Who is the eunuch? This word, as a rule, is associated with government harems in our country. However, the history of this special stratum of ministers is much more deep. Let's try to figure out together what the eunuch was in different eras. Who it was was known at different times and to completely different civilizations. Therefore, of course, representatives of this profession were very different from each other.
Actually, the eunuch - who is this, and when does he first appear in history?
The first evidence of the existence of such people dates back to the earliest civilizations of mankind, settled in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Interestingly, the first appearance of the representatives of this caste occurred, apparently, in the tribes where matriarchy existed. Later, eunuchs spread throughout the East, and even later, the ancient Greeks, who were diligent students, also adopted this tradition. It is interesting that in the ancient world they were used, as a rule, in areas related to religious worship. For example, only a eunuch could be a servant of the sacred temple of Artemis at Ephesus or the temple of Sibyl already in the Roman period. Who just does not report from ancient historians! Similar records can be found at Xenophon, Herodotus, Polybius.
Eunuchs in the medieval world
With the fall of the
Roman Empire, eunuchs forever left the European world. The nature of Christianity, its morality simply did not allow the existence of such a layer. Unless they continued to exist in Byzantium, an eclectic combination of Christianity and many cultural traditions of the Roman Empire. However, in the medieval era, this institution reached an incredible heyday among the eastern civilizations. And their standard was the eunuchs in the
Ottoman Empire (photos of the ministers of the harems are most often found in historical literature). Actually, this tradition was adopted from the neighboring Byzantines. The first castrates in the Ottoman harem appeared during the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror. Everyone knows that the main task of the Turkish eunuch was to protect the Sultan's harem. At first, this task was entrusted to white castrats, but later they began to recruit representatives of this guard exclusively from black Abyssinians. Over time, a whole guild of eunuchs appeared in Turkey, and after 1852 the management of the harem completely passed to them. Now these ministers are not
only guarded, but also chose slaves for their sovereign, were overseers, and sometimes even prepared the sultans for the wedding ceremony. By the way, thanks to these last representatives of the profession, today we can thoroughly consider what the eunuch looks like. Photos of them, taken by pioneers of photography, have come down to us from that era. By the beginning of the twentieth century, this institution itself began to die. Other qualities came to the fore in the new world, and the responsibilities of the eunuch at that time were reduced only to ensuring that the women in the harem dress appropriately. In 1909, during the period of secular reforms in Turkey, all harems were dissolved. And with them the last eunuchs have sunk into oblivion.