The Siberian Ulus of Jochi: Nomadic Traditions on the eve of Imperial Innovations

Abstract

Research objectives: To determine the principles of Chingis Khan’s giving of an appanage to his son Jochi after the submission of the peoples of Southern Siberia in 1207 and to correlate the criteria for the territorial division of the ulus with information from the epic folklore of Southern Siberia and Central Asia. Research materials: “The Secret History of the Mongols,” the court chronicles of the Mongol Empire of the 13th–14th centuries, the heroic epos of the peoples of Southern Siberia and Central Asia, and the historiography of the Mongol Empire of the first half of the 13th century. Results and novelty of the research: As a result of comparisons of the realities of the early Mongol Empire with the patriarchal foundations of the Turkic-Mongolian nomadic society reflected in epic tales, a projection of the traditional norms of the organization of the nomadic ulus on the situation with the endowment of Jochi in the conquered lands of Southern Siberia can be discerned. Just as in heroic tales, the son, on the orders of his father, conquers neighbouring tribes living in the north and west of their native nomadic lands and receives them in governing. In this situation, not only the paradigm of relations between the indigenous and annexed population of the ulus bequeathed by the ancestors but also the archaic scheme of descending sacrality from the North to the South and from the East to the West played its role.