Author: Timur

GENGHIS KHAN’S KIDS

Genghis Khan: The daddy of all lovers
by CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
Last updated at 16:51 22 May 2007

We know he was one of history’s greatest warriors, but new research shows Genghis Khan could have fathered thousands of children
Seven hundred years ago, a man almost conquered the Earth. He made himself master of half the known world, and inspired mankind with a fear that lasted for generations.

“In the course of his life he was given many names – Mighty Manslayer, Scourge of God, Perfect Warrior. He is better known to us as Genghis Khan.”

So begins Harold Lamb’s 1927 book Genghis Khan: Emperor Of All Men, which – 80 years after its publication – remains the best-selling history on the Mongolian warlord.

genghis
But what Lamb did not say – because there was no proof of it until this day – is that Genghis Khan could also lay claim to being the most prolific lover the world has ever seen.

After analysing tissue samples in populations bordering Mongolia, scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences believe the brutal ruler has 16 million male descendants living today, meaning that he must have fathered hundreds, if not thousands, of children.

And as the geneticists agree, it can be explained only by Genghis Khan’s policy of seizing for himself the most beautiful women captured in the course of his merciless conquests.

The Mongol victory feasts were notorious. Genghis Khan and his commanders would tear at huge lumps of nearly raw horsemeat while captive girls were paraded for their inspection.

Genghis Khan chose from women of the highest rank. He liked them with small noses, rounded hips, long silky hair, red lips and melodious voices.

He measured their beauty in carats: if he rated them below a certain number they were sent to the tents of his officers.

On one occasion, his lieutenants were idly debating what was the greatest enjoyment that life afforded. The consensus was leaning toward the sport of falconry – Genghis owned 800 falcons – when their leader offered his own deeply felt view.

“The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters,” he announced.

Despite his appetite for women, the findings of the geneticists sound impossible. They suggest that Genghis fathered more offspring than anyone in history.

How could 16 million men, living in an area stretching from China to the Middle East, share the identical genetic footprint of one man?

Yet that vast region precisely matches the range of Genghis Khan’s dominion, through which he led his 13th century Mongol armies on the greatest orgy of pillage, rape and slaughter known to history.

It was a phenomenal achievement, accomplished in just 20 years. At the time of his death in 1227, Genghis ruled an empire twice the size of Rome’s, and it changed the world forever.

His original name was Temujin, but he took the title of Genghis Khan or ‘Universal Ruler’ when he united the fractious Mongolian tribes in 1206.

He and his pony-mounted archers then set out on a whirlwind of foreign conquest and destruction.

His armies ravished northern China, Samarkand and the other fabled Central Asian cities of the Silk Road, and much of far-off Russia.

Genghis and his hordes annihilated every community which resisted them, killing or enslaving men, then distributing captured women among themselves and raping them.

“The plundering of enemy territories could begin only when Genghis Khan or one of his generals gave permission,” wrote Russian historian George Vernadsky.

“Once it had started, the commander and the common soldier had equal rights, except that beautiful young women had to be handed over to Genghis Khan.”

Often Khan took pleasure in sleeping with the wives and daughters of the enemy chiefs. His army commanders believed him to have extraordinary sexual powers, because he would sleep with many women every night.

There was never any shortage of women, for he and his hordes used bone- crushing violence to wipe out all the men who stood in their path.

A year after he and his hordes ransacked Beijing in 1214, an ambassador to the city reported that the bones of the slaughtered formed mountains, that the soil was greasy with human fat and that some of his own entourage had died from diseases spread by the rotting bodies.

When Genghis and his armies laid siege to cities, the besieged inhabitants were forced to resort to cannibalism.

His nomadic tribesmen travelled with battering rams, scaling ladders, four-wheeled mobile shields and bombhurlers in a juggernaut that was something new in history: a growing army which gathered prisoners as it went along and used them as soldiers or in its slave-labour force.

The further it travelled, building its own roads, the stronger it became. Prisoners were used as cannon-fodder – driven forward as suicide troops to fill up the moats and take the full force of the defences’ fire.

Where possible, Genghis Khan used local prisoners so that defenders would hold back, unwilling to slaughter people they recognised.

In the Persian city of Merv, an ancient seat of learning regarded as the pearl of Asia, Genghis Khan committed one of the greatest unmechanised mass killings in history, second only to the massacres of Armenians by Turks in 1915.

For four days, the population was led out from the city walls to the plains to be slaughtered. A group of Persians later spent 13 days counting the people slain.

The Persian historian al-Juvayni, writing a generation after the destruction of Merv, said: “The Mongols ordered that, apart from 400 artisans, the whole population, including the women and children, should be killed, and no one, whether woman or man, be spared.

“To each Mongol soldier was allotted the execution of 300 or 400 Persians. So many had been killed by nightfall that the mountains became hillocks, and the plain was soaked with the blood of the mighty.”

Historians today estimate that more than a million were killed.

In southern Russia, Khan’s Mongol armies destroyed a combined Russian army four times bigger. The surviving leaders, including Prince Romanovitch of Kiev, surrendered on the understanding that no blood would be shed. It wasn’t.

The captives were tied up and laid flat, where they became the foundation for a heavy wooden platform on which the Mongol commanders feasted and chose which women to bed, while the Prince and his allies were crushed or suffocated.

Aside from these battlefield conquests, Genghis Khan had six Mongolian wives, he established a large harem and he married many daughters of foreign kings who prudently submitted to his rule.

It was on August 18, 1227, during a campaign against the Tangut people of northwestern China, that Genghis Khan died. The reason for his death is uncertain.

Many assume he fell off his horse, due to old age and physical fatigue; others allege he was killed by the Tangut.

There are persistent folktales that a Tangut princess, to avenge her people and prevent her rape, castrated him with a hidden knife and that he never recovered. Whatever the cause, his legacy was astonishing.

His Mongol Empire ended up ruling, or briefly conquering, large parts of modern day China, Mongolia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Moldova, South Korea, North Korea and Kuwait.

His sons and heirs ruled over his empire, and may well have used their position to establish their own large harems, especially if they followed their father’s example.

David Morgan, a historian of Mongol history at the University of Wisconsin, says Genghis’s eldest son, Tushi, had 40 sons.

Ata-Malik Juvaini, who wrote a treatise on the Mongols in 1260, said: “Of the issue of the race and lineage of Ghengis Khan, there are now living in the comfort of wealth and affluence more than 20,000.

“More than this I will not say … lest the readers of this history should accuse the writer of exaggeration and hyperbole and ask how from the loins of one man there could spring in so short a time so great a progeny.”

GÜLEN AT

 

 

 

Kralın bir atı varmış. Bu at sürekli ağlarmış. Atının sorununa çare arayan kral, her yere haber verip “atımın sağlığını geri kazandıranı zengin ederim” demiş. Nice hekimler, baytarlar gelmiş gitmiş ama çaerisiz.. Olayı duyan Nam-ı Kemal hemen kralın yanına gitmiş: – “Ben bu işi hallederim” demiş ve anlaşmışlar Nam-ı Kemal atın yanına gidip kulağına bir şeyler söylemiş. Birden at gülmeye başlamış.

 

Nam-ı Kemal parasını almış ve gitmiş. Aradan 12 ay geçmiş. At gülmekten yemek yiyememeye başlamış. Kral Nam-ı Kemal’i tekrar çağırmış: – “Bu ata ne oldu bilmiyorum ama sıkıldım artık, bunu eski haline getirirsen sana daha çok para veririm” demiş. Nam-ı Kemal atın yanına gitmiş ve kısa sürede geri dönmüş. At ise eski haline dönmüş ve başlamış hüngür hüngür ağlamaya. Kral merak edip sormuş: – “Nasıl birden güldürüp, birden ağlattın be adam?” – “İlk seferde, benimki seninkinden büyük, dedim, gülmeye başladı.” – “Ya ikincisinde ne dedin?” – “Çıkarıp gösterdim.”

 

 

“APASSIONATA”

The Maestro’s Bleakest Work

In Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata,’ darkness overwhelms light.

ILLUSTRATION: RYAN INZANA

By

Paavali Jumppanen

2 COMMENTS

In 1804, following works born of the idealism of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment such as his “Eroica” Symphony, Beethoven created the greatest musical explosion for solo piano of its time: the Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, known as the “Appassionata.” It is a work of a very different temper.

Composed soon after Beethoven first faced the catastrophic prospect of incurable deafness, the work has fascinated and confounded performers and listeners ever since. Full of tragic power, the sonata is arguably Beethoven’s darkest and most aggressive work. It has been compared to Dante’s “Inferno” and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”

To this day pianists the world over wrestle with the jarring drama of this technically ferocious keyboard marvel. Having experienced the thrilling yet strenuous task of performing it numerous times, I can attest to the truth of what Carl Czerny, the composer’s most influential student, said of it: Performers must “develop the kind of physical and mental powers that will be needed to be able to represent the beauties of the noble musical picture.”

The main expectation of the Viennese Classical sonata was to provide the listener with a well-balanced mix of delight and surprise. Mozart was particularly skillful in the former, while Haydn excelled at the latter. Beethoven’s recipe was to write an emotionally involving composition that would hold the listener’s full attention until the very end, one in which shifts and surprises were part of a dramatic entirety.

Among Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, the “Appassionata” stands out for its uncompromising pianistic drive and extremely effective dramaturgy. One early 20th-century commentator spoke of the work’s “rush deathward.” The absence of any hint of a silver lining in the work was well ahead of its time.

Over the course of its three movements, the “Appassionata” pulls the listener through a wide range of extreme emotions. The drama begins with the pianist slowly reaching to the keyboard. Unison notes then fall downward and stalk upward, giving rise to a mysterious stillness. Suddenly the music bursts its bounds, and as it charges ahead the pace relaxes into a lyrical and hymn-like episode of graceful beauty. The dream soon proves to be a nightmare, though, as the fierce turbulence that lurked behind the work’s quiet opening regains its full potential. More dramatic shifts follow as episodes of extreme velocity, furiously jolting rhythms (that could be described as jazzy had they been created a hundred years later), and moments of solace alternate in transporting the listener.

But is the source of the diabolic power of the “Appassionata” simply the drama of violent surprises and shifts of mood? In my view it stems from something deeper, the way Beethoven highlights the tension between what was by then Western music’s most fundamental building blocks, the major and minor keys. You know what these are even if you think you don’t. Music in a major key usually sounds optimistic, cheerful; music in a minor key often sounds sad, even foreboding. These traits—naturally elaborated and complicated beyond what words can describe—add much to the music’s meaning and provide a kind of a dramatic framework.

In Beethoven’s day, “public” works such as symphonies needed to end upbeat and in a major key; it simply wouldn’t do to send a large audience home with an unpleasant aftertaste. However, in pieces written for smaller, private audiences, such as piano sonatas, Beethoven was emboldened to continue in the darker mode until the very end. In the “Appassionata” he made use of this freedom as he did nowhere else.

Throughout the sonata we are witness to a back-and-forth drama of major conquered by minor, or, if you will, darkness overwhelming light. Much of the piece’s harmonic structure includes the systematic repression of brighter themes in major keys. The first movement’s lyrical second theme (in A-flat major) is the first victim. The propitious melody comes to a sudden standstill; a strident chord interrupts and the music veers off into minor. Throughout the rest of the movement, other major keys become strangled by minor. This impulse reaches its climax in the cataclysmic second part of the sonata, which comprises the second and third movements, which follow each other without a break.

Remaining entirely in major, the second movement denies the horrors of the first movement until the sudden and terrific opening gesture of the minor key finale crushes the hopes represented by the major once and for all. The major mode makes one last attempt at an entrance near the very end of the work, but tragically late. And because of its tardiness it sounds like devil’s laughter in the face of ultimate damnation.

Czerny speculated about the finale that, “Perhaps Beethoven, ever fond of representing natural scenes, imagined the waves of the sea in a stormy night, whilst cries of distress are heard from afar.” Audiences over the past two centuries have perceived them to be devastatingly close. The modern listener may be inclined to either view, while every performance cultivates a truth of its own. In the end, what remains certain is that the “Appassionata” is a masterpiece that remains eternally fascinating with its eerie, brilliant and original wildness.

—Mr. Jumppanen, a Finnish pianist, will perform the “Appassionata” along with other works at the Frick Collection on Oct. 8.

FADİME’DEN TEMEL’E

Fadime yeni aldığı akıllı telefonuyla askerdeki Temel’e duygusal bir ileti göndermiş:
“Sevcilum Temel ; senu pek özledum.. ne yapaysun daa ?..Türkü çığrıyorsan pana sesuni conder, ağlıyorsan cözünin yaşuni, cülüyorsan cülen ağzuni, uyuyorsan cördüğün rüyâni, finduk kıraysan kabuğuni, hamsi yiyorsan kuyruğuni conder..uy cânum penum”
Temel çok duygulanıp yanıtlamış:
“Uy Fadimeciğum; helâdayum, sıçayrum. Saa ne cöndereyum da..?

 

(Adapted from English original below. TS) 

 

 

ROMANTIC TEXT MESSAGE

An elderly couple learned to send text messages on their mobile phones. The wife, a retired college English instructor with emphasis on the Classics, was an unapologetic romantic; her husband, a retired salty Navy chief petty officer of thirty years’ service, was a no-nonsense guy.

One afternoon the wife went to the local Starbuck’s to meet a friend for coffee.  While awaiting her friend’s arrival, she exercised her new skill by sending her husband a romantic text message: “If you are sleeping, send me your dreams.  If you are laughing, send me your smile.  If you are eating, send me a bite.  If you are drinking, send me a sip.  If you are crying, send me your tears. I love you!”

The husband responded:  “I’m in the bathroom takin’ a dump.  Please advise.”