The Steppe World: Mongol Tribes before Unification

The Eurasian steppe, a belt of grassland stretching from Manchuria to Hungary, shaped a nomadic pastoral way of life built around herding horses, sheep, goats, oxen, and camels, the so-called "five kinds of livestock." By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the territory of present-day Mongolia was home to several Mongolic-speaking peoples without any political unity: the Mongols proper, along with the Tayichiud, Tatars, Merkits, Kereites, Naimans, and Oirats. The Tatars, a Turco-Mongol people settled in the east near Lake Buir, lent their name, garbled into "Tartar," to the Mongols in medieval European sources, a mix-up that would persist in ethnographic confusion for centuries. The Kereites, in central Mongolia, had practiced Nestorian Christianity since the eleventh century, while the Naimans, in the west, possessed a more centralized organization and used the Uyghur script, which the Mongols would later adopt for their own writing system.