Video: The Mongolian Shrine of the Cult of Chinggis Khan: What Happened to Women’s Participation?

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. 

SPEAKER 2: The Mongolian shrine of the cult of Chinggis Khan. What happened to women's participation? October 9, 2025. 

ANN BRAUDE: We're thrilled to have Dotno Pount with us in the program, and she is the ideal WSRP scholar. She is a native speaker of both Mongolian and Chinese. She has a superlative education from Princeton, so as at the University of London and the University of Pennsylvania, and she is devoting her career to translating and analyzing the documents of the Mongol Empire, and particularly from the cult of Genghis Khan. 

And what I feel so fortunate about is that while she is currently transcribing and translating a large body of liturgical texts from the cult and preparing to publish a critical edition of this material, she is bringing gender analysis in from the get-go. So in Mongolian studies, we are not going to have to go back and revise the old, sexist language of the translations because she's got it all there, and it's just so thrilling to see gender analysis at the very beginnings of this process. So thank you so much for your work, and let me introduce Dotno. 

[APPLAUSE] 

DOTNO POUNT: Thank you so much, Ann, for the kind and encouraging introduction that you gave me. And thanks, everyone, for coming here to listen to my talk. So since Ann's already introduced me, I won't go into too much detail, but just from the get-go, I wanted to give a little bit of, I guess, fine print. I don't really have the answer yet because it's still October, so I'm really here to pose the question. So I hope you'll forgive me for that. So let me just start now. 

So today I will be talking about my project in a way that's structured on my own personal encounter with the subject, rather than a first half dedicated to the background and context and then try to explain what I did, which I've done many times before, and every single time I've received the feedback that I didn't give enough background. So I think it's time to try a different approach. 

So I'll start with a longish prelude, I guess, on how I came to the topic and then move on to what the cult of Genghis Khan is in the ethnographies and then move on to, I guess, the core of what I did in my dissertation research, [NON-ENGLISH], which means golden notes. And it's the liturgical textual collection of the cult of Chinggis Khan. And then I'll move back in time to the Mongol Empire and try to make some connections to how this whole institution might have come into existence and then move forward in time again and get to the point of why I'm here and what I'm trying to do this year at the WSRP. 

So I guess the story starts with my choice of dissertation topic when I started my PhD in 2017. Well, I didn't choose it back then but around 2018 to '19 is when this conversation between myself and my dissertation advisor, Professor Chris Atwood at the University of Pennsylvania happened. When I started my PhD program, I had thought of myself as a modernist because my master's dissertation was about the immigrants from inner Mongolia to the independent Mongolia right after the second world war, so it has a little to do with my own background. 

So my mom's from Central Inner Mongolia and my dad's from the western reaches of Northern Xinjiang. And they're both Mongols. And I actually grew up in Ulaanbaatar, so this whole transnational connection is very crucial part of my identity. So for those of you who might not know, Inner Mongolia is a part of the People's Republic of China, so there's been a lot of this historical divide between the two. So I'm thinking of history in terms of this period and my dissatisfaction with my historical education, of course, is because nobody ever talks about my history, my family history. 

So my parents would say, grandpa so-and-so did this and this, at that event and that event is almost never in history books that I had access to growing up in Oakland and in New Jersey. So I said, well, Professor Atwood, when I was reading the archival documents, I felt like there was a cultural distance between these people who are writing these petitions and myself. And I only read in the Cyrillic, which is the same as Russian alphabet, quickly. And I can read the traditional Mongolian alphabet, which is vertical, and it's based on Uyghur, which is derived from Sogdian, which comes ultimately from Syriac. And it's a whole different writing system and that old writing system is used had been used in inner Mongolia for education until 2019. 

So I was not happy with how fast I could read it. And I said, well, Professor Atwood, I want to understand earlier history and I want to be able to deal with texts of any period before the modern. And he said, well, why don't you do one on the cult of Chinggis Khan? And I said, well, is that a thing? Because I mean, I have heard of the cult of Genghis Khan because people from Ordos in inner Mongolia are unusually proud of their heritage because they have the cult. 

And the rest of us know that they have the worship of Chinggis Khan there, but we don't think of it as anything more than the Buryats in the North. Like in Russia, they have shamans and the people in Ordos, they have Chinggis Khan worship and that's it. And of course, coming from almost, I don't know, a quarter of a century of communist education on both sides of the border, we're very much educated in the secular framework. So I just said, well, can I really do that? 

And he said, well, yes, if you think about it, the textual sources, of course, in 20th century, there's a lot of textual sources, but the Mongol Empire has some. There are some in Mongolian and Chinese and Persian. You'd have to a lot of languages to do Mongol Empire studies. And then there's the Qing period, the Qing Empire, most famous as the last imperial dynasty of China, but now we know, the Qing is a lot more than China, so that period in the Qing is kind of interesting as an early modern regime. 

It's very bureaucratic. There's a lot of bureaucratic correspondence and there's a lot of Buddhist texts. And so there's before and after, you have some text to work with, but there's an in between, 15th century, post-imperial, what we learned in school as the time of feudal disintegration. And there's not a lot of text left. And he said, well, there's reason to think that the cult of Chinggis Khan, [NON-ENGLISH], might have text from that period. I was like, well, what do you mean? So let me quickly get to what the cult of Chinggis Khan is. 

And today, we all know that it's housed in this museum. It's built in the 1950s. They are replica or I think some of it might actually be in the tent shrine. I'll show you pictures in a few minutes. And since the 1980s, the local-- the cult custodians started holding their ceremonies again, and this is a big thing. People in Inner Mongolia go there for pilgrimage. And nowadays, I think Mongols from across the world and even non-Mongols are going there to see. It's a big tourist site now. 

And outside of the museum there's also this platform altar. It's a platform with five black [NON-ENGLISH]. [NON-ENGLISH] means both battle standard and charisma. So the semantic overlap is the point. So this is the battle standard of Chinggis Khan, and there's a code for this here. And women are not allowed on the platform. You can circumambulate it and honor it from the outside, but there's a sign says that it's dangerous for women to be near the [NON-ENGLISH]. So I didn't go up there, of course, out of respect and all that. 

So that whole thing is in Inner Mongolia, but I also grew up with the cult of Chinggis Khan ceremony in New Jersey, and I just never made the connection. But indeed, the connection was always there. The ceremony in New Jersey was started in 1989 by Dr. [INAUDIBLE] Hankin. He's a very famous scholar, and he's very important for the history of Mongolian-American relations. And I won't get into the details of it, but he founded this organization called the Mongol American Cultural Association. And every year, they hold their Chinggis Khan ceremony, and it's coming in early November this year too. 

So I'm very familiar with the format of this, and they have this altar set up and a group of men who take on the role of [NON-ENGLISH] or the people officiants, and they'll go there and read all these prayers. And I used to not pay much attention to the prayers. It's something very mundane, like blessings for the Mongols of America, et cetera. And sometimes they had a shaman come and perform something, and I was either babysitting my brother or, later, my kids. So I wasn't really there to watch everything from beginning to finish. Rarely, I had the chance or sometimes they had some of these Buddhist type performances and then also singers and dancers and just performance in general. 

And so it became an anchor for the Mongolian community in the US. So it's a very interesting thing that I grew up with, but why is this actually ancient? So Professor Atwood told me, well, did you that they had glossolalia? And I said, what's glossolalia? And he said, well, speaking in tongues. Haven't you heard of it? And I actually hadn't. So I learned all about how people in different religious traditions would have these ecstatic experiences, and then they would commune with the deities and then speak in their tongue. And people around them can't understand it, but then the different religious communities will have different understanding of it. 

So what happened with the cult of Chinggis Khan is that, at some point, people seem to have had this kind of an experience and their utterances were written down and these were performed as songs. So there are 12 songs of heaven's tongue, [NON-ENGLISH]. Actually, there are only 11. The 12th one is in normal language. So he showed me these things from this published manuscript by Dr. [INAUDIBLE] in Japan. And I was thinking, what's going on here? And he showed me his hypothesis is that the only time that this would have happened is during the reign of [NON-ENGLISH]. 

And this is very exciting information for me, because [NON-ENGLISH] is a very famous queen in Mongolian history from the 15th century, and she's basically the hero of every little girl in Mongolia because of this movie in 1988. So she's basically credited with reviving the dying lineage of Chinggis Khan and then saving the Chinggisid state. It's a warrior queen, and she's cool in every single way. That's her name. 

And another reason is that he said there's this player called the [NON-ENGLISH] or distributions. And this is sacrificial food being doled out to everybody in attendance. And they name people who are very important for the rise of Chinggis Khan and describe them in versified way and then give their descendants the share that they get from having created the Chinggisid state together with Chinggis Khan. 

The list of people are not just the familiar figures in the story of Genghis Khan, but later figures from the 13th or 14th centuries. So he's saying, well, look at this. Some of these people, we only about them because now we study the really Mongol period sources in Chinese, et cetera, and they were forgotten from the communal memory until now, with modern scholarship. But this is in here, so this text has some kind of a connection to the 14th century. So now I'm thinking, OK, yes, I'll take this project. This is my project. OK, I'll do it. 

[CHUCKLES] 

So I get to look at all kinds of texts. So now let me start with the first book I read. Well, I'll show you some photos of what the cult of Chinggis Khan looked like in the 1930s first. Owen Lattimore, you might of him. He's very famous in the US too. He was a famous traveler, and he actually went to the ceremony in 1939 and snapped all these photos. And you guys are lucky because you're the only people who are looking at these photos in public because they've never been published before. And Harvard's Peabody Museum have them. 

The important source for this is ethnography from 1983 by [NON-ENGLISH], and they basically talked to all the elders in the organization, the cult, and in Ordos and collected the notes on what they found out about this organization. So basically, the form, as you see, is this tent shrine. It's called the eight white [NON-ENGLISH] of Chinggis Khan. [NON-ENGLISH] is the Mongolian name [NON-ENGLISH] for the lattice tent of that sort, but this is not really the same kind of a lattice tent. 

It's also called [NON-ENGLISH]. [NON-ENGLISH] is also another name for precisely this type of tent. And you might have heard of the word yurt, which is a Turkic word for the same thing. And it's also called the ordo. Ordo is also the root of the English word horde. So when you talk about the Mongol hordes coming, it's the ordo, the palace tent, and it's all this entourage tents coming at you. So this is the [NON-ENGLISH] is the form that it takes. And traditionally they are supposed to be eight of them, but actually there aren't eight [NON-ENGLISH] per se, but eight objects of worship. 

So it gets a little bit complicated. I won't get into too much of it, but they also talk about what happened in the 20th century, and also all the Buddhist temples that became associated with the cult of Chinggis Khan. So it's a very interesting book. And also I wanted to point out that these depictions that you might see turns out to be inaccurate. Elizabeth Rose at the University of Toronto is going to publish on this, and it's very interesting. The actual form, just like the [NON-ENGLISH] is supposed to have two wheels and then this tent that juts out on the right. 

So I've been mentioning [NON-ENGLISH] and let me just quickly explain what I'm talking about. So the cult of Chinggis Khan, of course, have the shrine, but you also have the people, and the people are called the [NON-ENGLISH]. [NON-ENGLISH] is a word that means tax-free subject in the Mongol Empire, but later on it takes on other meanings. Basically, they're protected people and their organization-- well, at the head of it, they have a prince and he has the title [NON-ENGLISH]. And I can go into the history of this title, but let me skip that in the interest of time. 

So the [NON-ENGLISH] is organized into these sections called [NON-ENGLISH] and they're also divided into sections called [NON-ENGLISH]. So those of you interested in the Mongol Empire would find the word [NON-ENGLISH] very familiar because [NON-ENGLISH] or [NON-ENGLISH] is the bodyguard corps that surrounds the emperor that, for example, Marco Polo was recruited into. So they made this bodyguard corps from hostage princes from the subject of the vassals. 

The [NON-ENGLISH] are also interesting because they have communal memories of all kinds of things about the cult, and one of which is that they were incorporated in 1282, in the black horse year by Kublai Khan. And they also are the people who perform the rituals, and they save their ritual liturgies and such things in their texts. And even though in the Cultural Revolution, their official texts were burnt in the chaos, they also had personal texts and stuff. So I'll talk about the text. So that's what I studied for my dissertation. That's the critical edition is of that corpus. 

So there are transmitted and hand-copied texts and from the private collections, and there are also some scholars who visited in earlier parts of 20th century and then made hand copies of these. And these are saved at the libraries and archives everywhere. And there are also some excavated texts that I looked at, and these texts, I can divide them into prayers, just actual text of the prayers, and also framework texts. And these are basically the ritual instructions and also the ritual code and how you'll be punished if you don't do the rituals correctly. 

And here's a little diagram of all the different titles and texts manuscripts. And if you're interested, I can explain this later. We'll skip that. So I did a lot of this using digital humanities methods, and eventually I was able to get everything on a PDF and hand in the dissertation on time. 

[LAUGHTER] 

That in itself was an achievement, I must say. So the dissertation-- actual arguments I made about the cold are based on the ritual texts, and I try to reconstruct what they were doing, who were doing what, at what time, and try to date them based on who's required to be at the ceremonies. So here's a little bit of a very crude animation I made. So the point is that they're using food, sacrificial food and drinks, as a medium through which [INAUDIBLE] can be spread around the ritual community, which in every case, is like a synecdoche of the whole Mongol Empire. 

And their imagined empire is like Chinggis Khan's empire, of course, even though they don't have the big subject kingdoms anymore. They're localized, but still they think of themselves in that way, at least in the liturgies. So moving on, since we're talking about Women's Studies today, finally I get to talk about what I discovered. So the ethnography said that women were not allowed anywhere near the ceremonies while they were happening. 

And this banning of women from important places is very familiar to me because it's everywhere in Mongolia, all the sacred mountains and whatnot. But as I was going through the text, I realized there are women in the prayers and also in the ritual instructions. So here's an example in this one prayer. This is talking to Chinggis Khan. 

"At your golden threshold 

Let the golden belted sons kneel upon the upper 

Right-hand side 

Let the golden braided daughters kneel upon the upper 

Left-hand side" 

So this is like facing the door, basically. So then, yes, inside the ordo there are daughters-in-law. And then another one is this [NON-ENGLISH]. It's like a benediction. And this is supposed to be spoken by the [NON-ENGLISH] or the grandmothers. The narrative voice, is that the grandmother who's saying this prayer is speaking on behalf of the ancestors, so she's clearly there at some kind of a ceremonial occasion. So here's a quick summary of the kinds of instructions I was able to distill out of it and how I dated them based on who's in the ritual community and which matriarch they're calling. 

So there's [NON-ENGLISH]. [NON-ENGLISH] is just grandmothers, and there's [NON-ENGLISH]. [NON-ENGLISH] comes from Chinese. [NON-ENGLISH], it means queen. So the daughter-in-law of Chinggis Khan, his lineage, she's there, and it's very important. So now we'll go back in time, finally, and talk about the Mongol Empire and why this whole thing is significant. 

So just to give a quick overview who Chinggis Khan is. So all of you know about Chinggis Khan. Genghis Khan, he's also known as. Chinggis Khan is correct. Genghis is wrong. 

[LAUGHTER] 

Sorry. Chinggis is better than Ghengis. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So he's from the Eastern parts of what's now Mongolia and also part of it is China now. So when he was young, Mongolia was in a state of disunity. And people will talk about how the Mongols are tribal, but the tribalness, as we understand now, it's a feature of this post-imperial situation. There was a Khitan Liao Empire, and they got destroyed in 1115. And then the new guys who came into power, the Jurchen Jins. They had this Jin Empire, it's called, also called the Golden Empire. They weren't able to control the Eastern parts of Mongolia, but there were other kingdoms all around it. 

And just at that time, Chinggis Khan existed in a very tribalized society. And then he was able to defeat everyone and accumulate power. And by 1206, he had become the Khan of the Mongols. And then he starts taking revenge on the Jin Empire, because the Jin empire were very mean, and they had a lot of bad blood between them. So then, eventually, one thing led to another and they had to conquer the world, I guess. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So let's skip that part. 

[LAUGHTER] 

Basically, his whole career, by 1227, he died, but all his sons and grandsons also continued this whole conquest ideology and action. And they just kept conquering and created the biggest contiguous land empire in the world history, which became four independent parts by the second half of the 13th century. But still, they considered themselves the Mongol Empire and the ideological power of the Great Khan was always there, and the Eastern part of it eventually became what's called the Yuan Empire. 

So [NON-ENGLISH], the grandson of Chinggis Khan, also known as Kublai Khan, he had consolidated his power between 1260 and 1264, and in 1270, he named the country that he controls the Olus, or the country of the Grand Khan, as the Yuan Empire. And it controlled both Mongolia and China, and then they conquered some more places in the West, like the Dali empire and then the Tibetan states. It's a watershed moment for the history of the world. And now China is thought of as this big thing, and it starts with Kublai Khan, I guess. 

Then of course, there's a lot of textual evidence that's left behind from this big empire. And I won't go into some of these the Secret History of the Mongols or the archeological material, but basically we have evidence of animals being sacrificed to do ancestor worship and there are eyewitness accounts of how women were involved in these, so lots of evidence there. Let's skip this in the interest of time. We're running low. 

So some examples I'll show you. So in 1246, John of Plano Carpini, he was sent by the Pope to go visit the Mongols and the Mongol Khan, and he got there and he made records of his travels. So he described what they were doing, and he thought of-- they used to all think of the Mongols as monotheists, like the Christians and the Muslim people. I guess for ideological reasons, it's easier to explain why they're siding with the Mongols if you say they're monotheists. But also Mongols had this idea of a Supreme God, I guess, [NON-ENGLISH], that can be construed as the monotheistic God. 

But anyway, there are other things that are offensive to all of these world religions, which is an idolatry. Idolatry is everywhere in the sources, and I know it's a pejorative, but basically, descriptions have been idols being made in the image of man. And then they made one for Chinggis Khan, and then they were decorated and honored and worshiped and given food. And then the bones were burned, and they had made one of the first emperor. That's Genghis Khan, of course, and this was placed in the cart in an honored place before the dwelling of the emperor's court. And they're offering him milk and offering him food, and then putting the food in the fire, et cetera. 

So these are all observed, and the felt idol that they're describing still exist. In the 17th and 18th century, there was a lot of repression against the who the shamans who created these things and worshipped them from the Buddhists. Not a lot of people in the Mongolian-speaking world have it, but they still do exist. Another tradition that has to do with that is the same logic. There are a lot of these man stones or [NON-ENGLISH] in Mongolia or rock men, stone men, statues, and they almost always have this chalice or cup that they hold. So people have been giving them milk and fat and all kinds of things, throughout the ages, I guess, so they must have been important people in life. 

I'll skip what William of Rubruck said, another Franciscan friar who visited Mongols, and he described the importance of this cart that contained the felt and where it was placed. So these are all things that are reminiscent of the cult of Chinggis Khan's form later on, but at the same time, there's also other kinds of evidence. So a lot of recent work has been done in the study of Mongol Empire that shows how important queens were and that they headed this establishment called the ordo. 

And ordo is not just one palace tent. The center of it is the palace tent, but it's an entire population, and it has its own subjects, and it has its own financial estate. And sometimes it even had its own army and the commanders would be reporting to the queen. Basically, it's one contingent of the Mongol Empire coming to Persia and it's very important. And the queen who headed the ordo seemed to have been marrying the successive Khans. So when a man dies in the Mongol tradition, there's a thing called the levirate marriage. His younger male relatives can marry his widow. So I think this tradition comes together in that the state itself is contained in this ordo idea, and then the next Khan who comes into being will, of course, have to marry the queen. 

So this ordo is all over the Chinese sources as well. And when you look at the list of queens and their estates, usually they're listed by their ordos in two places, at least in the Yuanshi or the dynastic history of the Yuan Empire. In Chinese, they're listed very clearly, which queen is getting what. So if you're interested, we can get more into that, but more to the point of the ceremonial aspects of this, so we also have other kinds of sources. Here's a little poem from the Yuan period and this is describing these people going with their, I guess, their lady in the entourage of an ordo to the eastern side of [NON-ENGLISH] or what's now Beijing to perform their sacrifices. 

This is a very long poem, but the Chinese scholar, Marshall Ling, had picked this out. And I was thinking, well, that's a great example. So I did a little bit of translation. And the one on the right, this is also very interesting. So this is a letter from the [NON-ENGLISH]. [NON-ENGLISH] is very important in the history of Buddhism among Mongols. He was the first imperial preceptor. This is a very important office in the Mongol Empire of a monk who's teaching the emperor how to be a good Buddhist King. So in his letter to this princess or duchess, I guess. It's not a Princess. Sorry. Her husband, the prince, had passed away, and now he's consoling her. And there's this line that says that he says. 

You have performed services for his ancestors, and you're very important to his family. So you need to give yourself credit for that and don't feel too bad kind of a thing. So this whole thing about royal women doing ancestral sacrifice for their men is definitely there. In addition to that, there are also women involved in the funerary circumstances. So let me get a different example here. Here's a idea of the tent having a mortuary and funerary use. So these examples are from the thing called the [NON-ENGLISH]. 

It's like a section, small section in the Yuanshi, the dynastic history of the Yuan, and it describes that when a woman gives birth and if she dies, I guess she's going to stay in the tent, but after she gives birth and after a month, she moves out and the tent is preserved, and there's something that's left in the tent that's worth ritualizing about. And also in the funerary context, the same thing happens. 

This seems to say that people are buried inside the tent and this is also observed elsewhere, but I don't think anybody's found that archeologically yet. But the idea that a tent is involved with death is also very important. So the tent is also a container of all these polluting or liminal periods, and it has its own importance. So in summary, there's a lot of these disparate evidence that connects women and the use of tents and also the ancestor worship. 

Let me move on. We can think about that. So then coming back to [NON-ENGLISH]. After the empire falls apart in the late 14th century, and we don't really what exactly happened with the Mongols in all the stories we read about it are from later periods, so it's a period of multilateralism and civil wars here and there. And so eventually, the Chinggisids do win out, but they were almost wiped out. [NON-ENGLISH] is famous because her husband [NON-ENGLISH] died, and then she was able to locate one last scion of the Chinggisid house, [NON-ENGLISH]. 

And he was six years old at the time, and she married him. It's a levirate marriage. And then she's famous for having performed this prayer at the cult of [NON-ENGLISH] which is-- there is some disagreement about it, but basically it's the shrine of Chinggis Khan's daughter-in-law. So the shrine for his youngest son and her prayer is very famous. And in answer to her prayer, she gave birth to seven children; three twins and one singleton. So this establishes the rest of the dynasty for Mongolia and then their sons are sent everywhere and everybody accepts them as their Suzerain princes. 

So this goes on for another century or so, and then eventually these people, the Jurchens, in this part of Northeast Asia, they became very powerful in alliance with their Mongol neighbors and they gradually either absorbed the Mongols around them or, actually, I guess there were some warfare. And it's a little bit murky, but by 1634, the last Great Khan has died and his son surrenders to the rising Jurchens, and eventually they become the Manchus and create this giant behemoth called the Qing Empire. 

And so now the question is what to make of Qing Mongolia. This is important because for my purposes, the change between these women being involved in this cultic and royal cult, state cult, if you will, and then the point where women are now banned from this whole thing, it seems most likely it happened during the Qing period. And there are some conjectures that would lead to possibly some answers. So there's a question of Qing domination. People like me grew up with this narrative of the Manchu-Chinese colonial yoke. 

So Mongolia had its glorious empires, and then there was feudal disintegration because it's a monarchy. That's the problem with monarchies. And then because the feudal disintegration weakened Mongolia so much, then you had foreign domination and Qing basically meant to Chinese colonization for 300 years. And then the revolution wins and now we're OK. So we're gaining our independence and honor and everything back. So in that sense, well, maybe the subaltern state of Mongol princes had something to do with them having to beat down on their women maybe. 

And there's also the question of the flourishing monastic Buddhism and Buddhism or the yellow faith has always been taught as the opium of the masses. They fooled the Mongols into following the Qing domination. And so this is the idea that everybody shares in the Mongolian-speaking world, although this is coming under a lot of criticism lately. This could explain it, and people have explained the cult of Chinggis Khan changing its character during this period. There's a thesis of Buddhisation of the cult of Chinggis Khan, that it was defanged and morphed into something very local and not threatening to the Manchu Empire. 

So the Manchu Empire has lots of ways of legitimizing itself and using different symbols as its regalia. And some of it were inherited from the Mongols, so these are the Mahakala, Mahakala statue, and then the Yuan imperial seal, which nobody has ever really found. But ideologically, it's important that it's there. But there's also the nine white [NON-ENGLISH] of Chinggis Khan, the symbol of the Mongol state. That, they never quite took. And this stayed in [NON-ENGLISH]. 

There's some history behind it, but there are some issues with these. Nowadays, the more people look at the details of how the Mongol nobility dealt with the Qing, the more they realized they were pretty OK with just going along with the Qing Empire. So it seems like there was more continuity than rupture at this point. You can't really find the big rupture point, and there are one major rebellion from the grandson of the last Great Khan. But aside from that, basically, until the end of the dynasty, the Mongol nobility saw themselves as the Manchu-Mongol, as Qing elite, as Ching nobility and their Khan as the Manchu Khan. 

And this was never a problem for them, so our familiar narrative really doesn't square with what's being found in the sources. And on the other hand, I'm also finding evidence of the cult of Chinggis Khan having, I guess, national reach. Still people from Northern Mongolia, the nobility, are sending in milk mares, herds of milk mare to produce the sacrificial milk for the [NON-ENGLISH]. And from 1720s on, the Manchu emperors also involved in managing this cult. 

And there's also another thing that another familiar trope is that the Mongol nobility married the Manchu princesses, so they all became traitors to the Mongol nation. But then there are people who looked at all of the marriage choices of the Manchu nobility, and the Ordos elite are not in there. The Ordos nobility seems to have not married the Manchu family. I'm not sure who they married, like what's going on. So there are some things I need to find out about. 

But at the same time, you also have this definitely like a localization of this cult of Genghis Khan. The fund to run it has been now placed on the people, the Darkhad, the cult itself. They are supposed to fund it themselves. And there are also a lot of embezzlement cases that suggest that maybe the sacrality of the cult is deteriorating in the Qing period. 

So these are basically the things I'm looking for in the archival sources now. Hopefully, I'll find something. I think having gender as something to look for I think is going to be a good starting point to find where cultural and political changes are happening and how people articulate any kind of change they might be perceiving. 

Yeah, so I guess, in conclusion, I hope that I made the case that the cult of Genghis Khan is indeed an institutional thread that connects contemporary Mongols to the Mongol Empire, and also that their women's role can be very revealing for understanding all these different changes across time. Thank you very much. 

[APPLAUSE] 

Thank you. I can hear you. 

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you so much for a fascinating talk. This is almost a personal question, but I was so struck by your account of how you came to this topic and this moment where you were reading these older texts. And all of a sudden, there was these mentions of women where you didn't expect to find them. And could you just tell us a little bit about what that experience was like and how you felt? Was it like-- was it hard to reconcile? Did you have to-- did you have any doubts about what you were seeing? What was the power of the received narratives you'd experienced both in New Jersey, Ulaanbataar compared to seeing something on the page? 

DOTNO POUNT: Well, the moment I saw the word [NON-ENGLISH], grandmothers, I was really excited. I was so happy to see that. And actually, at the time, I wasn't sure what to do with it other than just put a footnote in the translations. The paper really came about much later. I think this is '23, so this is-- yeah, this is just before I finished writing the. Wait a second, I'm getting confused now. 

But anyway, I had basically written my whole dissertation before I really put this into a article to try to understand that women's role was really something that would trace here. I guess this is also a problem with my field in general. It's very androgyny centric. And there's gender analysis is very much missing, I think, in Mongolian studies and inner Asian studies in general. 

If there's anything that has to do with gender, it's usually just combing the sources to show what women did. And then that, of course, elite women are in the sources. And then you can see that the queens were important. And the point is that people have really recognized this for a very long time, that inner Asian women, especially the ones that are coming from these nomadic traditions, seem to have had more power and more access to just decision making and political life than the people in the surrounding sedentary areas in Eurasia. 

So that's not really the new part. But I think the whole thing about women being banned, that was just really like the disconnect that really stimulated a lot of research here. So it was very exciting in short. Thank you. 

AUDIENCE: I had a question. I was struck in your presentation by seeing the word "glossolalia." That's a word I mostly associate with Christianity and Pentecostalism specifically. And in that tradition, the first mention is in the scriptures, where glossolalia happens as a means of spreading the gospel on the day of Pentecost, the spirit sits on all these people and they speak in languages that are known tongues, but so that they can share this message with other people. Contemporarily, glossolalia is often associated with simply your communication with God in a completely unknown tongue, that nobody else knows. 

And so when I saw it in your presentation, I was like, where does this come from? And what is its use and purpose? And how is it that a woman leader becomes the one who kind of spurs it on in this movement? 

DOTNO POUNT: Thanks for the question. I'm so happy that I have a chance to explain this. So in the ethnographic accounts, the usage of this text is-- I can't find it anymore. Sorry. There we go. OK, maybe I can get rid of a little bit of this. OK. 

So it's performed as songs. 11 songs a tiny little text with this title. And then basically, if I read it, it says like, ha, jo, and then squiggles with no meaning-- [NON-ENGLISH]. It's just-- [NON-ENGLISH] there's no il-- something like that. You get the point. La la la and some squiggles, [NON-ENGLISH] something like that. 

So we don't really know how-- I think they're supposed to be a recording of people performing this maybe in the 1980s. I have not been able to locate it, but I did see this referenced in somebody's article from the late '80s, in Mongolian, in inner Mongolia. So there's a lot of things published about this in inner Mongolia that I'm still waiting through. 

So we know this is a song. Depending on which ceremony, which ritual it is, they actually stipulate which ones you have to sing. So Darkhad, they actually learned how to-- they used to, I guess, learn how to sing this and sing it at the right time, because now they have the text and they can read it and learn it. So they're not really experiencing this thing. 

But there are also some studies of, I guess, the second type of glossolalia that you were mentioning that nobody understands. So people who have looked at the, I guess, the surface structures of this linguistically, it usually has some bearing to the native languages that these people are speaking. So some of these features can be found in this material. 

I don't think this has anything to do with Christianity, although I can't completely rule that out either, because even before the Mongol Empire came into being, there were lots of people in Mongolia who had already accepted Christianity-- the Church of the East, the Syriac Rite Christianity. 

And I think in general for the history of the Syriac Rite Church in the East, especially in East Asia, it's not very well documented, and there's not that much information available. And most of what people can study are basically graves and these more architectural and art history kind of way, no texts survive. We don't know who did what. Maybe some grave inscriptions to say this was like a [NON-ENGLISH], they called it Christian church. 

So did this survive in Mongolia until later? Maybe. We don't really. So the reason why this queen was associated with this-- well, this is Professor Atwood's argument. So in no other time in Mongolian history do you see a period where this kind of intense group cohesion and also secretiveness and intense worshipping of Genghis Khan come into existence. 

How do they're really isolated at this point? Well, the Chinese have very detailed records of their dealings with the Mongols, and for the most part, they know who the Mongol Khans are. And, if they're alive or dead, how many people they're sending for different missions. So there's kind of a diplomatic record is there. 

But they have no idea that [INAUDIBLE] even exists. So for a decade or so, around the time that she would have ruled, there's no contact with the Mongols at all from the Chinese side. Not this group. Like other groups, yes, but basically, the Chinggisids seem to have turned inwards and stopped like dealing with anybody else. 

[INAUDIBLE] is known to have fought a war, at least one war with the oirats, the Western Mongols. So these are the people who are non-Chinggisids, and they live to the west, and they also had dealings with the Chinese a lot more. 

But the legend about [INAUDIBLE] and her magical fecundity and all these things, these are preserved in the historiography of the Chinggisid ruling house basically. Yeah. So that's basically what we have about them. And before that, everybody knows what's going on. And there's no intense concentration on these cults. After that, not really. Pretty soon, monastic Buddhism becomes a thing. And so this kind of leaves this period, where this possibly would have come into being. Yeah, thank you. 

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for such an interesting talk. And I'll just say I was in Ulaanbaatar 10 years ago, and that's the only time I was in Mongolia. And I saw all these statues of Genghis Khan. But I didn't realize that it has such a long history. I was associating with a modern, nationalist sentiment. And so it's really great to see how far back that goes. 

I have just a couple of comments. One, following up on Dean Frederick's question. It's quite extraordinary to see the "glossolalia" text in writing. So it's really kind of amazing that that's committed to writing. It's very much of an oral kind of visionary, kind of tradition. 

The first thought that came to my mind is, when you think of these edicts issued during the Yuan Dynasty, they're often trilingual, if not for languages altogether, so Tibetan, Mandarin, Mongolian, sometimes Sanskrit. So that side of glossolalia, that's about actual languages, just in multiple forms. Maybe that's something very special that was associated-- that became something of importance during the period. 

But the other kind of glossolalia, where people are going into a trance and speaking an unknown language, I mean, that's certainly not confined to Christianity by any means. It's something you find all over the world in various contexts. So I wouldn't necessarily associate it with Christianity per se, but it's really fascinating. 

So two, so none of this is a question. It's just me giving some comments. 

DOTNO POUNT: Thank you. 

AUDIENCE: The one thing that I would say-- so I'm coming from Tibetan studies. And so one thing is just the absence of Tibetan sources in your presentation. And I'm just wondering, would they not be a valuable source? One of the things about Tibet is that they're writing down-- they're actually confronting and dealing with this issue of Indigenous religion versus imported religion and new and gender dynamics for a very long time. And so there's a lot of written sources, and especially during the Yuan Dynasty, there's a lot of historiography and accounts of papa and others being there. I'm just wondering, would that not be another source for you and this work? You might be able to find certain descriptions. 

And just the second thing, just from my knowledge, what I know from Tibetan sources, this whole idea of associating the feminine or the female with indigeneity and trance and shamanic practices versus a more established power ruling, being gendered male, it's a very, very, very common pattern, certainly true throughout Tibetan history as well. So that makes sense in a very Central Asian kind of way. So anyway, there's just a few comments I throw out there. 

DOTNO POUNT: Thank you so much. I wish I knew more about Tibetan sources, but unfortunately, I just don't think we had time to really learn how to explore what's available and in translation. I don't read Tibetan yet. I've started trying to study, but it's a little hard to-- I think there's a very steep learning curve. 

So I'm really completely reliant on what's translated into either Mongolian, Chinese, or English. And I think, as you suggested, it's a great next step to take. And I hope I'll get to that soon. 

AUDIENCE: There's a visiting scholar here, I think she's here already, who's focusing on this period and Papa's letters to the Mongol Khan. So just ask the experts. And I can talk to you later. But you don't have to read it yourself. But there's a lot of people out there who read these sources, so. 

DOTNO POUNT: Thank you so much. I'd love to follow up with you on that. Thanks. You have a question? Yeah, Aaron. 

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for a wonderful presentation. I think this is coming along wonderfully. I remember you giving another presentation in Seoul on the cult of Genghis Khan. So I feel very fortunate to see its evolution. And you're right, giving more background information is very helpful, I think. So this is a great success. 

So I have two questions that are really one big question. And that is when we do-- just for some background, I do the Mongol empire here at Harvard, the Center for the Environment, from an environmental perspective. When we do the Mongol Empire, when we would do anything Mongol, we use the term Mongol, and it's a very monolithic term that lumps together a great complexity of societies and polities altogether. 

And because of the nature of our sources, it's so very hard to parse out that regional variation. And I'm wondering when Chinggis dies, 1227, and we have still a very fragmented ethno scape, if you will, in the empire, if the way that different groups of what become the Mongols, as Rashid al-Din calls them, have various iterations of how to deal with the ritualization of the great con. 

So what does that mean? It means, does the Ilkhanate have a particular iteration of how they remember and ritualize it through the role of women that is perhaps different from the heartland or the [NON-ENGLISH]? And I say this and maybe this is a comment, too, that we have information Nicola de Bruno brings up, that the [NON-ENGLISH] have the practice of Christianity, that they're adapting from the Byzantine Empire. For instance, the Despina Princess that we have records for brings a tent cart that is transformed into a Christian church on the move in that order. And that's linked to this very gendering of religion there. 

So I'm wondering if you've seen anything that can speak to that variation across the empire, because it's a big space. And I guess the next question then is, at that pivotal moment that you point out when the Manchu Qing take over, do we see any difference between Mongols who are part of the banner system, who are very much institutionalized and part of this elite corps of the empire, Mongols who are further in the steppe that are conquered or part of the empire in some way voluntarily, if we can call it that, and then the western-- Zunghars, right, who are not part of the empire for a very long time, up until the Qianlong emperor right in the later part of the 18th century? 

So they must all have different practices that we lose in that sanitization of the record that comes from the editing later. So I'm very curious if you see any of that kind of variation. 

DOTNO POUNT: Well, let's-- thank you for the kind comments and the questions. OK, let me start-- let me start with the empire. Let's do this chronologically. So you are right. The empire is very large and very multifarious. And of course, the name Mongol, when Genghis Khan was young, it was only like maybe a few hundred people, if not maybe a thousand. It was not a big group. The people who speak the language now we call Mongolian were more commonly known as the Tatars. So that's the historically more common term. 

So there's a big rebuilding of identity because of the Mongol empire. And coming from after it, it's kind of hard to detect when all these changes occurred. So yes, there's a lot of diversity. But if you-- maybe taking the assumption that the cult of Genghis Khan material might have something to do with this, we can see this identity construction happening like in the prayers. 

So when I mentioned earlier with the [NON-ENGLISH] prayer, for example, they have mentions of the people who helped Genghis Khan create the state and then people who helped his sons create the state, his family, and all these people. And then there are also lists of people from different parts of the empire coming together to help him create this state. 

And then there's ways that the constituent of the empires are brought into this being. The one famous schema that keeps reoccurring in the Mongol sources is like the five colors and four foreigners. [NON-ENGLISH] is how it's usually translated in Chinese literature. But I guess there's a lot written about this. 

So there are ways to create this imperial Mongol identity. And it has all these people who are representative of these smaller parts. One example is like Tangut. Tangut, as you know is the kingdom that was to the South of Mongolia when Genghis Khan was younger, and then he later destroyed the empire. It's also called Xi Xia in Chinese. 

But Tangut becomes a surname in Mongolian later on. So they're being absorbed and they're all-- people who study the Mongols' surnames find all kinds of interesting things. What used to be ethnonym becomes a clan name, and it gets all mixed up. So definitely the Mongols themselves have this very imperial and multitudinous kind of a conception of themselves. 

This is kind of contrary to how modern nationalists think of it. Yeah, right? So I think that answers the first part of your question. Sorry, what was the second one about? 

AUDIENCE: Qing Mongolia. 

DOTNO POUNT: Qing Mongolia-- oh, yes. Yeah the early Qing moment, I think is kind of a weird moment where there's just-- maybe there's enough sources, I'm not sure, but I think the experts who work on that particular topic are still kind of in the process of debating this. I don't think there's anything set in stone yet. 

So basically, if you read books in English about the Qing Empire published in the '80s and '90s maybe, they would just say the Mongols were kind of tribal and just out there, I don't know do what. And then the Qing came along and then incorporated them, organized them into the banner system, the famous like, they organized people into what's called banner or [NON-ENGLISH] in Mongolian. 

And then the [NON-ENGLISH] stays. Even today, if you look at inner Mongolia, the people are organized into these [NON-ENGLISH] they're like counties basically. And so the impression you get is that this whole thing is like a Qing Manchu invention that's being imposed on the Mongols, and that's been shown not to be true. The Mongols also had very similar terminology, their society or administratively and politically organized in almost the same way as how it was after the Qing conquest. 

So basically, the southern and eastern parts of Mongolia, they created the Ching together with the Manchus, some parts of central inner Mongolia, people from there, they were conquered. It's the oldest of the great Khan. People in northern Mongolia were going back and forth until the 1690s when they were having the war with the Oirats, Dzungar, and then they were getting defeated, and they asked to become part of the Qing formation basically. 

So that's how they were peacefully absorbed into the Qing empire. And then they were-- all the nobility kept their privileges and all their prerogatives. And so in general, there's very little rupture in terms of daily experience, I think. So that's why there's a lot of question about, were they really like subaltern now? Now that the Qing empire is their Qing emperors, now holy khan. 

Another interesting thing is bogd khan, holy khan or holy emperor, basically. That epithet used to only apply to Genghis Khan. So at the cult of Genghis Khan, you have bogd khan. But then bogd khan later becomes the Manchu emperor. And so Manchu emperor stays the bogd khan for a while and until in 1911, Mongolia calls a new theocratic king, the bogd khan. So they're all these continuities at the elite level. 

As you mentioned, Zunghar, the western Mongols are a completely different story. They did actually fight the Qing for more than a century, and eventually were defeated in battle and destroyed. And there were genocide involved. And it's just a very ugly process. So very different. 

But in all of this, can I find something about the cult of Genghis Khan in there? More often than not, I think I don't. Because at the same time, Buddhism is becoming a very important feature. And when Buddhism comes in Buddhism identifies itself as a religion, and everything else that might compete with its prerogatives are suppressed, and you're supposed to leave it behind. It's like the [NON-ENGLISH] wrong views, the wrong teachings. 

So yeah, I mean, I don't find a lot of things about the cult. I mean, of course, with the Oirats, the Western Mongols, they wouldn't be worshiping Chinggis Khan anyway. If anything, they're like one of the progenitors, remembered for having desecrated the cult of Genghis Khan in the Mongolian historiography. Yeah. So that's that. 

But the thing is after the advent of the Qing, you do find this cult of Genghis Khan practices getting a new life. So they're like-- the Genghis Khan temple in what's now Dornod province, near the [INAUDIBLE] river, where Genghis Khan's from, the Mongol nobility there kind of created a new Genghis Khan shrine by taking a little bit of stuff from artisan and creating their local shrine. So it's proliferating. 

Also, in the western part of Mongolia, there's another cult of the [NON-ENGLISH]. The source of that, I'm not exactly sure. Does it have anything to do with Ordos as an offshoot? Possibly, or maybe they had some [NON-ENGLISH] there anyway from a different person. I don't know. Another descendant of Genghis Khan possibly, but yeah. 

So they do have people who are called [NON-ENGLISH]. They still identify themselves as [NON-ENGLISH]. Tok is the flag. Tokuchi is like the flag caretaker, I guess, the people who are-- so yeah. It's around but not a lot outside of Ordos. 

AUDIENCE: If I understood correctly, you were-- I understand the connection of women with regards to marriage, and-- so I understood the connection you were making with regard to women, with regard to marriage and to lineage issues and their possible leadership in those regards. But if I understood you correctly were also talking about women's involvement in the burning of bones. And I wonder if you could speak more about that, about the gendered character of that kind of activity. And does one see that beyond this particular cult, for example? Is there some particular way in which that particular kind of activity is gendered, feminine or women are in charge of that? 

DOTNO POUNT: Yes, thank you so much for asking the question. It's because I also didn't have enough time to really get into the details. So burning of the bones is actually a very important theme in this study. So I guess locus classicus is in the secret history of the Mongols. 

This text was written in the 13th century, probably pretty early in Mongolian, but it was preserved in this weird like Chinese transcription and with glosses. And they reconstructed it. And it tells the story of Genghis Khan's rise, like his lineage, his youth, how he became powerful but very little about his actual big conquests. 

So this is written by somebody, who's basically in Mongolia. And in there, there's this very famous line. So this happens in passage 70, and this is a part when Genghis Khan's father has passed away and his mother and his basically immediate family is being excluded from the whole community. 

And so the widows of the-- two widows of the former Khan, their performing sacrifice, which is described as [NON-ENGLISH]. So they performed the sacrifice. And then they did not invite Genghis Khan's mom. And Genghis Khan's mom gets angry, and she confronts him and says, now, why is it that you don't invite me to the sacrifices anymore? And they say something like, well, show up when we tell you to show up, we're not going to-- or something like, we don't need to invite. If you want to show up, you're supposed to show up as basically like a follower, but not like an honored guest. 

So she's being excluded from this. And people have always kind of argued what does this mean. The sentence is a little bit cryptic. Maybe it's missing a word, and all kinds of hypotheses come around. But basically you can understand that they're giving something into the ground to the ancestors, the great ones basically. 

So that's that. And then there are also the eyewitness accounts that I was mentioning in [INAUDIBLE], William of Rubruck, they describe women assembling together and performing worships and then burning the bones. I think these are meat with bones on it. But in Mongolia, cuts of the meat are described according to. The bones. So they don't usually break bones. You kind of cut them at the joint. And so they're making this kind of sacrifices. 

And also, in the Yuan period, Chinese sources have a lot of references to this idea of [NON-ENGLISH], which is like burnt meal basically. So burning a meal for the ancestor is kind of a common thing, I guess it's not really like a Mongol thing, but the Mongols also do it. That's everywhere. 

And in addition to that, in northern Mongolia, in the Khentii mountains, there's a site, there's an old-- it's a really big-- it's almost like a town made of rocks. And this was dated to the early Mongol empire period. And lots of archeologists have studied that and the most important work that I reference by Noriyuki Shiraishi. He's a Japanese archeologist, and his team was able to found these what looked like temple grounds, and they had several layers. And around it, they also found these holes in which animal bones were burned. So these are like, they're interpreted as sacrifice making sites. 

So why is it related to women? Well, there are these eyewitness accounts. And in the Chinese sources, too, there's a lot of women doing this. So basically, it's kind of a confluence of all these sources that identify this as women's worship of her husband's ancestors with food offerings. 

AUDIENCE: So is there any particular way in which that's specifically gendered? I mean, we see women doing it, but why women and why that activity is something that women are doing? Is there any larger sense of that, cosmologically or connection to earth or connection to fire or-- 

DOTNO POUNT: I think so. I think the key here is hearth. So even today, women generally do the fire worship, feeding the fire god inside their homes, because they're basically the ones who cook. And the domestic labor is very gendered in Mongolia in the contemporary tradition. Basically, cooking and taking care of the house is a women's thing. It's still. Thank you. Yes, please. 

AUDIENCE: I have two questions. [INAUDIBLE] So the first question, I don't know if this is helpful or not, but do you ever see instances of speaking in tongues in shamanic Mongol circles or perhaps Islamic-- Mongol Islamic Sufi circles, especially in terms of ecstatic practices? I don't know if that's relevant or not, or Islamic sources mentioned during this time period. 

Second question, have you looked into the worship of Genghis Khan in other places, I guess? This is a contemporary or modern trend. In Korea, for example, there are shamans who actually worship Genghis. You have this history of them revering war heroes, like General MacArthur from the Korean War, for example, is one spirit who saluted. 

You have shamans who dress up as Genghis Khan. They start cutting themselves. They just start getting-- they basically act like the Korean general so that they act like that. Or you see Jesus being incorporated in Korean shamanic worship. You see Guan Yu, the Chinese Guan Yu, old paintings of him. Like you see all these different countries national figures being according to Korean shamanism. 

I was curious if you were aware of anything like that, in Korea, among the Manchu shamans, among the Taoists, or know anything like that.

DOTNO POUNT: I'm sorry, I haven't looked very far, to be honest. So this is my first time hearing that Koreans are worshiping Genghis Khan-- 

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 

DOTNO POUNT: I have no idea. I'm so sorry. 

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 

DOTNO POUNT: Islamic source, that's an interesting question. I haven't been able to investigate it too much because mostly because I haven't found enough sources. But there is a reason to think that the cult of Genghis Khan in the Yuan period in the 14th century might have been organized, financially, I guess, as a royal estate in a similar way as the Waqf. 

So we have records of people who were the ministers, who were sent out there to help the prince, who is supposed to preside over the cult. And they all have Islamic names. And they had these bureaus to manage the four orders of Genghis Khan. There aren't any details on what those look like, what they have more than how much subsidy was given them from the imperial coffers. That's as much information as the [INAUDIBLE] materials would give us.

So it's hard to say, but there might be connections. We don't know It depends on what sources we find, I guess. Thank you. 

AUDIENCE: Do they compare [INAUDIBLE] and Genghis Khan together in Mongolia or no? [INAUDIBLE] 

DOTNO POUNT: They're basically considered separate, I think. So, aside from [INAUDIBLE] becomes very important after Buddhism becomes important in Mongolia. But aside from [INAUDIBLE], there are other warrior heroes that are in epics. Here's another thing with Genghis Khan. He doesn't really have an epic of that type. Yeah. And the Mongol-- his secret history of the Mongols is interesting, one of the earlier editions, translations, it's called the epic chronicle about Genghis Khan, car, but it's not an epic. And it's not a chronicle either. 

The narrative is not epic at all. It's just one of the things we learned from Professor [INAUDIBLE]. But if you're interested, there's a new edition coming out from Penguin, and it's an excellent read. And in his introduction, he kind of goes through this material, too. Thank you. 

AUDIENCE: I promise it will be short. Thank you so much, Dotno, for this great presentation. I am Mariam, I teach Turkish language and literature at Harvard. That's why I interrupted Genghis Khan. And I heard Aaron exactly say, Genghis Khan, I think I catch you. [INAUDIBLE] I'm joking. 

My question is short. I will say something later on, but my question is you didn't mention any sources in Turkish, which is not available or you couldn't find. I wonder about that. And my thoughts, when I saw the title of this presentation, I got excited because just I was wondering if I will find some ties, cultural ties, Central Asia and modern Turkey, because Turks are very proud of their blood of Central Asia. 

This is a very nationalist thing, but apart from that, it's a woman rights, regarding women rights, which is very important point because people believe that under Islamic law, women started to be banned from being the part of state and being the part of Khan or emperor or just whatever. Over the history, through the history, up and downs, actually, Turks tried to keep this-- not privilege, actually, but it's a woman rights inside the states. 

And I found the clues in your presentation. Yes, there is definitely geographical or I don't know if you call Central Asia, which is central-- that means is geographical, but I think cultural tie or how we can call it, it doesn't matter actually if we have to name it or not. There are definitely some ties regarding the woman history or woman involvement of the states. And there are common words in standard Turkish, Urdu. Urdu, actually, right now in the meaning of military, which is interesting. 

But there's a city in Black Sea, as a city name is Urdu-- [NON-ENGLISH] of course. [NON-ENGLISH] is right now in the meaning of home country, but definitely there is some relation, just the tent, the place you live in. Yeah, thank you so much. 

DOTNO POUNT: Thank you. Thanks so much for bringing up the Turkey connection. I guess the short version of my answer is that I haven't looked for the Turkic source as much. Maybe I'm wrong, but my basic understanding is that a lot of the Turkic language sources are a bit later, mostly coming from the Timurid period. 

I mean, whatever Persian sources I can access are in English translation for now at least, probably forever. But anyway, that's the situation I find myself in. And I also didn't invest the time to look closely, because my assumption was that with the advent of Islamic culture, if there really were anything about worshipping Genghis Khan in this kind of a way, it probably would have been dropped, because my understanding is that a lot of the conversion narratives are defined against the shamans. 

But the interesting thing with the cult of Genghis Khan is that the shamans aren't there. Very rarely do you see a mention of a shaman in the Chinese sources. And sometimes, even when they mention that somebody is doing the incantations, they're not really described as a shaman either. So I think there are different categories of ritual specialists that we can't just all take as shaman. But then it's convenient for all these world religions converting people to call everybody shamans. So that's another, I guess, the artifact left behind from these very early polemics. 

But another interesting thing that I didn't have-- I guess, I didn't include the talk, I thought it would waste too much time, is that there is one connection I am still working on really drawing. So the. I did mention at some point that there are Mongolian historiographies. Let me get to this slide. 

So these 16th to 17th century, there are all these historiographies. And they have the cult of Genghis Khan in them. And they're basically like a narrative history of the Chinggisids through these centuries. And then they contain these little direct quotes of who said what. And usually, these instances are a woman, a queen, who's lamenting the loss of the Khan or something bad happening. And they're directly quoted for having versified this lament. 

And in Mongolian, the word for speaking the lament is [NON-ENGLISH], it means to melt. And it's also used in this one other specific instance. But Mongolians don't really have the tradition of a formal lament like that anymore, especially in any gendered way. 

But the Kazakhs have it, and it's alive and well. People still do perform the versified laments and still kind of reading through the ethnographies by [INAUDIBLE]. She's written about this. So I'm not exactly sure how to make the connection, but I feel like, my gut feeling is that this is laments by these queens in this specific ordo situation, and this is being remembered and maybe passed down in some form, written or not, maybe written down later, but somebody's memorizing this. And the lament is probably at this time a woman's thing. 

We don't really know if Mongolian women performed this or didn't perform it. I haven't really looked for it in the sources either, but-- 

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] In Turkish, just say-- in the meaning of madame. If you want to call [INAUDIBLE]. This is how beautiful to catch it. I mean, that means you are my woman. You are my [INAUDIBLE]. You are my place. It's kind of linguistic points, actually, shows that the woman involved often just the cultural importance. [INAUDIBLE] 

DOTNO POUNT: Thank you. 

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you for all these fascinating questions. And we are so fortunate to have to be able to ask you everything we always wanted to know. Really cool. Thank you so much. 

[APPLAUSE] 

ANNOUNCER 1: Sponsored by Women's Studies and Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. 

ANNOUNCER 2: Copyright 2025. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.