the ‘inside’ other 87
between boys and girls who had to inherit their parents. According to
him, the girls received more,^3 but a closer analysis of the patrimony
clearly shows the specific notion of a woman’s position in the clan, or
in the family: in fact she received a significant amount of possessions
but in movables only; and the estates were given to the sons, i.e. they
were viewed as the clan’s and the family’s property. It was the estate
that people perceived as more important than gold, silver, or precious
stones since it provided any society with food supplies. The more land
one had, the more power and weight in the society he had; it was the
same with the clans and families. That is why it was considered that
land should not to be divided or ‘moved’ to another clan, something
that could have possibly happened if a girl married to a boy and then
left her father’s house.
Of course, the passage referred to the already sedentarised Volga
Bulgars, but it is beyond any doubt that such kind of notion was typ-
ical for the remote past and was spread not only among sedentary
societies but amongst nomads too. Arable land was also valuable for
the steppe people and most of the nomads in the Middle Ages always
maintained an agricultural sector appropriate enough for the steppe
conditions. Such a claim is absolutely valid for the ‘steppe empires’
of Turks and Uighurs, especially in the oasis towns, not to mention
Khazaria and Bulgaria where the conditions for agriculture were much
better than those in the steppes of Central Asia.
If one wants to make a comparison between the status of women
in steppe Eurasia and Western Europe in the Early Middle Ages, he/
she will notice that there is no serious evidence from the steppe area.
The same is true about her role as a wife, widow, or divorced woman.^4
In Western Europe, in the so-called Barbaricum, the law was in fact
a product of a ‘written’ culture as well as of the adaptation of the
Roman law to new, post-Roman conditions. In the steppes, the law
was a product of an ‘oral’ culture and different traditions, without any
Roman legacy at all.
Not surprisingly, Herodotus links the warrior-like Amazons (who
are with another status and with another style of living than that of
(^3) Something similar is seen in Chapter 49 of the “Responsa papae Nicolai I ad
consulta Bulgarorum”: “Besides, you want to know if you are allowed to give, as it was
before, a dowry to your spouses in gold, silver, oxes, horses, etc.”. For the dowry and
marital gift in (Early) Medieval Bulgaria see, Georgieva 2001, 9–16.
(^4) See Hristova 2002, 13–28, with literature cited there.