The Mongol Empire in World History: The State of the Field

Abstract

The study of the Mongol Empire has made enormous strides in the past two decades, and its most notable impact is the shift of seeing the Empire not only in national or regional terms but from a holistic perspective, in its full Eurasian context. This focus, credited mostly to the works of Thomas T. Allsen, also means that the scholarly literature now gives more space to topics that interest world historians such as the cultural, economic, religious and artistic exchanges that prevailed in Mongol Eurasia, or the legacy that the Mongol Empire left for the early modern empires. Simultaneously, the Mongols' image begins to shift from the barbarian warriors obsessed with massacres and plunder, to the Mongols as active promoters of cross‐cultural connections, who even brought about the transition from the medieval to the modern world. The paper reviews the major trends in the study of the Empire from world history perspective and argues that the nomadic civilization of the Mongols should be taken into account in world history surveys.

Population Structure and Genetic Diversity of Sheep Breeds in the Kyrgyzstan

“…In addition, there was also an assumption that Mongolian tribes brought local fat-tailed sheep to the territory of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (Lushikhin, 1964). The Mongol invasion in China (Zhao et al, 2017) and in Central Asia including the Kyrgyzstan dated to the 12 th to 13 th centuries CE (Biran, 2004;Biran, 2013). As there were no genotyping data of Mongol sheep breeds, we were not able to address this assumption genetically.…”