Chapter 11 Journal

In the beginning of the chapter, the author talks about pastoral societies and Mongol women. When the book describes these women, they sound not at all like the women from all the other societies that we have covered. These Mongol women have a larger part and I feel like they are respected more as a gender than the other tribes. These women were able to ride on horses, serve as political advisers, had a part in the military, and even rode horses. That really surprised me. I also think that it is amazing how the Mongols managed to get so much land and space with the little number of people they had. The book says that "Their thirteenth-century breakout from Mongolia gave rise to the largest land-based empire in all of human history, stretching from the Pacific coast of Asia to Eastern Europe. This empire joined the nomadic peoples of the inner Eurasian steppes with the settled agricultural civilizations of outer Eurasia more extensively and more intimately than ever before." It also states that,"Both the enormous destructiveness of the process and the networks of exchange and communication that i spawned were the work of the Mongols, numbering only about 700,000 people. That is just remarkable to me. All in all, I admire the Mongols. They are smart, ruthless, and close to their families. I admire how they fought and ran through big powerhouse nations like Persia, China, and Russia. That takes A LOT of courage, skill, and intelligence. However, what I like the most is how they incorporated things from the places they conquered into their lives. Take China for example. China made great breakthroughs like taxation and the postal system. Well after the Mongols went through China, they incorporated those things and started to use it themselves. The Mongols are probably one of the smartest civilizations to ever exist.