span of the Mongol empire also meant that the sources available to scholars are written in a vast number of languages. Perhaps the most crucial are the sources in Chinese, Mongolian, Persian and Arabic, but vital materials are also available in Italian, Latin, French and Russian. Often the same text was produced in two languages with differing contents.
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