KALMYKIAN and MONGOLIAN TRADITIONAL FAIRY TALES - 39 Kalmyk and Mongolian Children's Stories


Book Description

Herein are 39 Kalmyk-Mongolian children’s fairy and folktales which are Mongolian in origin. Herein you wind stories like: The Saga Of The Well-And-Wise-Walking Khan The Woman Who Sought Her Husband In The Palace Of Erlik-Khan The Gold-Spitting Prince Five To One The Fortunes Of Shrikantha The Use Of Magic Language The Wife Who Loved Butter Bhîxu Life The Saga Of Ardschi-Bordschi And Vikramâditja’s Throne The Boy-King Schalû the Wolf-boy Vikramâditja acquires another Kingdom The Voice-charmer How Naran Gerel swore falsely and yet told the Truth ….plus many, many more. Kalmyk folklore, fairy tales, omens and sayings are a little-researched genre of folklore. Since early times the Kalmyk people, surveyed nature, animals, and the birds around them, from which they created tales, legends, myths, songs, proverbs, and sayings that are notable for their keen observation, which, over time, have been infused with a healthy dose of deep wisdom, which is highly complementary to their commonly held practise of Tengric Bhuddism, or Mongolian Buddhism. The Kalmyk people are members of the Oirat clan which is Mongolian in origin. The Kalmyks (also spelled Kalmouk) migrated 3,700km/2,300miles from the steppes of southern Siberia on the banks of the Irtysh River to the Lower Volga region, bordering on the northern Caspian sea, arriving in about 1630AD. The most compelling reason was to escape the growing dominance of the neighboring Dzungar Mongol tribe. Along the route of their migration, the Kalmyks would have met and mixed with pagans and shamans, the Jewish Khazars, Islam from the Alans and Nogais, and Christianity from the Russians and other Slavic tribes. As such their folklore and fairytales are interwoven with elements of all these cultures creating a rich and diverse tapestry of lore which is reflected in this volume. ============== KEYWORDS/TAGS: Kalmykian, Mongolian, folklore, fairytales, Ananda, ancient, ape, Ardschi-Bordschi, ARDSCHI, BORDSCHI, arrows, ass, barley-corns, beasts, beautiful, birdcatcher, bird, catcher, Bodhisattva, bones, Boy-king, Buddha, Buddhist, butter, capital, caravan, chief, children, children’s books, children’s stories, Churmusta, companions, cunning, dancing, demons, eight, endowed, enemy, feathers, fifteenth century, 15th C., free, friends, Gandharva, garuda-bird, Gerel, grandparents with children, gratitude, Hermit, honour, horse, India, jewel, Khan, Khanin, King, kingdom, Kun-dgah, Lama, lioness, love, magicians, magnanimous, maiden, majesty, mango tree, marry, Massang, Master, merchandize, merchandise, merchant, Minister, Moonshine, mother-o’-pearl, mothers to be, mothers with children, mountain, Nâgârg′una, Naran, Naran-Dâkinî, Naran Dâkinî, noble, oxen, palace, parents to be, parents with children, parrot, peace, possessed, Prince, Princess, Queen, reading to children, sacred, sacrifice, Schimnu, Schimnu Khan, Schimnus, Serpent, Serpent king, seventy-one, Shanggasba, Siddhi-kür, soothsayer, Ssaran, Sunshine, Suta, tales, talisman, Teacher, temple, thousand, throne, token, transform, treasure, Vikramâditja, water, Well-and-wise-walking, Well and wise walking, weep, wisdom, wise, wolves, wood-carver, wood carver, youth




Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire


Book Description

A comprehensive reference to Mongolia and the Mongols includes alphabetically arranged entries on the region's history, political movements, key figures, culture, languages, religion, economy, sociology, medicine, and climate .




Red Shambhala


Book Description

Many know of Shambhala, the Tibetan Buddhist legendary land of spiritual bliss popularized by the film, Shangri-La. But few may know of the role Shambhala played in Russian geopolitics in the early twentieth century. Perhaps the only one on the subject, Andrei Znamenski’s book presents a wholly different glimpse of early Soviet history both erudite and fascinating. Using archival sources and memoirs, he explores how spiritual adventurers, revolutionaries, and nationalists West and East exploited Shambhala to promote their fanatical schemes, focusing on the Bolshevik attempt to use Mongol-Tibetan prophecies to railroad Communism into inner Asia. We meet such characters as Gleb Bokii, the Bolshevik secret police commissar who tried to use Buddhist techniques to conjure the ideal human; and Nicholas Roerich, the Russian painter who, driven by his otherworldly Master and blackmailed by the Bolshevik secret police, posed as a reincarnation of the Dalai Lama to unleash religious war in Tibet. We also learn of clandestine activities of the Bolsheviks from the Mongol-Tibetan Section of the Communist International who took over Mongolia and then, dressed as lama pilgrims, tried to set Tibet ablaze; and of their opponent, Ja-Lama, an “avenging lama” fond of spilling blood during his tantra rituals.




Empires of the Silk Road


Book Description

An epic account of the rise and fall of the Silk Road empires The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols. In addition, he explains why the heartland of Central Eurasia led the world economically, scientifically, and artistically for many centuries despite invasions by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, and others. In retelling the story of the Old World from the perspective of Central Eurasia, Beckwith provides a new understanding of the internal and external dynamics of the Central Eurasian states and shows how their people repeatedly revolutionized Eurasian civilization. Beckwith recounts the Indo-Europeans' migration out of Central Eurasia, their mixture with local peoples, and the resulting development of the Graeco-Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations; he details the basis for the thriving economy of premodern Central Eurasia, the economy's disintegration following the region's partition by the Chinese and Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the damaging of Central Eurasian culture by Modernism; and he discusses the significance for world history of the partial reemergence of Central Eurasian nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Empires of the Silk Road places Central Eurasia within a world historical framework and demonstrates why the region is central to understanding the history of civilization.







Sources of Mongolian Buddhism


Book Description

Despite Mongolia's centrality to East Asian history and culture, Mongols themselves have often been seen as passive subjects on the edge of the Qing formation or as obedient followers of so-called "Tibetan Buddhism," peripheral to major literary, religious, and political developments. But in fact Mongolian Buddhists produced multi-lingual and genre-bending scholastic and ritual works that profoundly shaped historical consciousness, community identification, religious knowledge, and practices in Mongolian lands and beyond. In Sources of Mongolian Buddhism, a team of leading Mongolian scholars and authors have compiled a collection of original Mongolian Buddhist works--including ritual texts, poetic prayers and eulogies, legends, inscriptions, and poems--for the first time in any European language.




The Spread of Buddhism


Book Description

This book unravels some of the complex factors that allowed or hampered the presence of (certain aspects of) Buddhism in the regions to the north and the east of India, such as Central Asia, China, Tibet, Mongolia, or Korea.




Information-theoretic causal inference of lexical flow


Book Description

This volume seeks to infer large phylogenetic networks from phonetically encoded lexical data and contribute in this way to the historical study of language varieties. The technical step that enables progress in this case is the use of causal inference algorithms. Sample sets of words from language varieties are preprocessed into automatically inferred cognate sets, and then modeled as information-theoretic variables based on an intuitive measure of cognate overlap. Causal inference is then applied to these variables in order to determine the existence and direction of influence among the varieties. The directed arcs in the resulting graph structures can be interpreted as reflecting the existence and directionality of lexical flow, a unified model which subsumes inheritance and borrowing as the two main ways of transmission that shape the basic lexicon of languages. A flow-based separation criterion and domain-specific directionality detection criteria are developed to make existing causal inference algorithms more robust against imperfect cognacy data, giving rise to two new algorithms. The Phylogenetic Lexical Flow Inference (PLFI) algorithm requires lexical features of proto-languages to be reconstructed in advance, but yields fully general phylogenetic networks, whereas the more complex Contact Lexical Flow Inference (CLFI) algorithm treats proto-languages as hidden common causes, and only returns hypotheses of historical contact situations between attested languages. The algorithms are evaluated both against a large lexical database of Northern Eurasia spanning many language families, and against simulated data generated by a new model of language contact that builds on the opening and closing of directional contact channels as primary evolutionary events. The algorithms are found to infer the existence of contacts very reliably, whereas the inference of directionality remains difficult. This currently limits the new algorithms to a role as exploratory tools for quickly detecting salient patterns in large lexical datasets, but it should soon be possible for the framework to be enhanced e.g. by confidence values for each directionality decision.




Genghis Khan


Book Description

A definitive and sweeping account of the life and times of the world's greatest conqueror -- Genghis Khan -- and the rise of the Mongol empire in the 13th century Combining fast-paced accounts of battles with rich cultural background and the latest scholarship, Frank McLynn brings vividly to life the strange world of the Mongols and Genghis Khan's rise from boyhood outcast to world conqueror. McLynn provides the most accurate and absorbing account yet of one of the most powerful men ever to have ever lived.




Central Asian Sources and Central Asian Research


Book Description

In October 2014 about thirty scholars from Asia and Europe came together for a conference to discuss different kinds of sources for the research on Central Asia. From museum collections and ancient manuscripts to modern newspapers and pulp fiction and the wind horses flying against the blue sky of Mongolia there was a wide range of topics. Modern data processing and data management and the problems of handling five different languages and scripts for a dictionary project were leading us into the modern digital age. The dominating theme of the whole conference was the importance of collections of source material found in libraries and archives, their preservation and expansion for future generations of scholars. Some of the finest presentations were selected for this volume and are now published for a wider audience.