Mingghan

The mingghan was a social and military unit of 1,000 households created by Genghis Khan for the Mongol state. From the households of one mingghan a regiment of 1,000 fighting men could be raised, so the unit served both as a way of counting and ordering the population and as the source of troops. It belongs to the old decimal method of organisation used by the nomads of Eurasia: a mingghan was made up of ten jaghuns or one hundred arbans, and ten mingghan together made a tumen of 10,000 households, the largest of these groups. The sources also record that when the son of a mingghan commander became a guard, he had to bring a younger brother and ten other men to serve with him. The Mongol name is also given in Mongolian as myangat.