#mongol tag

[caesarsaladinn]

Öljaitü, the Ilkhanid shah (r. 1304-1316), was apparently raised Buddhist, converted to Christianity at age 10, subsequently converted to Sunni Islam as a young adult, became taken with Shiism after his coronation, later considered switching to his ancestral Tengrism, and possibly returned to Sunnism before he died at age 34. nobody was doing it like the Mongols

[caesarsaladinn]

did this stupid movie kill off Genghis Khan immediately after he killed Jamukha? come the fuck on. why make a movie about the world-conqueror and exclude all the world-conquering parts? artistic license does not remotely cover this

[caesarsaladinn]

oh fuck, Jochi is in this show. that's neat, I've never seen him anywhere

[caesarsaladinn]

People wondering “what if women ruled the world?” make me remember that brief period around 1242, when the height of the Mongol Empire was controlled almost totally by women... who took power and immediately set about annihilating each other’s dynasties by any means necessary.

[caesarsaladinn]

With what might be considered a professional linguist's capacity to analyze the phonetics of the other languages, [Phagspa] produced a script that beautifully meets the demands of phonetic accuracy and graphic simplicity. Some scraps of other languages of the time transcribed in Phagspa, still extant, are so phonetically precise that modern linguists treasure them as the only accurate evidence for the sounds of those languages as then spoken.

Re the recent pinyin discussion: apparently Kublai Khan commissioned a Tibetan monk to write a new universal alphabet in the 1260s, apparently it was really good, and apparently it was hardly used at all.

[caesarsaladinn]

Tangentially related, but Mongolia is currently switching back to its traditional alphabet right as Inner Mongolia is switching away from it.

[caesarsaladinn]

That Sima Yi post reminds me of the time Kaidu Khan had his men light ten thousand campfires so they would seem like a much larger force; his cousin Kublai Khan saw the fires and knew something was fishy, but he didn’t know what was fishy, so he turned around and marched away.

(It’s even better if you know that Kaidu and Kublai’s grandfather Genghis Khan had used that exact tactic to great effect, so both cousins were fully aware of the strategy beforehand.)

[caesarsaladinn]

Ah fuck Bret Devereaux uses the (very correct) spelling of “Chinggis Khan,” I love him even more now