Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 1 1911.djvu/405

Rh are never entitled to inherit, and on marrying receive merely a suitable dowry from their brothers, who then receive the kalym. If only daughters survive, the inheritance goes to the father’s brothers or cousins, who in that case receive the kalym as well.

Speedy as the Altaian is on horseback, on foot he is helpless and unwieldy; and so the dance is unknown to him. All games full of dash and excitement are played on horseback. His hospitality is marvellous; for weeks at a time he treats the new arrival to the best he has, even when it is the despised and hated Shtitish Persian. He possesses many sagas and songs—mostly in the minor key, and monotonous as the steppes—which are accompanied on a two-stringed guitar. Tenor and mezzo-soprano predominate, and the gait of the horse and the stride of the camel mark the rhythm.

The surplus of the female house-industry and of the herds is, as a rule, exchanged in barter for weapons and armours, metal and wooden articles, clothing material, brick-tea, and grain. Instead of our gold and silver coinage they have—sit venia verbo—a sheep coinage, in which all valuations are made. Of course they were acquainted with foreign coins from the earliest times, and obtained countless millions of pounds from tribute, plunder, and ransom of prisoners, and they used coins, now and then, in external trading, but among themselves they still barter, and conclude all their business in sheep, cattle, horses, and camels. Rubruquis says of the Mongols in 1253 : “We found nothing purchasable for gold and silver, only for fabrics, of which we had none. When our servant shewed them a Hyperpyron (Byzantine gold coin), they rubbed it with their fingers and smelt it to see if it were copper.” They have no hand-workers except a few smiths.

The Altaian, and especially the Turko-Tartar barbarian, considered only the advantage of the moment; the unlimited plundering was hostile to any transit-trade. But when and so long as a strong hand controlled the universal plundering spirit, a caravan trade between north and south, and especially between east and west was possible, and, with high duties, formed a considerable source of income for the Central-Asiatic despots.

The religious conceptions of a group of primitive people inhabiting such an enormous district were of course never uniform. To-day the greatest part of the Altaians is Buddhist, or Islamitic, and only a few Siberian Turkish tribes remain true to the old-Altaian Shamanism.

The characteristic feature of Shamanism is the belief in the dose union of the living with their long dead ancestors; thus it is an un-interrupted ancestor worship. This faculty however is possessed only by a few families, those of the Shamans (Mong. shaman, Turk, ham), who pass on their power from father to son, or sometimes daughter—with the visible symbol of the Shaman drum by means of which he can call up the spirits through the power of his ancestors, and compel them to active assistance, and can separate his own soul from his body and send it into