Kiyat Erotic

The Kiyat are less a people than a lineage, and for a few decades in the twelfth century they were the lineage that mattered most on the Mongolian steppe: the clan of Yesugei and of his son Temujin, who became Genghis Khan. The name comes from kiyan, a torrent pouring down a mountainside, and Kiyat is simply its plural. The Persian chronicler Rashid al-Din, writing for the Mongol rulers of Iran, made Kiyan one of two ancestors who led the surviving Mongols into the hidden valley of Ergenekon, where they multiplied for generations before melting a way out through an iron mountain. That is legend. Recorded history begins with Khabul Khan, the first ruler of the Khamag Mongol confederation, whose descendants took up the old Kiyat name as a mark of the senior line. Their pasture was the grass and larch country along the Onon and Kherlen rivers in what is now northeastern Mongolia, shared and contested with the Tayichiud, the Merkit and the Tatars. They spoke Middle Mongol and belonged to the wider Borjigin descent group. Yesugei's house called itself Kiyat-Borjigin. The descendants of Khabul's eldest son were the Kiyat-Yurkin, a proud line whose chiefs Temujin executed early in his rise after they refused to follow him against the Tatars. That killing inside the family was the first sign that he meant to replace kinship with loyalty as the basis of power. Once he became Genghis Khan he reserved Borjigin for his own descendants, and the Kiyat name settled on the collateral cousins.

Religion in the founding era was the steppe's own: reverence for Tengri, the eternal blue sky, and for the spirits of mountains and rivers, reached through shamans. Descendants who stayed in Mongolia became Tibetan Buddhists from the sixteenth century on. Those who rode west with the empire became Muslims, and it is in the west that the name had its second life. In the Golden Horde, Mamai, the strongman who ruled through puppet khans and lost to the Russians at Kulikovo in 1380, was a Kiyat. The Glinsky princes of Lithuania later claimed descent from him, a pedigree that would run through Elena Glinskaya to her son Ivan the Terrible. Today Kiyat survives as a clan name among Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Karakalpaks and Nogais, and in Mongolia, where clan names were restored in the 1990s, many families registered as Khiad or Khiad Borjigin, reclaiming an affiliation that had gone unrecorded through seventy years of socialist rule.