Jonathan Ratcliffe

Compared with epic heroes such as Geser and Jangar who are widely popular among the Mongolic peoples of Inner Asia, the far less well-known epic of Shono-Baatar stems from a determinable and relatively recent historical basis: the eighteenth-century Dzungar prince Louzang Shunu and his seeking sanctuary from persecution by his relatives in the Russian Empire. While legends and short songs about this figure are widely attested from Kalmykia to Xinjiang, only among the Buryats has any full-length oral epic been preserved: a single specimen taken down from storyteller Sagadar Shanarsheev in 1936. Although Shanarsheev’s epic possesses a complex political and textual history, it was almost wholly unknown beyond a few scholars until its republication in a dual-language Russian-Buryat edition in 2015. Since then, it has increasingly become an important part of the symbolism of Buryat cultural identity and has even been hailed as a world-class epic equal to the Iliad and Nibelungenlied

This paper outlines the debates surrounding the conflicts between large-and small-scale mining in Mongolia. It provides a historical overview of these conflicts, discusses the critical role of mining in Mongolia's international relations and foreign investment, and the chain of economic, social and environmental causes and effects at work in the trend of herders diversifying into (largely informal) mining activities. As we show, despite the rapid changes in relation to land, culture, community currently taking place in Mongolia stemming from neoliberal policies, privatization and deepening disparities in wealth, notions of social justice remain firmly rooted in socialist ethics.

In 1995 to mark the thousand-year anniversary of the Buryat Geser, the Kray Gesera (Land of Geser) ethnographic park was opened in the Okinskiy region of Buryatia. At the opening ceremony, the American Daniel Plumley [1996: 20-21], who had played an integral part in the park’s creation, was compelled to admit that he knew almost nothing about the figure of Geser. He just could not find anything about him “in European books”. As we celebrate another anniversary for Geser in 2020, one must ask whether much has changed during this past quarter century in which the rise of the internet has revolutionised study by granting access to all manner of texts once obscure and difficult to obtain. In this paper I undertake a short survey of what there is now readily available on the Mongolic Geser in English, both forgotten gems and new exciting treasures.

In the 1941 essay “The Mongol Orders of Submission to European Powers, 1245-1255,” Eric Voegelin presents and analyses some eight letters and decrees written by Mongol khans and generals to European rulers and popes at the height of Mongol imperial power.  These “orders of submission” offer a fascinating case study of what happens when two very different ecumenical symbolizations of the world and its political-theological ordering try to communicate with one another.

The Greek Anthology is a large collection of very short pieces of writing from Ancient Greece which were complied over several centuries. A translation in English is available in 16 books spread over 5 volumes. The writings in this anthology include inscriptions copied from buildings, poems, and epigrams. However, book XIV is quite different from the other books. Sprinkled throughout book 14 are 45 elementary mathematical problems. Now Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes are household names in the history of mathematics in ancient Greece. However, The Greek Anthology is not so well-known in mathematical circles. The purpose of this paper is to describe these ancient problems. Perhaps they can be used to enrich mathematics in the classroom, or to make innovative connections with subjects such as classical studies or ancient history

REVIEW:

Peter Kingsley, A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World, Golden Sufi Centre Publications, Point Reyes:  2010, second printing 2011. (Hardcover) ISBN 13:978-1-890350-20-8; (Paperback) ISBN: 13: 978-1-890350-21-5.

Geser is an epic hero of Tibetan origin, but narrative cycles about the figure are widely found among the Buryats and other Mongolic peoples. During the 1940s Soviet scholars attempted to "create" a national culture for the Buryats, which included turning oral epics about Geser into the national epic.

In the past ten years interest in the study of the history of Buryat literacy and literature during the Soviet Period has increased substantially in English language academia (Soni 2007; Khosomoev 2007; Cakars 2009). However, a great many avenues are yet to be explored in relation to this field – most notably the history of the Buryat Geser traditions in the twentieth century and their transformation from oral to written epic compositions. In this piece I would like to open up some of the less-explored issues concerning the religious cults and epic traditions surrounding the hero Geser as a messianic savior figure in Inner Asia, and how these became compatible with communist ideology.

Modern political mythology frequently associates the Aesopic fable of The Farmer and His Quarrelling Sons with the Roman insignia of state, the bundled sticks and axe of the fasces. This seems to be due to the uncanny similarity that this fable also describes a bundle of sticks, but a very different one. It describes how a farmer " s argumentative sons are only quelled into concord through their father " s allegorical illustration of the relative weaknesses of the sticks individually and bound together. The symbolic association of these two bundles in popular culture if often reinforced by Fascist receptions of the Roman insignia as a symbol of collective power. However, collective power is a notion never explicitly attested regarding the fasces in their original Roman context. Rather, such a reading only emerges during the French Revolution in its efforts to echo the Roman Republic through its new understandings of the collective power of human beings. Any discernible mingling at all between the Aesopic fable and the Roman symbol, upon inspection, does not seem to begin until an important legal precedent in nineteenth century America. Moreover, conscious connection of these symbols in which Aesop, the fasces and Fascism are directly named is actually a fairly recent retrojective invention of the past twenty-five years. In this paper I identify when this appears to have occurred and how " invented traditions " such as this can grow and diffuse far more quickly than might be initially supposed.

Manshuud Emegeev is perhaps the most famous epic reciter, or üligershen, of the Western Buryats. His twenty-two thousand line cycle of the hero Geser has since the 1930s come to be regarded by many scholars as containing historical strata stretching back a thousand years. For this reason this work was widely utilised in the 1990s as part of Buryat efforts to rediscover and celebrate their ethnic identity. However, in spite of the many studies of Manshuud’s epics and their narrative, mythological, and technical composition, mostly produced by ethnic Buryats, as of yet very little has been ventured on the symbolic role played by writing and textual literacy within them. This is a very important issue, as Manshuud, whilst a remarkable storyteller, was conventionally illiterate. The divine, mantic and socially-binding power that the acts of reading and writing seem to convey in his epics are very curious, contradictory and diverse. Of special significance is the fact that we only know of Manshuud’s stories because two western educated scholars, Jeremiah Curtin and Tseveen Zhamtsarano, committed them to paper for academic purposes. In order to make sense of this complex web of dissonances between epic as written and spoken, some comment will be made in reference to Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy and the ways in which this now famous philosophical study explores the problems inherent in the prioritising of the written over the spoken word in how history and cultural memory are constructed.

The Roman foundation myth of the twins Romulus and Remus’ exposure in the wilderness is in many ways exemplary of the elevation of a local myth into a powerful symbol of imperial legitimacy. My approach to this subject will centre on three main case-studies from the Eastern Mediterranean during the second century BCE, an integral period in Rome’s cultural and military emergence beyond Italia into greater Greek cultural awareness. The first is the manufacture on Chios of a narrative of the Roman twins by an unknown benefactor in order to gain Rome’s favour; the second, the inclusion of the Roman myth as one of nineteen scenes in a temple constructed at Cyzicus by the Attalid rulers of Pergamon in honour of their mother. The third is the nativity myth of the eponymous founder of the city of Miletus, who in one second century BCE account, with many similarities to the Roman myth, is exposed and nursed by a pack of wolves. Throughout this exploration I will endeavour to illustrate the multifaceted nature of the Roman foundational myth and the way in which its different elements could appeal to diverse audiences who reappropriated and reshaped it for their own ends.

Classical conceptions of geography, even before Herodotus, present us with a wealth of bizarre tribes and monstrosities in relation to the remote lands beyond the Greco-Scythian settlements around the Pontus Euxinus and to the regions north of India. But what can we make of legendary and distant beings such as the one-eyed Arimaspians, gold-digging ants, regions full of feathers and dog-headed men? In this paper I will look to uncannily similar descriptions made by the geographers of ancient and mediaeval India and China towards their north and west respectively, which point towards notions that such wonders had their origins in the folklore of the nomadic cultures of Inner Asia. Indeed, in support of this, we find similar descriptions for the inhabitants of remote lands within the mediaeval and living epic narratives of the Turkic-Mongolian peoples. A key possibility, which shall be discussed, is that when asked about distant regions by geographers and traders, Inner Asian peoples may have made use of the signposts which they themselves used to describe the very ends of the earth.

Largely due to the influence of twentieth century Fascism, modern popular mythology has often viewed the meaning and origins of the bundled rods and axe of the Roman symbol of magistral authority, the fasces, to be intertwined with the Aesopic tale of "The Farmer and
His Sons" or "The Bundle of Sticks", as it is also known. In this famous and widely spread tale, familial and ethnic cohesion are endorsed via the allegory of a bundle of sticks, or men, being far harder to break than mere individuals. However, whilst the rods and axe which composed the Roman fasces have many parallels in axe and rod cults of authority across the ancient Mediterranean region, the meaning of unity or cohesion is not explicitly attested in any ancient source regarding the meaning of the fasces. In comparison with this, the Aesopic tale in antiquity is instead connected explicitly with the Scythian nomads in Plutarch's Moralia, and reappears many times amongst the Turkic-Mongolian Bulgar, Oghuz and Khalkh Mongol nomadic peoples during the middle ages, where it is a key moral message frequently reiterated in the Secret History of the Mongols. It is later even attributed by historians to Chingis Khan himself. Through this paper, I hope to untangle the strands which compose this interlaced confusion of symbols in order to show the survival and reinterpretation of mythic patterns over time, and offer suggestions as to how the two distinct usages of bundles of sticks in the forms of this fable and the fasces came to be mistakenly associated from the Renaissance onwards.

The legends surrounding the eponymous founder of the Oguz people, Oguz kagan, have a long and diverse history of reappropriation and use in legitimising power in the Central Asian world. Key to this is the
Tawariq-e Oguz of Rashid al -Din and the influence it has had on assembling both inclusive and exclusive national origin myths. However, aside from this Oguz tradition we also possess the tantalising Oguz-name manuscript from Turfan, the dating and language of which are often disputed. This variant presents the reader with several provoking puzzles in attempting to reassemble the transmission of the figure of Oguz. Do some of the work’s constituents extend back as far as the legends surrounding Modun Chanyu? Is the work a unique and repository of pre-Islamic Türkic-Mongolian myth and ritual? In this paper I will address these questions as I attempt to revive study of this curious variant and revaluate its relevance.

It is a commonly held modern conception that the Roman symbol of imperial power, the fasces - or bound rods and axe, represented the collective power of the Roman people, wherein weaker individual men or rods analogically display their collective strength by reinforcing one another. However this is a completely erroneous idea. Our investigation will take us from the fables of Aesop to the dying words of Genghis Khan, the French Revolution and the ideological formation of twentieth-century Fascism.