ABSTRACT
Both sexes tend the sheep and goats, and they are milked on some occasions by the men, on others by the women.3 The skins are dressed with curdled ewe's milk, thickened and salted.
(3) When they want to wash their hands or head, they fill their mouths with water, and let it trickle slowly from their mouths onto their hands, using it to wet their hair and wash their heads. 4
( 4) Regarding their marriages, you should know that the only way to have a wife there is to purchase her ,5 and for this reason the girls are sometimes very mature before they are married, for the parents always keep them until they sell them. They observe the first and second degrees of c0nsanguinity, but none of affinity, for they can have two sisters at the same time or in succession. 6 Widows among them do not marry, on the grounds of their belief that all who serve them in this life
1 This is noticed also by Carpini, IV, 8 (Van den Wyngaert, p. 48; Dawson, p. 17). 2 According to Carpini, IV, 11 (Van den Wyngaert, p. 51; Dawson, p. 18), both the
repair of the wagons and loading the camels are among the duties of the women. 3 Carpini, IV, 10 (Van den Wyngaert, p. 50; Dawson, p. 18), asserts that the men manu-
facture nothing whatever except arrows, and that on a few occasions they tend the flocks. 4 A very similar description is given by the 14th-century writer al-"Umari, who
appears to have borrowed it from some source other thanJuwayni: Masiilik al-ab~iir, ed. and tr. Klaus Lech, Das mongolische Weltreich (Wiesbaden, 1968), text p. 10, tr. p. 97. The practice arose from the taboo against washing in running water, on which see Juwayni, I, 161-2 (tr. Boyle, p. 204). Hsiao Ta-heng (Serruys, 'Pei-lou', p. 146) inveighs against the filthiness of the Mongols of his day, who never wash either their persons or their garments, so that their stench is unbearable.
