Tumen (unit)

"Myriarch" redirects here. Not to be confused with Miriarcha.

Tumen, or tümen ("unit of ten thousand";[1] Old Turkic: tümän; Mongolian: Түмэн, tümen;[2][3] Turkish: tümen; Hungarian: tömény), was a decimal unit of measurement used by the Turkic and Mongol peoples to quantify and organize their societies in groups of 10,000. A tumen denotes a tribal unit of 10,000 households, or a military unit of 10,000 soldiers.

English Orientalist Sir Gerard Clauson (1891-1974) defined tümän as immediately borrowed from Tokharian tmān, which according to Edwin G. Pulleyblank might have been etymologically inherited from Old Chinese tman or 萬.[4]

  1. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language - toman Archived 2007-12-09 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ Vietze, Wörterbuch Mongolisch - Deutsch, VEB 1988
  3. ^ The Silk Road And The Korean Language
  4. ^ Clauson, Gerard (1972). An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish. Oxford, Clarendon Press. p. 507. ISBN 0198641125.