All Mongols recognize their kinship to each other in varying degrees through legend, written history, and especially language. Dialects vary from east to west more than from north to south, but few are unintelligible to other Mongols. Historical change in the language is indicated by the fact that reading The Secret History of the Mongols (mid-13th century), the oldest major document written in Mongol, is for the Mongols of today like reading the work of Chaucer for modern speakers of English. Pan-Mongolism, the desire to reunite politically all the Mongols and always more a romantic than a practical idea, is now a dead issue.The Mongols have always been nomads, though they have also always cultivated crops. However, nomadism is the seasonal movement of livestock and camps from one pasture to another, not unfettered wandering. Nomads have a clear concept of the possession of territory, though they sometimes interpret this in socially conflicting ways. Legend and folklore show that among the premodern Mongols the common people considered livestock to be private property and land to be the collective property of the tribe, while the families of ruling chiefs tried to claim the land as well as individual subjects as their property.Traditional society was based on blood relationship traced through the common male ancestor who gave his name to the clan, though evidence exists of a more ancient system of matrilineal descent. Marriage was forbidden between members of the same clan, giving rise to complicated marriage alliances (and also feuds) among the clans. As clans grew and merged into tribes (often inventing a fictitious common ancestor), the most successful families tended to arrogate to themselves claims to “real” ancestry and, at the same time, to control of the tribal territory, while lesser families could claim ancestry only in a vaguer, tribal sense. In this process weak clans fell to a subordinate but not servile status: they owned their own cattle and had their own headmen but paid tribute to the ruling clan and moved, camped, pastured, and fought under its orders.Political and military organization was matched to the family-clan-tribe pattern. Every man who could ride and bear arms was both a herdsman and a soldier according to the need of the moment. Raiding other tribes to capture cattle, women, and prisoners was a recognized method of property accumulation. When a tribe rose to notable power, however, as in the time of Genghis Khan in the 13th century, a decimal form of military organization was adopted, with units of 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000. Commanders of large units were assigned territories from which they drew the tribute to the supreme khan and mustered their quotas of troops. Mongol history fluctuates between such periods of feudal concentration and those of tribal dispersion.The first mention in the Chinese chronicles of tribes that can be identified with Mongolia goes back in a shadowy way to the 2nd millennium BC. The first inhabitants of whom there is certainty, however, are the Xiongnu, in about the 5th or 4th century BC. It was once thought that they were Turks, or at least Turkic-speaking, but the opinion has grown that they spoke a paleo-Asiatic language, represented today by the Ket dialects of the Yenisey River valley in Siberia. The Xiongnu created a great tribal empire in Mongolia while China was being unified as an imperial state under the Qin (221–206 BC) and Han (206 BC–AD 220) dynasties. After several centuries of war with the Chinese, complicated by civil wars among themselves, the Xiongnu confederation broke up. Some of the southern tribes surrendered to the Chinese and were settled within China, where they were eventually absorbed. Some of the northern tribes migrated westward, where descendants—together with the members of other tribes—appeared in Europe in the 5th century AD as the Huns of Attila. By then, of course, these people were considerably more mixed ethnically.In Mongolia the Xiongnu were succeeded both by Turkic-speaking peoples and by others identified by some scholars as Mongols, or Mongol speakers. There is a lack of convincing archaeological or historical evidence that these groups came to Mongolia from some distant region to fill a void left by the Xiongnu departure. Probably they were there all the time as the subjects of the Xiongnu, until the breakup of that confederation gave them the opportunity to assert themselves. Among the peoples who have been considered possibly Mongol, the most important tribal names are Sienpi (Xianbi), who may however have been Tungus (modern Evenk) rather than Mongol, recorded in Han dynasty annals, and the Juan-juan (Rouran, or Geougen) of the 4th to 6th centuries. The latter have been identified by some scholars with the Avars, who migrated into Europe along the plains of the Danube and were nearly annihilated in Hungary by Charlemagne in the late 8th century.According to a legend recorded by the Chinese, the Turks of Mongolia, whose name is recognizable under its Chinese transcription “Tujue,” were a subject tribe ruled by the Juan-juan. The Turks overthrew their masters and soon were in control of all Mongolia, centring their power in the Orhon valley in the northern part of the country. The Orhon (Orkhon) Turks were contemporaries of the Tang dynasty (618–907) in China, and their fortunes rose and fell in counterpoint to periods of Tang strength and weakness. Comparison of archaeological and historical data, moreover, shows that power in Mongolia was at this time not based simply on levies of nomad horsemen. The khans and great men had fixed headquarters, surrounded by cultivated land that enabled them to breed large, stable-fed horses capable of carrying a man in armour. This situation emphasized a class distinction between the aristocrat on his charger and the herdsman-warrior-archer on his smaller horse. Agriculture also became an element in the economy, and the Uighurs, who came to power after the fall of the Orhon Turks, enter history as an oasis-centred people.In the welter of tribes, the name Mongol first appears in a tribal list recorded under the Tang dynasty. It then vanishes, to reappear only in the 11th century, when the Khitan (Khitai, from which comes the word Cathay) ruled in Northeast and North China and controlled most of Mongolia. The Khitan, who established the Chinese dynasty of Liao (907–1125), were themselves a Mongol people, but their homeland was in Northeast China rather than in what is now Mongolia. Like other Chinese dynasties, the Liao exercised its power in Mongolia by playing off the tribes against one another. Liao sources record the existence of a rather shadowy tribal power known in Mongol tradition as Khamag Mongol Uls (“Nation of all the Mongols”), which did not, however, include all of the population who spoke the Mongol language.When the Khitan fell, their power in China was taken over and extended by the Juchen (Jürched), a Tungus people based farther north in northeastern China. They took the Chinese name of Jin (“Golden”). In their tribal policy they switched their favour from “All the Mongols” to the Tatars (known in the West as Tartars, from a medieval pun on tartarus, Latin for “hell”). Although Mongols, the Tatars were not part of the tribal league of All the Mongols, centred in the Onon and Kerulen valleys in the eastern half of North Mongolia; the Tatars lived to the east and south of them.On the whole, though chastened occasionally by punitive expeditions, All the Mongols had been transfrontier allies or auxiliaries of the Khitan-Liao. A contingent (large for that time) of 50,000 Mongols fought on the Khitan side in the last battles of the Khitan empire. Presumably, this was one reason why the Juchen-Jin transferred their favour to the Tatars, nearer to their frontier. Such alternations, between using the more-distant and using the nearer transfrontier and frontier tribes, were frequent in the policies of dynasties in China, and this one had the desired effect of creating a feud between Mongols and Tatars.Before the era of Genghis Khan, a defeated Khitan army had migrated westward at the fall of their Liao dynasty. It was led by a prince of the Khitan imperial line but must have included heterogeneous tribal elements. Moving westward through Mongolia, it reached what is now Kazakhstan and created a new and briefly powerful empire, the Karakitai. It ruled primarily over Turkic-speaking peoples, made up of nomads and city dwellers in the oases, and the Khitan nucleus had the opportunity to apply its knowledge of how to deal with nomads and its ability in the administration of a bureaucracy.Encyclopedia Britannica:
