As a native arabic reader, Mongolian gives me headaches. My brain keeps seeing it as an unreadable arabic script rotated 45 degrees to the left. (It also turns out it does have some arabic influence[0])
Not-native Arabic reader here. To my eyes, it pretty clearly has a "baseline" that, if you tilted the text 45° to the right, would run along the "bottom". With this in mind, the similarity of many characters and ligatures to those in Arabic is striking.
Yes and right when my brain thinks it found something it could make sense of, my head tries intuitively to tilt to the left and I have to forcefully resist it.
Incidentally, having listened to a few clips of the language, it sounds like it has a slight Arabic tinge in some words. And otherwise reminds me of Russian, and sometimes Hangul.
No kidding! At some point Genghis Khan invaded Afghanistan. Over the next century Pax Mongolica made it as far as Egypt. Conquered swathes of Persia, felt cute, sacked Baghdad. Just Mongol things.
Splintered into a bunch of Khanates that started fighting each other..
Arguably they fell apart because they picked up so many scripts and cultural and religious influences the different types of Mongols could no longer communicate or tolerate one another. Then the bubonic plague came and they became insular again instead of expansionist.
Indeed. The fall of Baghdad [0] during that century at the hand of Hulagu Khan[1], the grandson of Gengis Khan, is thought to be a critical turning point that ended the islamic golden age and drove the eastern islamic caliphate to a dark age Iraq and other descendant countries never fully recovered from.
<graphic warning> According to some accounts, Hulagu cut open the belly of the Caliph Al-Musta'sim, pulled his guts and left them on top of the caliph's head to drip while he was slowly dying. Some other accounts relate that he was killed by horse trampling wrapper in a rug.</graphic warning>
It's also fascinating that Mongols, with all their mighty army, would settle in a land upon invading it, marrying into the locals, adopting their religion and traditions. Some modern Russian, Turk and Persian populations have this "reverse influence" from past Mongol invasions and admixture with actual Mongol people. Tatars[2] are a notable example, a Russo-Turko-Mongol population descending from Golden Horde troops who settled around the Volga (as everything in ethnographics, this is contested).
The Mongoles did some horrible things. In the Shahr-e-Gholghola, when the grandson of Gengis Khan was killed, he ordered that everyone in the city be killed, including children in cribs. As if that was not enough, they left the city and returned a few days to kill any survivors.
"Arguably they fell apart because they picked up so many scripts and cultural and religious influences the different types of Mongols could no longer communicate or tolerate one another. "
Interesting thought and it certainly had influence, but I would argue that the trope that one strong ruler conquers a big kingdom, but it doesn't stay united, because his heirs cannot settle on the next great king, is a quite common and often repeated one.
Still fascinating and super cool.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script