eunuch - who is it?This word usually associated with the government we have harems.However, the history of this particular layer ministers Bole much deeper.Let's try to understand what is represented in different epochs eunuch.Who has been known at various times and a completely different civilizations.So, of course, the representatives of this profession is strikingly different from each other.
Actually, the eunuch - who is it, and when he first appears in history?
first evidence of the existence of such people already belong to the earliest human civilization, settled in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris.Interestingly, the first appearance of the members of this caste took place, apparently, in tribes, where there was a matriarchy.Later eunuchs spread throughout the East, and still later the ancient Greeks who were diligent students also adopted this tradition.It is interesting that in the ancient world they were used, usually in areas related to the religious cult.For example, a minister of the sacred temple of Artemis at Ephesus and the Temple of the Sibyl in the Roman period could be a eunuch.Who not only tells of the ancient historians!Such records can be found in Xenophon, Herodotus, Polybius.
eunuchs in the medieval world
With the fall of the Roman Empire, eunuchs gone forever from the European world.The nature of Christianity and its morality simply does not admit the existence of such a layer.Is that they continued to exist in Byzantium, eclectically combines Christianity and many of the cultural traditions of the Roman Empire.However, in the medieval era, this institution reaches the incredible prosperity in an environment of Eastern civilizations.Their standard steel eunuchs in the Ottoman Empire (the photo is of ministers harems often can be found in the historical literature).Actually, this tradition has been adopted from the neighboring Byzantium.The first Ottoman harem eunuchs appeared during the reign of Mehmet the Conqueror.Everyone knows that the main task was to guard the eunuch Turkish sultan's harem.Initially this task was entrusted to Neuter white, but later the representatives of the Guard were recruited exclusively from black Abyssinians.Over time, even in Turkey, a whole guild of eunuchs, and after the 1852 management harem completely passed to them.Now these ministers not only protect, but also chose the slaves to their sovereign, were guards, and sometimes even the sultans prepared for wedding ceremony.By the way, thanks to the latter the profession, today we can thoroughly consider looks like a eunuch.Picture them made pioneering photography, came to us from that era.By the beginning of the twentieth century, the institution itself began to die.At the forefront of the new world out other qualities and responsibilities of a eunuch at the time confined to the observation that women in the harem decently dressed.In 1909, during the secular reforms in Turkey, there is a dissolution of all harems.And along with them they have sunk into oblivion, and the last eunuchs.
