How historians composed the Mongol Empire. Part 2

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Some hamsters, saving a template that was desperately cracking at the seams from a rupture, reassured themselves that without a time machine we still won't know how it really was 800 years ago, and therefore they, hamsters, have every right to believe in that historical past whichever they like best. And as soon as that, they screech hysterically: but prove what was wrong. In fact, a person has a universal mechanism of cognition - the mind, which can replace the time machine. True, hamsters do not know how to use their minds (that is, to think), therefore they use the head mosk exclusively as a tool for storing information. True, with the development of external drives, they do not even need a moscow for this. Just a little - I got into Wikipedia and copied and pasted a piece of text from there.

To think, one must master logic, that is, the art of making consistent judgments. The language of logic, even the most elementary one, 90% of the primates cannot master in principle. To learn the Chinese language is please, because here you don't need to use anything except memory, you can memorize one and a half thousand hieroglyphs if necessary. And the language of logic requires something completely different - mental effort, intellectual discipline. After all, the process of thinking is not memorizing information, but a critical SORTING of it, as a result of which arrays of information are structured into consistent chains (judgments), and information "garbage" is eliminated.

If I make a JUDGMENT, then I can substantiate it, that is, describe the entire path from the initial data to the conclusion. However, the overwhelming majority of hamsters do not operate with judgments, but with cliches extracted from memory or copied and pasted from Duropedia. As Swan said, stupidity is not a lack of mind, it is its kind. In the same way, illogical thinking is also thinking, chaotic, unsystematic, but thinking. To put it cleverly, this type of thinking is generated by atomized consciousness.

Atomization of consciousness is a form of mental degradation, manifested in the absence of the integrity of thinking, in the inability to draw conclusions, in the readiness to perceive only conclusions imposed by external sources (authorities). An individual with an atomized consciousness is practically defenseless against manipulation, has a hyper-suggestibility, and is prone to mass psychosis. In general, this is a portrait of a typical modern person.

You don't have to go far to illustrate the atomized consciousness; it is enough to read the comments to this post or to the previous one. Here's a dialogue like this:

I AM: - The nomads, in principle, could not capture China (Russia, Persia, etc.), because:

a) The population density of nomadic peoples is hundreds of times less than the density of agricultural peoples, and therefore their mobilization potential is incomparable;

b) War is not a competition between armed men, it is a confrontation between the systems of organizing society, in which, all other things being equal, a more effective system wins. Among nomads, the form of organization of society is of a tribal nature, therefore, savages, who are capable of forming only a bandit of robbers, are not able to compete with a society that has a professional army (an attribute of any state). This is all the more obvious that they cannot compensate for their qualitative lag in quantity (and they cannot, see point "a");

c) The state provides an overwhelming technological superiority over stateless peoples (nomads), which is fully manifested in military affairs. The nomads do not have metallurgy, respectively, they do not have steel weapons, and there are no technical means of communication and command and control of troops. They also do not have any military infrastructure - fortresses, ammunition depots, points of mobilization and deployment of troops, that is, operational bases and strong points for conducting hostilities.

Consequently, the Mongols do not even have a hypothetical chance of gaining a numerical, organizational and technological advantage over the Chinese, and therefore the statement about the conquest of numerous sedentary and more cultured southern peoples by the small wild Mongols should be considered incorrect until the opposite is proved.

Hamster: - Author, teach materiel, if the Xiongnu nomads were able to conquer China, then the Mongols could all the more. Bugaga, you merged.

Is there logic in the hamster's judgments? Its appearance is present, but in fact this logic cannot be called even feminine, according to which red is better than round, because the "proof" of a hamster does not contain any judgments at all.

The point is not even that the existence of the Xiongnu, Huns, Scythians, Khitan and other mythological characters is no more reliable than the existence of elves, hobbits and orcs, but that at the level of the discussed abstraction for the Xiongnu, Zhuzhen, mangurs and other savages, who supposedly captured China, in which by that time a civilization had allegedly already existed for several thousand years, the same insurmountable obstacles will operate as for the Mongols. It is possible to refute my arguments only with the help of logic, unfounded statements appealing to anonymous "authorities", the authors of myths about the Xiongnu and Scythians, are powerless here.

However, abstract inferences, even if they are internally consistent and flawlessly logical, can eventually lead to wrong conclusions due to the effect of accumulating errors. To avoid this, such a dialectical technique is used as an ascent from the abstract to the concrete. In our case, it is necessary to correlate the abstract conclusion that the medieval Mongols did not possess metal processing technologies, and therefore could not possess effective military weapons, with reality, that is, with established facts. So let's consider this issue, based on the data of objective reality.

And the reality is this: the arms archeology of Mongolia (and the neighboring steppe zones) is extremely poor. There are two types of weapons: combat and hunting. There is also a ceremonial one, but in essence it is not a weapon, and therefore we will not consider it. For hunting weapons, metal is not required, arrowheads can be made of bone, stone or simply sharpening a wooden end, you can beat a fish with a wooden spear, and even drive large animals into traps and slaughter with spears, stone axes and clubs. But the military weapon of the Mongols in the described era should be qualitatively different, that is, iron (steel), because in order to fight the peoples with their own metallurgical production, you must at least have equal opportunities. Although experience shows that an aggressive policy can be carried out only if you have an undeniable superiority in military technology.

But in the Trans-Baikal steppes and other surrounding semi-deserts, we do not find any "lost" weapons in any noticeable quantities, or what is commonly called military burials. This speaks of one thing: the nomads did not have warriors, that is, those whose trade was war. Yes, in fact, they could not have, because there was no need for them. Deserted steppe areas were defended by pastoralists, and there was no way to attack sedentary neighbors (not in the sense of a petty situational robbery, but in the sense of gaining control over the territory). So why on earth will there be people who know how to professionally fight and have modern weapons? Who will support them and for what reason? I’m already silent about the fact that in such a situation, there is no place for commanders who have experience in managing large military formations.

Nomadic pastoralism is such a primitive type of farming that it does not allow the creation of a surplus product. The surplus product will give only one thing - exploitation, and the nomads (like the Indians on the American prairies, that the Nenets reindeer herders, that the same Mongols) did not know such a phenomenon as exploitation, because it was impossible due to the family and clan way of life and because of non-commodity nature of production. After all, the nomad produced almost exclusively food, and food exclusively for himself. Well, let's say you take two buckets of kumis from him - what to do with it? There is no one to sell in the steppe, and no one has any money. You can't drink two buckets yourself, the product will deteriorate. With meat, the situation is the same - you can pick up five rams, but eat it - not eat it. And who will give it to you?

Did the nomad need iron objects in everyday life? No, he completely got along with a bone knife for butchering a ram and a bone needle so that he could sew coarse clothes for himself with a thread from animals. They didn't need saddles, they didn't need to shoe their horses in the steppe, they didn't need to mow hay for the winter either. The grass is high, and the winters are not snowy, so the cattle graze the whole year round. You don't need nails to build a yurt. To heat it, you do not need to prepare firewood, therefore there is no need for a saw and an ax, they drowned with dung, that is, with dried manure. It smelled, of course, but the nomads got used to it.

Nothing in our life appears unnecessarily, and if the nomads basically did not need iron, then metallurgy could not arise either. Farmers have a different matter. Initially, agriculture was carried out only in the floodplains of rivers, where the soil is fertile and fertilized with silt deposits. There is no need to plow the floodplain fields; it is enough to loosen it with a wooden hoe, the productivity of the soil is high. But sooner or later, all available floodplain lands are occupied. Nomads simply go further and further into the steppe. Eating grass means you can live. If you do not find grass, the cattle will fall, you will die. But what is the farmer to do when the land runs out? We have to develop lands near the floodplain, and there is a forest. But to clear a plot of arable land from the forest, you need an iron tool.

Well, perhaps they initially got by with a bronze ax, but the available reserves of bronze and tin were so insignificant that the Bronze Age was, in general, only an episode, a transitional stage from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. Only with the development of the technology for obtaining iron did the agricultural revolution begin - slash-and-burn agriculture turned out to be many times more effective than the cultivation of floodplain fields and, most importantly, made it possible for a person to settle far in the north, where you cannot do without an iron ax. Anyone doubting? Well, then try to cut down a tree with this stone ax (see photo). And to build a house, or at least a dugout, more than one of these trees is required. And for the long winter, it is firewood that is needed, not brushwood, which you can pick up with your hands. It will not be an exaggeration to say that it was with the iron ax that modern technogenic civilization began, metallurgy for centuries determined the main vector of human development, and even today, in the era of composite materials, plastic and all kinds of nanopolymers, we cannot do without iron.

Nobody knows where and when a person learned to make iron (there are a dozen versions of varying degrees of persuasiveness, but there are no "generally accepted" ones), but no one argues that it was a farmer who taught iron, and not a priest, not a hunter, and even more so, not a nomad-pastoralist.

Did the Mongols have their own pottery? No. And since there was no ceramics, there could be no iron either. The hamsters explain the lack of ceramics by the fact that, they say, the steppe people do not need it, because it will be beaten during wandering. Therefore, they made do with leather wineskins. I can't even imagine a dumber hypothesis. The earthenware bowl beats as it falls from the table to the floor. The pot may burst from the heat in the oven. But for some reason, the potters were not afraid to carry their products to the market on a shaking cart along a paved road. And in the steppe there were no paved roads and shaking carts. So why would the ceramics break if transported on pack horses in leather trunks? Well, whisper, shift it with mutton fur, if you're afraid to break.

Maybe the nomad has no need for pottery? The need is just there. Think for yourself, in what you can cook a delicious young lamb chowder? You can fry and dry meat, but you can't cook without dishes. Cast iron cauldrons and pans appeared in use quite recently, namely when the metallurgical industry mastered the technology of casting iron and stamping from a steel sheet. Prior to this, the only container available to wide layers for making stew was ceramic. But the steppe nomads could not make earthenware, if only because ceramics can be burned only in a special oven, and this requires wood, you cannot do with dung. So they used leather wineskins and all sorts of containers made of animal entrails not because of convenience, but because there were no other options. In general, ceramic production is possible only with a sedentary lifestyle.

Yes, over time, nomadic tribes were drawn into the orbit of more developed peoples, entered into trade relations with them, adopted modern cultural achievements, therefore the Mongols also had stationary settlements (it came to cities, however, only in the 20th century), division of labor, exploitation, clergy, aristocracy, artisans, cast iron cauldrons, iron knives and even computers. But in this case, the main point is that they themselves did not make cauldrons and computers. Eskimos use GPS today, but if, after a hundred or fifty thousand years, archaeologists find a GPS navigator in the permafrost of Greenland, it would be a big mistake on their part to think that this device was made by the local natives. Even if they find a thousand navigators, it won't say anything. It is necessary to search for a plant for the production of microelectronics, but it will definitely not be found in Greenland.

So, if we find a hundred or a thousand sabers and swords in the Mongolian steppes, this will in no way be evidence that the steppe people were advanced metallurgists. We must look for traces of metallurgical production. And looking for them in the steppe zone is completely useless. Although some enchanting idiots croak something about "marching Mongol forges", for some reason even they do not say anything about marching blast furnaces and nomadic ore mines with miners who roam right underground. To make steel, iron ore is needed, which is not available in the steppe, a mass of charcoal (a source of carbon), which is nowhere to be found on the bald plain, and stationary furnaces for producing kritsa, which consume a lot of fuel, the sources of which, again, are not in the steppe.

Technologies are developing sequentially from simple to complex, and if the Mongols did not even have a pottery production, then what kind of metallurgy can we talk about? It is impossible to invent a steam locomotive before the carriage, it is impossible to smelt metal without having a clay kiln. Nomads could use the products of metallurgy in the same way as the Indians used guns, which they exchanged with white people. By the way, despite the opportunity to acquire guns, the Indians have never been able to fight the pale-faced, even with a huge numerical superiority. The reasons are indicated by me at the beginning of the post.

True, here historians begin to fuss all kinds of nonsense about the fact that the northern Mongols who lived in the forest-steppe zone were, they say, excellent metallurgists, and Genghis Khan, it seems, was himself one of these Mongols-Bardzhutdins “patched” by civilization, and therefore, they say, there were no the nomadic army had no problems with weapons. Wait a minute! Steel production is a commercial production based on the division of labor. Some mine raw materials, others burn coal, others produce kritz, and blacksmiths forge the final consumer product. Moreover, only a dumbass would dare to assert that a blacksmith in a rural blacksmith does not care what to do - a plow, a nail, a horseshoe or a battle sword.

Weapons were made only by highly skilled gunsmiths. After all, the war blade was welded - inside the blade there was mild steel, which sharpened well, and on the sides there was fragile, but solid steel. The technology is very labor intensive. I will not retell how the damask and Damascus blades, all sorts of Japanese samurai swords were created, those who wish themselves can google the topic. But, I think, no one dares to argue that a warblade, and even a good one, was fantastically expensive, and very few could afford it. Maintaining a professional army before the advent and widespread distribution of firearms was very, very expensive. And only a society that was economically highly productive, giving a high surplus product, could afford to have a modern army.

And here we come to an obvious contradiction: if nomadic cattle breeding in a closed cycle of farming does not give a surplus product at all, and metallurgical production requires a settled way of life, a highly developed technological base, which can only be created by hereditary artisans, division of labor and the sales market, then what is the relationship of all this has to nomads? Obviously not the slightest!

However, archaeologists persistently repeat about the many found remains of metallurgical furnaces and abandoned ore mines on the territory of modern Buryatia and, especially, Altai. Let's not argue with them. Let's think about where they came from, and why they were abandoned. When Russian colonists began to develop Altai and Transbaikalia, they did not meet here peoples with metallurgical production technologies. It is a fact. Historians interpret it as if the Mongols, Buryats, Oirats, Uighurs and other nomads, once unsurpassed gunsmiths and warriors, by that time had "forgotten" the secrets of steel production, forgot about their great past, forgot written language, completely lost their belligerence, and in general, returned to a wild, extremely primitive state. And their cities, all sorts of Karakorums and Sarai, into which riches from all over the world flocked, fell into complete decay and so reliably disappeared from the face of the earth that they still cannot be found. The passionarity of the rulers of Eurasia, you see, has dried up. The explanation is quite delusional, but in this case it is not important to us.

It is important to understand what the first Russian settlers began to do. They had a need for iron, and everything seemed to be in order with passionarity. Therefore, they began to look for ore, make kritsa in damp-blowing ovens and forge utensils, which were needed in the household, from it - sickles, axes, knives, needles, and so on. But such artisanal production of iron was short-lived, as soon as civilization in the local wild lands took root and Altai mining factories provided industrial iron, the need for primitive ore mines and blast furnaces disappeared, forges began to work on factory semi-finished products. That's where the ABANDONED objects of handicraft iron production come from in these places. The reason is not at all in the savagery of the Mongols after their conquest of the world.

Now it is clear how a person who knows how to think logically differs from a professional historian? The historian takes from the shelf a puffy book written by some academician, finds there the chapter "The Armament of the Mongol Warrior", looks at pictures on which beautiful sabers, swords, armor are drawn and "everything is clear to him", there is no need to strain. Suffice it to hint that I read "the fundamental work of academician such and such" and the surrounding hamsters reverently open their mouths. And a thinking person, applying the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete (letters on paper are abstraction), is looking for the PROOF of the assumption that the Mongols MADE weapons (otherwise they could not arm their own army in any way). And the more you look for such evidence, the more you become convinced of the opposite.

But even professional historians, no matter how stupid they are, understand that the Mongols could not conquer anyone without weapons, so they need to be armed with something. And then they came up with the idea that the Mongols made armor-piercing superbows and fired from them so that Robin Hood, compared to them, is just a kid in short pants. But more on that next time. In the meantime, enjoy the extravaganza of hamster "logic" in the comments.

Continuation…