Naimans Erotic

The Naimans were a steppe confederation that dominated western Mongolia through the twelfth century until 1204, when Genghis Khan broke them at the battle of Chakirmaut and folded their people into the new Mongol state; their name survives today as a clan among Kazakhs, Mongols and several other Turkic peoples, and as a banner in Inner Mongolia. What set them apart on the plateau was organization. While most of their neighbors were loose tribal alliances, the Naimans ran something closer to a kingdom, with a khan's court, a chancellery staffed by literate Uyghur scribes, and a state seal. Their rulers carried Turkic titles, and their most powerful khan, Inanch Bilge, held a realm stretching from the Altai Mountains east toward the Khangai and west along the upper Irtysh, sitting astride the routes that linked Central Asia with the Tangut kingdom and Jin China.

The name is Mongolic and means eight, most likely a count of the constituent clans. Yet the language the Naimans themselves spoke is one of the open questions of medieval Inner Asia. Their titles and a possible descent from the Sekiz Oghuz, the eight Oghuz of the Uyghur era, argue for Turkic; the Mongolic name and their deep entanglement with Mongol politics argue otherwise. They may well have been bilingual, which on that frontier would not have been unusual. In religion they are less ambiguous. The Naiman elite had adopted Christianity from the Church of the East, the so-called Nestorian church that spread along the Silk Road, and practiced it alongside older shamanist customs; the Naimans and their Kereit rivals were the two Christian powers of the plateau when Temujin was rising. That rivalry ended grimly: when the Kereit ruler Ong Khan fled toward Naiman territory in 1203, a border guard killed him without recognizing him, and his skull was brought to the Naiman court and treated as a relic.

The confederation's undoing was a succession fight. Inanch Bilge's sons, Tayang Khan and Buyruq, split the realm and were defeated separately. Tayang died of wounds from Chakirmaut; Buyruq was hunted down two years later; Tayang's son Kuchlug fled west, seized the Qara Khitai throne in 1211, and was killed by Mongol pursuers in 1218. The Naimans' most durable gift to their conquerors was administrative. Tata-tonga, the Uyghur keeper of the Naiman seal, was captured in 1204 and taught the Mongols to write their language in Uyghur letters. That vertical script is still used in Inner Mongolia and has been restored to official status in Mongolia, which means every line of Mongolian written in the traditional script carries a Naiman inheritance.