Chapter 3 Central Asia, Xinjiang, and Tibet 93For some it may seem absurd to suggest that groups like the Mongol hordes
were more civilized than the Chinese Tang and Song dynasties that came
before the Mongol conquests. And yet when we examine the history of the
Mongols and their neighbors, we should interrogate the markers of civilization
that we might otherwise take for granted. Gender relations, cultural produc-
tions, religious practices, and the possibility of social or political advancement
are worth consideration. The Mongols are best remembered for military profi-
ciency and sometimes terrorizing brutality, but so, too, were generals of the
Chinese dynasties that preceded the Mongol Yuan.
Women on the Steppe
The Amazons are perhaps the most striking example of gender roles in a
nomadic society that were starkly different from their sedentary or agricultural
counterparts. They first emerge in Greek descriptions of ancient Scythia, which
included portions of Central and Western Asia. The label of Scythians or later,
Sarmatians, could include nomadic peoples around the Caspian Sea but also
could include the ancestors of the Xiongnu and even the Mongols. The women
warriors known to myth and history as the Amazons are experiencing a
dynamic revival as archaeological work in the past two decades has revealed
with increasing certainty that Scythian women warriors indeed rode into battle
and fought alongside men. Historian Adrienne Mayor has compiled much of
this new research in a compelling argument that the mythology of Amazon
women that existed in Greece, Persia, Egypt, and China portrayed a genuine
gender dynamic among the nomadic peoples of the steppe that was far more
equal than these sedentary societies (Mayor 2014).
The myth of the Amazons is a window to the roles of women in nomadic
societies. Judging by the history and literature from ancient Greece and China,
it seems that the relative social freedom of women within nomadic societies
was a source of cultural and psychological anxiety and a flash point of pro-
found and uneasy cultural difference. Women in nomadic cultures experience
greater social freedom for a number of reasons. The necessary division of labor
related to the total mobilization of the adult male population for warfare, herd-
ing, or hunting led to women in Central Asian cultures taking on prominent
public roles in work and social organization, including military and political
roles, as recent archaeological finds have confirmed. Lyn Webster Wilde (2000)
traveled to many Central Asian burial sites where she found tombs of women
warriors buried with military honors, pierced by arrows, clasping weapons, and
with skeletal evidence in their bowed legs of a life spent on horseback. The
peripatetic lifestyle of nomads is also conducive to a lower birth rate, reducing
the amount of time that women spend pregnant or caring for infant children.
These facts may have led to the more outrageous claims among Greek writers
that Amazon women lived in seclusion from men, practiced male infanticide,
and amputated or cauterized one breast to allow for stronger archery, though
none of these are confirmed in the expanding archaeological record. Beckwith