In which nobody remembers the baseline until it breaks.
The Floor Moves Quietly
I've read more than most about the Mongol Empire. A lot of people know some of the basics: swept the world, unusually good at horse riding, exceptional at shooting arrows (from horseback). But one thing that it's easy to gloss over, one thing that truly made their army work: the number 10.
Genghis reorganized the army into units of ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. Not especially exotic, the number 10, but the decimal structure itself was interesting because of the Mongol top down insistence on it. And the reason was so smart: the Mongols were a new political order, created out of old tribal loyalties, and those old tribal groupings were immediatlely broken apart. In the new system, a hundred meant a hundred, and it was as good a thing as any to cut through inherited loyalties.
It's a small fact, almost boring, when read against the rest of what the Khans did: burned cities, eradicated powerful foes, executions that boggle the mind, biggest continuous land Empire of all time. Meanwhile, underneath all of it: organize yourselves into groups of ten. Now.
Eight hundred years later, we make our own tens: deadlines, budgets, minimums, definitions, some line somebody once drew. And then you start hearing a phrase I've probably said myself a thousand times: “for this one.” For this one, Friday is really Monday. For this one, leave those out. Use the other definition. Usually I hear the explanation and think, yeah, that makes sense. But my mind reaches back to the Mongol Empire. How much room was there for “for this one”?
Probably not much.
Footnotes
The decimal organization itself wasn't Genghis's invention. We could already think in tens, and versions of it already existed on the steppe. What the Khan of Khans did differently was use the structure while also deliberately redistributing people across older tribal affiliations and putting them under new commanders. Sot it's more of a case of what he made the ten do that was new and insightful.
Unfortunately for my argument, history is unwilling to fully cooperate: the larger Mongol units weren't always literally base ten. A mingghan was technically a “thousand” in idea, but the actual size and strength of force could vary. Even still, though a particular thousand didn't always contain exactly one thousand people, the decimal structure was how the Mongol army organized itself.
Which means the Mongols themselves managed to discover the difference between “ten” as a number and “ten” as a baseline category even back then, and well before I arrived here to praise them for avoiding it.
| Published | 27 July 2023 (3 years ago) |
|---|---|
| Reading time | 3 min |
| Tags | standards |
| Constellation | Deep Current |
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