The UmBlog

This is a great Mongolian story filmed by a German. It is subtitled. It is about a family's life in their yurt on the Mongolian steppe as they tend their ponies and sheep and hybrid wolf/dog puppy discovered by the young daughter. My family and I watched it last spring but I didn't think of reviewing it until my dear wife noted the connection to my yurt post. Towards the end of the movie the family disassembles their yurt for the move to greener pastures. It is all very fascinating. The interview with the director on the DVD is great. This isn't filmed with actors. It's a Mongolian family who let her film their real lives but also pretend with some dramatic elements to make a story arc. The film's website in english is here . There is also a wiki entry .  Not related to the movie, but I have friends who lived in a yurt with their 3 children for a year while they built their house. They own a small local farm and call the yurt their future farm stand . After they ...

Maybe Genghis Khan is the worst killer in human history after all. In fact, maybe life wouldn't be the way we know it now if it weren't for the rise of the Mongol Empire in the 1100's AD. This is the argument made by Jack Weatherford in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World 2005 is a fantastic read on the Mongol empire at the turn of the first millennium AD. He is an admirer of the empire and downplays somewhat the horrors of Mongol warfare and pumps up the politics of free trade and freedom of religion. The research on Genghis's life consists of research into a document called The Secret History of the Mongols , an authentic Mongolian history, and correlating it with the terrain in Mongolia today. From these sources Genghis's life before becoming Khan is analyzed. Of interest to me is finding out that some neighboring tribes were Christian as well as Buddhist and Muslim. Genghis himself was an animist. Genghis's first major campaign was against th...

no link for this old book, The Mongols by E. D. Phillips, 1969, Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, New York after reading about Ivan the Terrible , i had to learn more about the Tatars, or Tatars, he was constantly worried about, remnants of the Golden Horde , the Mongol army that could have made it to the Atlantic Ocean if not for the inconveniently timed death of Ogedei , Genghis Khan 's son and successor, which required the generals to return and accept the next Khan. discipline was strict in Genghis's armies. death was the usual punishment for infractions. technology played a large role in Genghis's sieges. fear and fairness were also helpful. cities that surrendered were only subjected to heavy taxation. cities that didn't were exterminated. the Mongol army perhaps killed as many people as all of WW2, but over a hundred years, anywhere between 30 and 60 million deaths . The army was guilty of some horrific devastations though. Consider the Seige of Baghdad . The C...