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wandering

flâneur
Moderator
Oct 25, 2017
2,136
Came to say that I partially blame Mulan for the confusion for clearly having Mongols in the cartoon but then confusingly referring to them as "The Huns". Despite the Huns being usually located in and around present day Romania where it would launch raids into the Eastern Roman Empire.

It gets more confusing because they were supposed to be the Xiongnu, not the Mongols

That doesn't explain why most of China speaks Chinese dialects and not Mongolian. You would think being closest to Mongolia would mean it would have a tighter grip on China, and yet here we are. The Yuan Dynasty fell like any other dynasty.

To be fair everyone that invaded China just ended up becoming Chinese.

Why would they idolise Mongol historical figures instead of Turkish ones?

Turkish nationalists have a weird obsession with the idea that the theorized linguistic link between Turkic people (i.e. not only people from Turkey but also Kazakhs, Tatars, Tuvans, Kyrgyz, Yakuts, Uyghurs, etc.) and Mongols means that the Mongols are Turkish heritage, even though Turkey itself is far removed from the Turkic steppe cultures it descended from. Basically modern Turks are closer to surrounding Islamic cultures, but some hold onto being the inheritors of the nomadic steppe horse-warrior Central Asian peoples that long, long ago migrated to Anatolia. Those ancient peoples shared certain cultural elements with Mongols. So Genghis Khan is a Turk. It's wild.
 
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Sovan Jedi

Member
Oct 30, 2017
452
Southampton, UK
Did you also know that I Can't Believe It's Not Butter and Kubo and the Two Strings (Blu-Ray release) are two different objects? My mind was blown to discover that!
 

dom

▲ Legend ▲
Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
10,444

Zolbrod

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,070
Osaka, Japan
807907.jpg
 

Deleted member 60295

User requested account closure
Banned
Sep 28, 2019
1,489

Yeah, uh, you did read the article, right? The idea that the Huns were an offshoot of the Xiongnu is a serious matter of debate within historical scholarship to this very day... and more importantly, its still not historically accurate to directly conflate the two. Which is exactly what the Disney movie does.... well, in the English language version, anyway. I didn't know this until now, but the Chinese language dub actually refers to them as Xiongnu. Which sure goes a long way towards making this particular aspect of the movie less historically erroneous.
 

GameAddict411

Member
Oct 26, 2017
8,513
Some of your skipped geography, social studies and history so hard. The name alone indicate different cultural background. If people lack the knowledge to even know this, it's nuts.
 

Titik

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,490
Some of your skipped geography, social studies and history so hard. The name alone indicate different cultural background. If people lack the knowledge to even know this, it's nuts.
To be fair, I hated history in school and I think alot of people did too. History classes before college are usually about memorizing dates, names and pointless data when the real importance of the subject are the stories and lessons we should learn from them. When I started approaching history from this narrative perspective, I started to become much more interested.
 

Heshinsi

Member
Oct 25, 2017
16,092
How did you conflate the two? One was a scourge upon the Western Roman Empire before its fall, and the other showed up after the Crusades and was a scourge (along with his immediate descendants) primarily on the Islamic world. Almost 800 years separated the two, and they did most infamous work in two different and after apart regions.
 

DosaDaRaja

Member
Oct 26, 2017
963
It gets more confusing because they were supposed to be the Xiongnu, not the Mongols



To be fair everyone that invaded China just ended up becoming Chinese.



Turkish nationalists have a weird obsession with the idea that the theorized linguistic link between Turkic people (i.e. not only people from Turkey but also Kazakhs, Tatars, Tuvans, Kyrgyz, Yakuts, Uyghurs, etc.) and Mongols means that the Mongols are Turkish heritage, even though Turkey itself is far removed from the Turkic steppe cultures it descended from. Basically modern Turks are closer to surrounding Islamic cultures, but some hold onto being the inheritors of the nomadic steppe horse-warrior Central Asian peoples that long, long ago migrated to Anatolia. Those ancient peoples shared certain cultural elements with Mongols. So Genghis Khan is a Turk. It's wild.
That ..... makes sense and doesn't at the same time.
 

Melody Shreds

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,551
Terminal Dogma
Speaking of ancient warmongering cultures, I used to think Bones and Grey's Anatomy were the same show until I saw that they were both on Netflix and realized they're different :o
 
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iksenpets

Member
Oct 26, 2017
6,485
Dallas, TX
I mean, if Genghis Khan were here next to me telling me that I had the timeline wrong and centuries before his own birth he had pillaged Roman territory, I wouldn't tell him no?
 

Orbis

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,337
UK
I confess I know almost nothing about Asian history so I've never known much about either individual. It's not taught in school in the UK and I was too lazy to ever read into it.

That said, I didn't assume they were the same person.
 

JBucc

Member
Oct 25, 2017
263
I don't remember anything about it specifically but I do recall watching an Attila miniseries in the early 2000s. Turns out Attila was played by.......Gerard Butler. Huh.
 

Irminsul

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,034
BTW did you know that ancient people knew about computers, the steam engine and batteries?
I'm not quite sure which computer you're thinking of, but I just wanted to chime in to say "no" to these two inventions. No, ancient people did not know about the steam engine and no, they did not know about batteries. Those are two common misconceptions.

They had objects that worked with the same basic principles modern steam engines and batteries use, sure, but both lacked the key thing to make them similar to the actual stuff: produce useful amounts of work and energy, respectively. And that's where later inventors had to put their work into.

You can't use Hero's "steam engine" to power anything, it's far too weak for that. As soon as you put anything on it to move beside itself, it will most probably stop moving.
Even in modern times, countless people before James Watt built steam engines, but they all had horrible efficiency and thus weren't used very often. They can be called steam engines, however, because they actually did some work that went further than moving itself.

As for the Baghdad battery, it's very much unknown if this wasn't just an accidental battery that "worked" because someone put two different metals and an electrolyte (read: a mug, a spoon, and lemon juice) together. Even if it wasn't an accident, however, the same thing mentioned above applies. The amount of electric energy such a "battery" would produce couldn't be used for anything.

Even in modern times, it took (literal) ages for people to understand the connection between static electricity known for millennia and the thing batteries created. And even after that, someone first needed to connect a couple hundred batteries in parallel and series (to get both enough voltage as well as current) to demonstrate it's actually useful for something (in that case, generating light).
 
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Gundam

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
12,801
No one has ever really explained to he difference between George Washington and George W Bush before so they're the same guy. What do you think the W means?
 

Midgarian

Alt Account
Banned
Apr 16, 2020
2,619
Midgar
Both Genghis Khan and Attila (It's with one L , two T!!) are revered by Graywolf supremacists and as a Greek-Turkish minority in Turkey, they have always terrified me. My family for years had received death threats from them, most of them mentioned Genghis Khan and Oghuz Khan and how they would walk their path to destroy anyone who's not Turkish. Graywolves are among the most dangerous and bloodthirsty supremacist group in the world.

Turkish school history books do not put Genghis and his family in the good light, they describe him as what they were: Mass murderers who decimated the predecessor state of ottomans: Anatolian Seljuks.
Thanks for your reply.

I'm a British born ethnic Turk myself. We've had discussions about Turkey years ago back on NeoGaf.

I understand your concerns about the Fascist morons. I myself wish Turkish history had gone in such a way that the local Greeks and Armenians were not exiled, and likewise I wish the local Turks hadn't been exiled from the former Ottoman lands that did not become part of Turkey. Such is the problem of the organic multi-ethnic settlements that were spread all over the Ottoman Empire, being partitioned into artificial sanitised borders based on ethno-state identity. It was a disaster for people caught on the wrong side of the new borders.

However I must adamantly point out, the popularity of names like Cengiz, Attila, Kaan, Oguz and the -Han suffixes, exist independently of the racism and facism in my opinion.

Those historical figures being appropriated by fascists is unfortunate. The modern Turkish ultra-nationalistic racism they practice would be an alien ideology to those figures. It's comical. Like how Western racists co-opt historical crusading figures for their racist purposes.


Why don't they ever make movies about the Mongolian Empire going into space
They did. The Saiyans in DragonBall Z :P.
 

Tuorom

Member
Oct 30, 2017
10,902
But have Atilla the Hut and Ghengis Khan been seen in the same room together?
🤔

What you folks don't see is that clearly we have a situation where Atilla isn't actually his real name. He is even older. His name is lost in time. He is a conqueror. He was Attila, but he was also Genghis. He was also Hannibal. He is the oldest vampire known. Do some research and you'll all see! He is around today even and people have seen him but they haven't put two and two together.

timeline.jpg
 

Finaika

Member
Dec 11, 2017
13,287
Coincidentally I'm currently playing a game that has Attila the Hun in it.

store.steampowered.com

Operencia: The Stolen Sun on Steam

Operencia: The Stolen Sun embraces everything you love about classic first-person dungeon-crawlers, enhancing the old-school turn-based RPG experience with modern sensibilities. Guide a team of memorable characters through a world inspired by Central European mythology.
 

thewienke

Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,935
Both Genghis Khan and Attila (It's with one L , two T!!) are revered by Graywolf supremacists and as a Greek-Turkish minority in Turkey, they have always terrified me. My family for years had received death threats from them, most of them mentioned Genghis Khan and Oghuz Khan and how they would walk their path to destroy anyone who's not Turkish. Graywolves are among the most dangerous and bloodthirsty supremacist group in the world.

Turkish school history books do not put Genghis and his family in the good light, they describe him as what they were: Mass murderers who decimated the predecessor state of ottomans: Anatolian Seljuks.

There's some irony to this if what I learned in my "History of Islam" class was accurate.

Supposedly for centuries after the Mongol incursions into the Middle East, they continued to be whispered about as the "Great Satan" due to the amount of carnage and bloodshed they left behind. Basically the violence was so terrible that the events entered the collective conscience of much of the Islamic world and remained for a long, long time after.


Arab sources claim 2,000,000 casualties in the sacking of Baghdad which at the time was the seat of the Caliphate (similar to Rome for the Papacy).

Theoretically it was only relatively recently that nations like the UK and the US took that mantle from the Mongols themselves.
 
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Stinkles

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
20,459
I think it's sort of understandable to make this error in the US - but Europeans - especially the brits, think of "Huns" as germanic and austro-hungarian - maybe slavic peoples. So there's no way the average football fan would conflate those two.

The similar issue I get muddled about is the order and location of the Greco Roman moments - everything from Bronze Age pre-Trojan War cultures, to Alexander the Great, to Etruscans, to Rome, Constantine, to Byzantium - but more specifically - where and when each of those intersected with Egypt and Persia.