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Post by Yazig on Oct 16, 2012 20:17:24 GMT 3
Do you know any games or activities for entertainment or other purposes that were practised by any steppe societies?
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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Oct 17, 2012 0:43:47 GMT 3
Chinese sources of tell us that girls in Gokturk society played a sort of modern football with balls made from leather. Mahmud of Kashghar in the 11th century described the same game and also gave it's name as Täpük (Täp, modern Turkish Tep means "kick").
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Post by Temüjin on Oct 17, 2012 19:55:39 GMT 3
so, it's not the english but the turks who invented football? ;D
also, i think polo and buzkashi.
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Post by hjernespiser on Oct 18, 2012 1:29:22 GMT 3
Almost every ancient peoples had some form of association football.
Tuvans throw sheep knuckle bones like dice.
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Post by Yazig on Oct 18, 2012 1:32:20 GMT 3
Do you know any games or activities for entertainment or other purposes that were practised by any steppe societies? The chinese played their own version of football too. I've seen it in some chinese movies. Than there is one game or activity I know of that is practised in Mongolia. It's some kind of sparing.
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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Oct 18, 2012 10:04:07 GMT 3
Yup ;D lol
They have it in rural Turkey too, called "Aşık Oyunu (The Knucklebones Game)".
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Post by Yazig on Oct 19, 2012 0:08:49 GMT 3
What about the kids?
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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Oct 19, 2012 2:05:27 GMT 3
All the games I described were played by Turkic children according to written sources.
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Post by snafu on Nov 4, 2012 0:10:04 GMT 3
Yeah, knucklebones was pretty popular. The Mongolian version is called Shagai. There are actually many different games you can play with knucklebones. Some games are like dice or marbles, others are more complicated. As a kid Genghis Khan played Ice Shagai with Jamukha. That game is played on a frozen river (The Onon river in Genghis' case) and it involves hitting an anklebone with a ball and knocking both of them into a goal.
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Post by Ardavarz on Nov 13, 2012 0:01:20 GMT 3
Those games were used as method for divination too - see this: www.infomongolia.com/ct/ci/3173Found it some time ago and I still play with it now and then. It's funny!
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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Nov 13, 2012 11:22:10 GMT 3
Speaking of fortune telling, there is this famous fortune telling book written in Turkic Runic script and discovered by the British expedition in Dunhuang. The book is titled Ïrq Bitig meaning "Fortune Telling Book", is most probably from the Gansu Uyghurs (also known as the Yellow Uyghurs who established a kingdom in Gansu that lasted until the 11th century) and is now stored in the British Library. It is divided into many fortune telling sections marked by different sets of dots which indicate that fortune telling was made by throwing dices, counting the dots on them and checking the section whose dots matched the ones on the dice. Quite an interesting thing, and fun to play with too lol (I did it a few times myself).
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Post by Ardavarz on Nov 14, 2012 1:35:39 GMT 3
That is very interesting. I have the text of Ïrq Bitig from S. E. Malov's edition from 1951, but I didn't know that the sections were marked with dice dots in the original. The commentary relates it to interpretations of dreams, but still I've come across some authors that compare it with I Ching (there are 64 hexagrams in I Ching and 65 sections in Ïrq Bitig). Maybe some similar practices were common amongst the Steppe people. Thus the Chinese fortune-tellers use sheaf of yarrow stalks to obtain the number of the hexagram and this resembles the Scythian divination with willow twigs described by Herodotus.
Also an acquaintance of mine wrote me about some other fortune-telling practice amongst the Mongols based on the other Chinese system - that of Tai Xuan Ching (unlike the I Ching it is ternary, not binary, and makes use of three symbols - whole, broken and double broken lines forming 81 tetragrams). According to him the Mongols have represented those symbols with zigzag, wavy and stright lines and they have carried this system to Eastern Europe where the 27 ternary trigrams became a base for the 27 "oldest Scythian runes" (I don't know what he means by that - maybe the Rovas letters?). I had no other information about this subject, neither had read about such things before and I wondered how much of this could be correct. So I tried to inquire him about that, but he obviously has read it in some old book long ago and now he can't remember much.
Maybe we should make a new thread about the fortune-telling practices amongst the Steppe people. It would be interesting if somebody have more information about these topics.
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Post by snafu on Nov 14, 2012 3:23:30 GMT 3
I think the most popular type of fortune telling for the steppe nomads was Scapulimancy (burning a sheep's shoulder blade and reading the cracks that appeared). I'm sure there were many other lesser-known practices too. I read that some steppe people believed that crows had their own language, and that certain fortune tellers could read omens and predict the future by listening to the crows "speak".
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Post by H. İhsan Erkoç on Nov 14, 2012 12:10:24 GMT 3
Here are two pages from the Ïrq Bitig manuscript:
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Post by Ardavarz on Nov 15, 2012 0:54:32 GMT 3
Interesting. From this picture I guess they have used three quadrilateral dices - not cube-shaped like ours, but maybe oblong, thus everyone of them having four possible values: 1 to 4 (they may be a later elaboration of the ankle bones which also when thrown can fall on one of their four sides - "horse", "camel", "sheep" or "goat"). There are ten possible sums (minimum 3 to maximum 12) that can be obtained from them, but if the dices are marked somehow or maybe coloured differently so that they can be distinguished (as "first", "second" and "third"), the combinations will become 43 or 64. It's curious how they were related to the 65 sections of the book (one seems left out) and whether there was some connection to I Ching (this system seems to be quarternary in contrast to the binary hexagrams).
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