Perhaps the most valuable research on the Mongols was done by Russian scholars starting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the Tsarist regime consolidated its control over Central Asia.

This work was produced within a colonial milieu and was largely survey notes produced by travellers, soliders, merchants and antiquarian scholars.

In the early twentieth century, after the extension of the the soviet republics in the regime, a new Marxist historiography argued that the prevalent mode of production determined the nature of social relations.

The term ‘barbarian’ is derived from the Greek barbaros which meant a non-Greek, someone whose language sounded like a random noise: ‘bar-bar’. In Greek texts, barbarians were depicted like children, unable to speak or reason properly, cowardly, effeminate, luxurious, cruel, slothful, greed and politically unable to govern themselves.

The stereotype passed to the Romans who used the term for the Germanic tribes, the Gauls and the Huns. The Chinese had different terms for the steppe barbarians but none of them carried a positive meaning.

Juwaini, a late-thirteenth-century Persian chronicler of the Mongol rulers of Iran, carried an account of the capture of Bukhara in 1220. After the conquest of the city, Juwaini reported, Genghis Khan went to the festival ground where the rich residents of the city were and addressed them: ‘O’ people know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you’… Now one man had escaped from Bukhara after its capture and had come to Khurasan. He was questioned about the fate of the city and replied: ‘They came, they [mined the walls], they burnt, they slew, they plundered and they departed.’

The steppe dwellers themselves usually produced no literature, so our knowledge of nomadic societies comes mainly from chronicles, travelogues and documents produced by city-based litterateurs.

These authors often produced extremely ignorant and biased reports of nomadic life.