title: Bagel

text: Variants of the word are used in Yiddish and in Austrian German to refer to a similar form of sweet-filled pastry; , a pastry filled with poppy seeds, and , a pastry filled with ground nuts. The term is also used in southern German dialects, where refers to a pile, e.g., ('woodpile'). According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, "bagel" derives from the transliteration of the Yiddish , which came from the Middle High German or 'ring', which itself came from ('ring') in Old High German, similar to the Old English ('ring') and ('to bend, bow'). Similarly, another etymology in the Webster's New World College Dictionary says that the Middle High German form was derived from the Austrian German , a kind of croissant, and was similar to the German , a stirrup or ring.


title: Bagel

text: In the Brick Lane district and surrounding area of London, England, bagels (locally spelled "beigels") have been sold since the middle of the 19th century. They were often displayed in the windows of bakeries on vertical wooden dowels, up to a metre in length, on racks.


title: Bagel

text: Bagels were brought to the United States by immigrant Polish Jews, with a thriving business developing in New York City that was controlled for decades by Bagel Bakers Local 338. They had contracts with nearly all bagel bakeries in and around the city for its workers, who prepared all their bagels by hand.


title: Bagel

text: The bagel came into more general use throughout North America in the last quarter of the 20th century with automation. Daniel Thompson started work on the first commercially viable bagel machine in 1958; bagel baker Harry Lender, his son, Murray Lender, and Florence Sender leased this technology and pioneered automated production and distribution of frozen bagels in the 1960s. Murray also invented pre-slicing the bagel.


title: Bagel

text: Around 1900, the "bagel brunch" became popular in New York City. The bagel brunch consists of a bagel topped with lox, cream cheese, capers, tomato, and red onion. This and similar combinations of toppings have remained associated with bagels into the 21st century in the United States.


title: Bagel

text: In Japan, the first kosher bagels were brought by from New York in 1989. BagelK created green tea, chocolate, maple-nut, and banana-nut flavors for the market in Japan. Some Japanese bagels, such as those sold by , are soft and sweet; others, such as Einstein Bro. bagels sold by Costco in Japan, are the same as in the U.S.


title: Bagel

text: Bagels in the U.S. have increased in size over time. Starting at around , by 1915, the average bagel weighed ; the size began to increase further in the 1960s. By 2003, the average bagel sold on a Manhattan coffee cart weighed around .


title: Bagel

text: At its most basic, traditional bagel dough contains wheat flour (without germ or bran), salt, water, and yeast leavening. Bread flour or other high gluten flours are preferred to create the firm, dense but spongy bagel shape and chewy texture. Most bagel recipes call for the addition of a sweetener to the dough, often barley malt (syrup or crystals), honey, high fructose corn syrup, or sugar, with or without eggs, milk or butter. Leavening can be accomplished using a sourdough technique or a commercially produced yeast.


title: Bagel

text: In recent years, a variant has emerged, producing what is sometimes called the steam bagel. To make a steam bagel, the boiling is skipped, and the bagels are instead baked in an oven equipped with a steam injection system. In commercial bagel production, the steam bagel process requires less labor, since bagels need only be directly handled once, at the shaping stage. Thereafter, the bagels need never be removed from their pans as they are refrigerated and then steam-baked. The steam bagel results in a fluffier, softer, less chewy product more akin to a finger roll that happens to be shaped like a bagel. The dough used is intentionally more alkaline to aid browning, because the steam injection process uses neutral water steam instead of an alkaline solution bath.


title: Bagel

text: According to a 2012 "Consumer Reports" article, the ideal bagel should have a slightly crispy crust, a distinct "pull" when a piece is separated from the whole by biting or pinching, a chewy inside, and the flavor of bread freshly baked. The taste may be complemented by additions cooked on the bagel, such as onion, garlic, sesame seeds, or poppy seeds. The appeal of a bagel may change upon being toasted. Toasting can have the effect of bringing or removing desirable chewiness, softening the crust, and moderating off-flavors.


title: Bagel

text: A typical bagel has 260–350 calories, 1.0–4.5 grams of fat, 330–660 milligrams of sodium, and 2–5 grams of fiber. Gluten-free bagels have much more fat, often 9 grams, because of ingredients in the dough to supplant the wheat flour of the original.


title: Bagel

text: The New York bagel contains malt, is cold-fermented for several days to develop the flavors and enhance the crust, and is boiled in salted water before baking in a standard oven. The resulting bagel has a fluffy interior and a chewy crust. According to CNN, Brooklynites believe New York bagels are the best due to the quality of the local water. According to Brooklyn Water Bagels CEO Steven Fassberg, the characteristics of a New York bagel are the result of the recipe formula and preparation method.


title: Bagel

text: Different from the New York style, the Montreal-style bagel contains malt and sugar with no salt; it is boiled in honey-sweetened water before baking in a wood-fired oven. It is predominantly of the sesame "white" seeds variety (bagels in Toronto are similar to those made in New York in that they are less sweet, generally are coated with poppy seeds and are baked in a standard oven).


title: Bagel

text: The St. Louis style bagel refers not to composition, but to a particular method of slicing the bagel. The St. Louis style bagels are sliced vertically multiple times, instead of the traditional single horizontal slice. The slices range from thick. This style of bagel was popularized by the St. Louis Bread Company, now known as Panera Bread. Generally, the bagels are sliced into eight pieces using a bread slicer, which produces characteristically precise cuts (the bagel is not torn or crushed while slicing). This particular method of preparation increases the surface area available for spreads (e.g., cream cheese, butter). However, it decreases the portability of the bagel and prevents formation of sandwiches.


title: Bagel

text: Other bagel styles can be found elsewhere; Chicago-style bagels are baked with steam. American chef John Mitzewich has a recipe for what he calls San Francisco-style bagels which yields bagels flatter than New York-style bagels, characterized by a rough-textured crust. The traditional London bagel (or beigel as it is spelled) is chewier and has a denser texture.


title: Bagel

text: In Austria, (often also spelled or in its diminutive form) are a traditional Lenten food. The rings are made from a yeasted dough, rolled out very thin and briefly boiled in salted water before topped with salt and caraway seeds and then baked. Depending on the region, they are sometimes baked to a very hard consistency, making them relatively brittle. Connected with it is the tradition of () at Easter where two people pull on opposite ends of a until it breaks into two pieces. Tearing off the larger piece is meant to bring good luck. In Vienna, Eastern Lower Austria and Burgenland, has taken on the meaning of certain types of kipferl.


title: Bagel

text: While normally and traditionally made of yeasted wheat, in the late 20th century variations on the bagel flourished. Non-traditional versions that change the dough recipe include pumpernickel, rye, sourdough, bran, whole wheat, and multigrain. Other variations change the flavor of the dough, often using blueberry, salt, onion, garlic, egg, cinnamon, raisin, chocolate chip, cheese, or some combination of the above. Green bagels are sometimes created for St. Patrick's Day.


title: Bagel

text: A flat bagel, known as a 'flagel', can be found in a few locations in and around New York City, Long Island, and Toronto. According to a review attributed to New York's "Village Voice" food critic Robert Seitsema, the flagel was first created by Brooklyn's 'Tasty Bagels' deli in the early 1990s.


title: Bagel

text: According to the American Institute of Baking (AIB), 2008 supermarket sales (52-week period ending January 27, 2009) of the top eight leading commercial fresh (not frozen) bagel brands in the United States:


title: Bagel

text: Further, AIB-provided statistics for the 52-week period ending May 18, 2008, for refrigerated/frozen supermarket bagel sales for the top 10 brand names totaled US$50,737,860, based on 36,719,977 unit package sales.


title: Bagel

text: The AIB reported US$626.9 million fresh bagel US supermarket sales (excluding Wal-Mart) for the 52 weeks ending 11 April 2012. Fresh/frozen supermarket sales (excluding Wal-Mart) for the 52 weeks ending 13 May 2012 was US$592.7 million. The average price for a bag of fresh bagels was $3.27; for frozen it was $1.23.


title: Bagel

text: Many cultures developed similar breads and preparations, such as "bubliki" in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and "obwarzanek" (in particular "obwarzanek krakowski") in Poland. Somewhat similar in appearance to bagels, these breads are usually topped with sesame and poppy seeds. The ingredients in these breads and bagels somewhat differ, as these breads are made with a different dough using butter. and sometimes also with milk.


title: Bagel

text: In Turkey, a salty and fattier form is called "açma". The ring-shaped simit is sometimes marketed today as a Turkish bagel. Archival sources show that the "simit" has been produced in Istanbul since 1525. Based on Üsküdar court records (Şer’iyye Sicili) dated 1593, the weight and price of simit was standardized for the first time. Noted 17th-century traveler Evliya Çelebi wrote that there were 70 simit bakeries in Istanbul during the 1630s.


title: Bagel

text: Jean Brindesi's early 19th-century oil paintings about Istanbul daily life show simit sellers on the streets. Warwick Goble made an illustration of the simit sellers of Istanbul in 1906. Simit is very similar to the twisted sesame-sprinkled bagels pictured being sold in early 20th century Poland. "Simit" are also sold on the street in baskets or carts, as bagels were then.


title: Bagel

text: The Uyghurs of Xinjiang, China enjoy "girdeh nan" (from Persian, meaning round bread), a type of nan, the local bread.


title: Bagel

text: Another bagel-like type of bread is the traditional German "Dortmunder Salzkuchen" from the 19th century.


title: Bagel

text: Ka'ak al-Quds (better known in English as the Jerusalem bagel) is an oblong ring bread, usually topped with sesame seeds, with its origins in Jerusalem. Unlike the bagel, it is not boiled prior to baking.


title: Bagel

text: "Bagel" is also a Yeshivish term for sleeping 12 hours straight—e.g., "I slept a bagel last night." There are various opinions as to the origins of this term. It may be a reference to the fact that bagel dough has to "rest" for at least 12 hours between mixing and baking or simply to the fact that the hour hand on a clock traces a bagel shape over the course of 12 hours.


title: Bagel

text: In tennis, a "bagel" refers to a player winning a set 6–0; winning a match 6–0, 6–0, 6–0 is called a "triple bagel".


title: Bagel

text: ""Bublichki" or ""Bagelach" is a title of a famous Russian and Yiddish song written in Odessa in the 1920s. The Barry Sisters together with the Ziggy Elman Orchestra made it popular in the US in 1939. Today it belongs to the repertoire of klezmer, jazz and pop musicians.


title: Bagel

text: In Quizbowl, a "bagel" refers to failing to correctly answer any part of a multi-part bonus question (i.e. "We bageled that bonus on the Franco-Mongol alliance in the first finals match."). This is because a bagel looks like the number zero, which is the points gained by incorrectly answering all of the questions.


title: Bagel

text: In the United States, February 9 is often celebrated as National Bagel Day, in which people celebrate the rich history of getting together and eating bagels.


title: Bagel

text: The term "bageling" refers to when a Jew uses a Jewish word or phrase in a conversation, or in the vicinity of a stranger who is also clearly Jewish, in order to inform them that they are also Jewish.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: In many languages, the names given to the seven days of the week are derived from the names of the classical planets in Hellenistic astronomy, which were in turn named after contemporary deities, a system introduced by the Sumerians and later adopted by the Babylonians from whom the Roman Empire adopted the system during Late Antiquity. In some other languages, the days are named after corresponding deities of the regional culture, beginning either with Sunday or with Monday. The seven-day week was adopted in early Christianity from the Hebrew calendar, and gradually replaced the Roman nundinal cycle as the new religion spread. Sunday remained the first day of the week, being considered the Lord's Day, while the Jewish sabbath remained the seventh. Emperor Constantine adopted the seven-day week for official use in AD 321, making the Day of the Sun () a legal holiday.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, the Roman Empire gradually replaced the eight-day Roman nundinal cycle with the seven-day week.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The earliest evidence for this new system is a Pompeiian graffito referring to 6 February ("ante diem viii idus Februarias") of the year AD 60 as "dies solis" ("Sunday").


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Another early witness is a reference to a lost treatise by Plutarch, written in about AD 100, which addressed the question of: "Why are the days named after the planets reckoned in a different order from the 'actual' order?". (The treatise is lost, but the answer to the question is known; see planetary hours).


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The Ptolemaic system of planetary spheres asserts that the order of the heavenly bodies, from the farthest to the closest to the Earth is: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, or, objectively, the planets are ordered from slowest to fastest moving as they appear in the night sky.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The days were named after the planets of Hellenistic astrology, in the order: Sun, Moon, Mars ("Ares"), Mercury ("Hermes"), Jupiter ("Zeus"), Venus ("Aphrodite") and Saturn ("Cronos").


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Except for Modern Portuguese and Mirandese, the Romance languages preserved the Latin names, except for the names of Sunday, which was replaced by "[dies] Dominicus (Dominica)", i.e. "the Lord's Day", and of Saturday, which was named for the Sabbath. Mirandese and Modern Portuguese use numbered weekdays (see below), but retain "sábado" and "demingo"/"domingo" for weekends.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Early Old Irish adopted the names from Latin, but introduced separate terms of Norse origin for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, then later supplanted these with terms relating to church fasting practices.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Albanian adopted the Latin terms for Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday, adopted translations of the Latin terms for Sunday and Monday, and kept native terms for Thursday and Friday. Other languages adopted the week together with the Latin (Romance) names for the days of the week in the colonial period. Several constructed languages also adopted the Latin terminology.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: With the exception of "sabato", the Esperanto names are all from French, cf. French "dimanche, lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi".


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The Germanic peoples adapted the system introduced by the Romans by substituting the Germanic deities for the Roman ones (with the exception of "Saturday") in a process known as .


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The date of the introduction of this system is not known exactly, but it must have happened later than AD 200 but before the introduction of Christianity during the 6th to 7th centuries, i.e., during the final phase or soon after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. This period is later than the Common Germanic stage, but still during the phase of undifferentiated West Germanic. The names of the days of the week in North Germanic languages were not calqued from Latin directly, but taken from the West Germanic names.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Hindu astrology uses the concept of days under the regency of a planet under the term "vāsara", the days of the week being called "āditya-, soma-, maṅgala-, budha-, guru-, śukra-," and "śani-vāsara". "śukrá" is a name of Venus (regarded as a son of Bhṛgu); "guru" is here a title of Bṛhaspati, and hence of Jupiter; "budha" "Mercury" is regarded as a son of "Soma", i.e. the Moon. Knowledge of Greek astrology existed since about the 2nd century BC, but references to the "vāsara" occur somewhat later, during the Gupta period ("Yājñavalkya Smṛti", c. 3rd to 5th century), i.e. at roughly the same period or before the system was introduced in the Roman Empire.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The Southeast Asian tradition also uses the Hindu names of the days of the week. Hindu astrology adopted the concept of days under the regency of a planet under the term "vāra", the days of the week being called "āditya-, soma-, maṅgala-, budha-, guru-, śukra-," and "śani-vāra". "śukrá" is a name of Venus (regarded as a son of Bhṛgu); "guru" is here a title of Bṛhaspati, and hence of Jupiter; "budha" "Mercury" is regarded as a son of "Soma", i.e. the Moon.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The East Asian naming system for the days of the week closely parallels that of the Latin system and is ordered after the "Seven Luminaries" (七曜 "qī yào"), which consists of the Sun, Moon and the five planets visible to the naked eye.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The Chinese had apparently adopted the seven-day week from the Hellenistic system by the 4th century, although by which route is not entirely clear. It was again transmitted to China in the 8th century by Manichaeans, via the country of Kang (a Central Asian polity near Samarkand).


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The 4th-century date, according to the "Cihai" encyclopedia, is due to a reference to Fan Ning (范寧), an astrologer of the Jin Dynasty. The renewed adoption from Manichaeans in the 8th century (Tang Dynasty) is documented with the writings of the Chinese Buddhist monk Yijing and the Ceylonese Buddhist monk Bu Kong.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The Chinese transliteration of the planetary system was soon brought to Japan by the Japanese monk Kobo Daishi; surviving diaries of the Japanese statesman Fujiwara no Michinaga show the seven-day system in use in Heian Period Japan as early as 1007. In Japan, the seven-day system was kept in use (for astrological purposes) until its promotion to a full-fledged (Western-style) calendrical basis during the Meiji era. In China, with the founding of the Republic of China in 1911, Monday through Saturday in China are now named after the luminaries implicitly with the numbers.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The Slavic, Baltic and Uralic languages (except Finnish and partially Estonian and Võro) adopted numbering but took Monday rather than Sunday as the "first day". This convention is also found in some Austronesian languages whose speakers were converted to Christianity by European missionaries.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: In Slavic languages, some of the names correspond to numerals after Sunday: compare Russian "vtornik" () "Tuesday" and "vtoroj" () "the second", "chetverg" () "Thursday" and "chetvjortyj" () "the fourth", "pyatnitsa" () "Friday" and "pyatyj" () "the fifth"; see also the Notes.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The modern Chinese names for the days of the week are based on a simple numerical sequence. The word for "week" is followed by a number indicating the day: "Monday" is literally the "Stellar Period One"/"Cycle One", i.e. the "First day of the Stellar Period/Cycle", etc. The exception is Sunday, where 日 ("rì"), "day" or "Sun", is used instead of a number. A slightly informal and colloquial variant to 日 is 天 ("tiān") "day", "sky" or "heaven".


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Accordingly, the notational abbreviation of the days of the week uses the numbers, e.g. 一 for "M" or "Mon(.)", "Monday". Note that the abbreviation of Sunday uses exclusively 日 and not 天. Attempted usage of 天 as such will not be understood.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Colloquially, the week is also known as the "Prayer" (), with the names of the days of the week formed accordingly.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The following is a table of the Mandarin names of the days of the weeks. Note that standard Taiwan Mandarin pronounces 期 as "qí", so 星期 is instead "xīngqí". While all varieties of Mandarin may pronounce 星期 as "xīngqi" and 禮拜/礼拜 as "lǐbai", the second syllable with the neutral tone, this is not reflected in the table either for legibility.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Several Sinitic languages refer to Saturday as 週末 "end of the week" and Sunday as 禮拜. Examples include Shenyang Mandarin, Hanyuan Sichuanese Mandarin, Taishanese, Hakka, Teochew, Ningbonese, and Loudi Old Xiang. Some Hakka varieties in Taiwan still use the traditional Luminaries.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Sunday comes first in order in calendars shown in the table below. In the Abrahamic tradition, the first day of the week is Sunday. Biblical Sabbath (corresponding to Saturday) is when God rested from , making the day following the Sabbath the first day of the week (corresponding to Sunday). Seventh-day Sabbaths were sanctified for celebration and rest. After the week was adopted in early Christianity, Sunday remained the first day of the week, but also gradually displaced Saturday as the day of celebration and rest, being considered the Lord's Day.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Saint Martin of Dumio (c. 520–580 [10520–10580]), archbishop of Braga, decided not to call days by pagan gods and to use ecclesiastic terminology to designate them. While the custom of numbering the days of the week was mostly prevalent in the Eastern Church, Portuguese, Mirandese and Galician, due to Martin's influence, are the only Romance languages in which the names of the days come from numbers rather than planetary names.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) historically objected to the pagan etymologies of days and months and substituted numbering, beginning with First Day for Sunday.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Icelandic is a special case within the Germanic languages, maintaining only the Sun and Moon ("sunnudagur" and "mánudagur" respectively), while dispensing with the names of the explicitly heathen gods in favour of a combination of numbered days and days whose names are linked to pious or domestic routine ("föstudagur", "Fasting Day" and "laugardagur", "Washing Day"). The "washing day" is also used in other North Germanic languages, but otherwise the names correspond to those of English.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: In Swahili, the day begins at sunrise, unlike in the Arabic and Hebrew calendars where the day starts at sunset (therefore an offset of twelve hours on average), and unlike in the Western world where the day starts at midnight (therefore an offset of six hours on average). Saturday is therefore the first day of the week, as it is the day that includes the first night of the week in Arabic.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Etymologically speaking, Swahili has two "fifth" days. The words for Saturday through Wednesday contain the Bantu-derived Swahili words for "one" through "five". The word for Thursday, "Alhamisi", is of Arabic origin and means "the fifth" (day). The word for Friday, "Ijumaa", is also Arabic and means (day of) "gathering" for the Friday noon prayers in Islam.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: In the Žejane dialect of Istro-Romanian, "lur" (Monday) and "virer" (Friday) follow the Latin convention, while "utorek" (Tuesday), "sredu" (Wednesday), and "četrtok" (Thursday) follow the Slavic convention.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: In Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino), which is mainly based on a medieval version of Spanish, the five days of Monday–Friday closely follow the Spanish names. Sunday uses the Arabic name, which is based on numbering, because a Jewish language was not likely to adapt a name based on "Lord's Day" for Sunday. As in Spanish, the Ladino name for Saturday is based on "Sabbath". However, as a Jewish language—and with Saturday being the actual day of rest in the Jewish community—Ladino directly adapted the Hebrew name, "Shabbat".


title: Names of the days of the week

text: The days of the week in Meitei language (officially known as Manipuri language) originated from the Sanamahi creation myth of Meitei mythology.


title: Names of the days of the week

text: Or canàbara, cenàbara, cenàbera, cenàbura, cenarba, chenàbara, chenabra, chenapra, chenàpura, chenarpa, chenàura, cianàbara, chenabura; meaning holy supper as preparation to the sabbathday(Saturday)


title: Harem

text: Harem (Persian: حرمسرا "haramsarā", "ḥarīm", "a sacred inviolable place; harem; female members of the family") refers to domestic spaces that are reserved for the women of the house in a Muslim family. A harem may house a man's wife or wives, their pre-pubescent male children, unmarried daughters, female domestic servants, and other unmarried female relatives. In harems of the past, slave concubines were also housed in the harem. In former times some harems were guarded by eunuchs who were allowed inside. The structure of the harem and the extent of monogamy or polygamy has varied depending on the family's personalities, socio-economic status, and local customs. Similar institutions have been common in other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations, especially among royal and upper-class families, and the term is sometimes used in other contexts. In traditional Persian residential architecture the women's quarters were known as "andaruni" (Persian: اندرونی; meaning inside), and in the Indian subcontinent as "zenana" (Persian: زنانه).


title: Harem

text: Although the institution has experienced a sharp decline in the modern era due to a rise in education and economic opportunities for women, as well as the influence of Western culture, the seclusion of women is still practiced in some parts of the world, such as rural Afghanistan and conservative states of the Persian Gulf.


title: Harem

text: In the West, Orientalist conceptions of the harem as a hidden world of sexual subjugation where numerous women lounged in suggestive poses have influenced many paintings, stage productions, films and literary works. Some earlier European Renaissance paintings dating to the 16th century portray the women of the Ottoman harem as individuals of status and political significance. In many periods of Islamic history, women in the harem exercised various degrees of political power, such as the Sultanate of Women in the Ottoman Empire.


title: Harem

text: The word has been recorded in the English language since the early 17th century. It comes from the Arabic "ḥarīm", which can mean "a sacred inviolable place", "harem" or "female members of the family". In English the term harem can mean also "the wives (or concubines) of a polygamous man." The triliteral "Ḥ-R-M" appears in other terms related to the notion of interdiction such as "haram" (forbidden), "mahram" (unmarriageable relative), "ihram" (a pilgrim's state of ritual consecration during the Hajj) and "al-Ḥaram al-Šarīf" ("the noble sanctuary", which can refer to the Temple Mount or the sanctuary of Mecca).


title: Harem

text: In the Ottoman Turkish language, the harem, i.e., the part of the house reserved for women was called "haremlik", while the space open for men was known as "selamlık".


title: Harem

text: The practice of female seclusion is not exclusive to Islam, but the English word harem usually denotes the domestic space reserved for women in Muslim households. Some scholars have used the term to refer to polygynous royal households throughout history.


title: Harem

text: Leila Ahmed describes the "ideal of seclusion" as "a man's right to keep his women concealed—invisible to other men." Ahmed identifies the practice of seclusion as a social ideal and one of the major factors that shaped the lives of women in the Mediterranean Middle East. For example, contemporary sources from the Byzantine Empire describe the social mores that governed women's lives. Women were not supposed to be seen in public. They were guarded by eunuchs and could only leave the home "veiled and suitably chaperoned." Some of these customs were borrowed from the Persians, but Greek society also influenced the development of patriarchal tradition.


title: Harem

text: The ideal of seclusion was not fully realized as social reality. This was in part because working-class women often held jobs that required interaction with men. In the Byzantine Empire, the very ideal of gender segregation created economic opportunities for women as midwives, doctors, bath attendants and artisans since it was considered inappropriate for men to attend to women's needs. At times women lent and invested money, and engaged in other commercial activities. Historical records shows that the women of 14th-century Mamluk Cairo freely visited public events alongside men, despite objections of religious scholars.


title: Harem

text: Female seclusion has historically signaled social and economic prestige. Eventually, the norms of female seclusion spread beyond the elites, but the practice remained characteristic of upper and middle classes, for whom the financial ability to allow one's wife to remain at home was a mark of high status. In some regions, such as the Arabian peninsula, seclusion of women was practiced by poorer families at the cost of great hardship, but it was generally economically unrealistic for the lower classes.


title: Harem

text: Where historical evidence is available, it indicates that the harem was much more likely to be monogamous. For example, in late Ottoman Istanbul, only 2.29 percent of married men were polygynous, with the average number of wives being 2.08. In some regions, like Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, prevalence of women in agricultural work leads to wider practice of polygyny but makes seclusion impractical. In contrast, in Eurasian and North African rural communities that rely on male-dominated plough farming, seclusion is economically possible but polygyny is undesirable. This indicates that the fundamental characteristic of the harem is seclusion of women rather than polygyny.


title: Harem

text: The idea of the harem or seclusion of women did not originate with Muhammad or Islam. The practice of secluding women was common to many Ancient Near East communities, especially where polygamy was permitted. In pre-Islamic Assyria and Persia, most royal courts had a harem, where the ruler's wives and concubines lived with female attendants, and eunuchs. "Encyclopædia Iranica" uses the term "harem" to describe the practices of the ancient Near East.


title: Harem

text: There has been a modern trend to refer to the women's quarters of the Pharaoh's palace in Ancient Egypt as a harem.


title: Harem

text: The popular assumption that Pharaonic Egypt had a harem is however an anachronism; while the women and children of the pharaoh, including his mother, wives, and children, had their own living quarters with its own administration in the Palace of the Pharaoh, the royal women did not live isolated from contact with men or in seclusion from the rest of the court in the way associated with the term "harem". The custom of referring to the women's quarters of the pharaoh's palace as a "harem" is therefore apocryphal, and has been used because of incorrect assumptions that Ancient Egypt was similar to later Islamic harem culture.


title: Harem

text: The kings of Ancient Assyria are known to have had a harem regulated by royal edicts, in which the women lived in seclusion guarded by slave eunuchs.


title: Harem

text: A number of regulations were designed to prevent disputes among the women from developing into political intrigues. The women were guarded by the eunuchs who also prevented their disputes from developing into political plots, banned from giving gifts to their servants (as such gifts could be used as bribes) and not allowed any visitors who had not been examined and approved by officials. When the king traveled, his harem traveled with him, strictly supervised so as not breaking regulations even under transport.


title: Harem

text: In the 7th century BC, Assyria was conquered by the Median Empire, which appears to have adopted the harem custom, from whom it was in turn taken over by the Achaemenid Empire.


title: Harem

text: Female seclusion and a special part of the house reserved for women were common among the elites of ancient Greece, where it was known as the gynaeceum. However, while gender segregation was the official ideal in Classical Athens, it is debated how much of this ideal was actually enforced, and it is known that even upper-class women appeared in public and were able to come in contact with men on at least religious occasions.


title: Harem

text: These traditional Greek ideals were revived as an ideal for women in the Byzantine Empire (in which Greek culture eventually became dominant), though the rigid ideal norms of seclusion expressed in Byzantine literature did not necessarily reflect actual practice. The Byzantine Emperors were Greek Orthodox and did not have several wives - or official concubines - secluded in a harem. When Greek culture started to replace the Roman in the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century, it came to be seen as modest for especially upper-class women to keep to a special women's quarters ("gynaikonitis"), and until the 12th century, men and women are known to have participated in gender-segregated banquets at the Imperial Court; however Imperial women still appeared in public and did not live in seclusion, and the idealized gender segregation was never fully enforced.


title: Harem

text: There is no evidence of among early Iranians for harem practices, that is, to take large numbers of wives or concubines and keeping them in seclusion. However, Iranian dynasties are said to have adopted harem practices after their conquests in the Middle East, where such practices were used in some cultures such as Assyria (the Median Empire conquered Assyria in the 7th-century BC, and Media transformed into the Achaemenid Empire). According to Greek sources, the nobility of the Medes kept no less than five wives, who were watched over by eunuchs.


title: Harem

text: Greek historians have reported about the harems of the Achaemenid Empire. Herodotus reported that each Persian royal or aristocratic man had several wives and concubines, who came to the husband on a well-regulated turn-basis. and had sole control over their children until these were five years old.


title: Harem

text: The Old Persian word for the harem is not attested, but it can be reconstructed as "xšapā.stāna" (lit. night station or place where one spends the night).


title: Harem

text: The royal household was controlled by the chief wife and queen, who as a rule was the daughter of a Persian prince and the mother of the heir to the throne, and who was subject only to the king, with her own living quarter, revenue, estates and staff, which included eunuchs and concubines.


title: Harem

text: The second rank under the queen consisted of the legal secondary wives, with the title "bānūka" (“Lady”); the third rank consisted of unmarried princesses as well as the married princesses who lived with their own family, with the title "duxçī" (daughter), The fourth group of women in the harem were the royal slave concubines, who were bought in slave markets, received as a gifts or tribute or taken as prisoners of war. The concubines were trained to entertain the king and his guests as musicians, dancers and singers. The harem of Darius III reportedly consisted of his mother, queen-wife, children, over 300 concubines and nearly 500 household servants.


title: Harem

text: However, it is a matter of debate if the Achaemenid court had a full harem culture, as women do not appear to have been fully secluded in the harem. The fact that women lived in separate quarters at the Royal Palace does not necessarily mean that they were secluded from contact with men, and despite the (possibly biased) Greek reports, there is no archeological evidence supporting the existence of a harem, or the seclusion of women from contact with men, at the Achaemenid court.


title: Harem

text: Royal and aristocratic Achaemenid women were given an education in subjects which did not appear compatible with seclusion, such as horsemanship and archery. It does not appear that royal and aristocratic women lived in seclusion from men since it is known that they appeared in public and traveled with their husbands, participated in hunting and in feasts: at least the chief wife of a royal or aristocratic man did not live in seclusion, as it is clearly stated that wives customarily accompanied their husbands to dinner banquets, although they left the banquet when the “women entertainers” of the harem came in and the men began "merrymaking".


title: Harem

text: Little is known about the alleged harems of the Parthians. Parthian royal men reportedly had several wives and kept them fairly secluded from all men but relatives and eunuchs. According to Roman sources, Parthian kings had harems full of female slaves and hetairas secluded from contact with men, and royal women were not allowed to participate in the royal banquets. Also aristocratic Parthian men appear to have had harems, as Roman sources report of rich men travelling with hundreds of guarded concubines. However, the Roman reports about Parthian harems seem to mirror the traditional Greek reports about the Achaemenid harems, and they similarly are biased, and cannot be verified by archeological evidence.


title: Harem

text: The information about the Sasanian harem reveals a picture that closely mirrors the alleged Achaemenid customs.


title: Harem

text: In the Sassanian Empire, Roman reports that it was common for men to have multiple wives. The hierarchy of the Sassanian harem is not clear. The Sassanian kings had one chief consort, who was the mother of the heir to the throne, as well as several wives of lower rank and concubines, all of whom accompanied him on travels, even on campaigns. Five titles are attested for royal women: “royal princess” ("duxšy", "duxt"); “Lady” ("bānūg"); “Queen” ("bānbišn"); “Queen of the Empire” ("[Ērān]šahr bānbišn") and “Queen of Queens” ("bānbišnān bānbišn"). The rank of these titles has been the matter of debate and it appears that their status varied depending on circumstances and that the highest female rank was not necessarily borne by the chief wife, but could be held by a daughter or a sister. The Sasanian harem was supervised by eunuchs, and also had female singers and musicians.


title: Harem

text: However, while the Sasanian kings had harems, women in the Sassanid Empire in general did not live in seclusion and elaborate harems were detested and appear to have been exceptions to the rule, which is illustrated by the fact that big harems when they occurred, were abhorred by the public.


title: Harem

text: According to Sasanian legend, of all the Persian kings, Khosrow II was the most extravagant in his hedonism. He searched his realm to find the most beautiful girls, and it was rumored that about 3,000 of them were kept in his harem. This practice was widely condemned by the public, who abhorred of him keeping those girls in seclusion and denying them the benefit of marriage and progeny, and it was counted as the fourth of the eight crimes for which he was later tried and executed. Khosrow himself claimed that he sent his favorite wife Shirin every year to offer them a possibility of leaving his harem with a dowry for marriage, but that their luxurious lifestyle always prompted them to refuse his offer.


title: Harem

text: South Asian traditions of female seclusion, called "purdah", may have been influenced by Islamic customs, but the practice of segregation by gender in Hindu society predates the Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent.


title: Harem

text: Ashoka, the emperor of the Mauryan Dynasty in India, kept a harem of around 500 women, all of whom were under strict rules of seclusion and etiquette.


title: Harem

text: In contrast to the earlier era of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the Rashidun Caliphate, women in Umayyad and Abbasid society were absent from all arenas of the community's central affairs. While it was very common for early Muslim women to play an active role in community life, and not unseen for women to lead men into battle and even start rebellions as demonstrated in the Hadith literature, by the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, women were ideally kept in seclusion.


title: Harem

text: The practice of gender segregation in Islam was influenced by an interplay of religion, customs and politics.The harem system first became fully institutionalized in the Islamic world under the Abbasid caliphate. Seclusion of women was established in various communities of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and Persia before the advent of Islam, and some scholars believe that Muslims adopted the custom from the Byzantine Empire and Persia, retrospectively interpreting the Quran to justify it. Although the term "harem" does not denote women's quarters in the Quran, a number of Quranic verses discussing modesty and seclusion were held up by Quranic commentators as religious rationale for the separation of women from men, including the so-called "hijab verse" (33:53). In modern usage "hijab" colloquially refers to the religious attire worn by Muslim women, but in this verse, it meant "veil" or "curtain" that physically separates female from male space. Although classical commentators agreed that the verse spoke about a curtain separating the living quarters of Muhammad's wives from visitors to his house, they usually viewed this practice as providing a model for all Muslim women.


title: Harem

text: The growing seclusion of women were illustrated by the power struggle between the Caliph Al-Hadi and his mother Al-Khayzuran, who refused to live in seclusion but instead challenged the power of the Caliph by giving her own audiences to male supplicants and officials and thus mixing with men. Her son considered this improper, and he publicly addressed the issue of his mothers public life by assembling his generals and asked them:


title: Harem

text: Conquests had brought enormous wealth and large numbers of slaves to the Muslim elite. The majority of the slaves were women and children, many of whom had been dependents or harem-members of the defeated Sassanian upper classes. In the wake of the conquests an elite man could potentially own a thousand slaves, and ordinary soldiers could have ten people serving them.


title: Harem

text: Nabia Abbott, preeminent historian of elite women of the Abbasid Caliphate, describes the lives of harem women as follows.


title: Harem

text: The choicest women were imprisoned behind heavy curtains and locked doors, the strings and keys of which were entrusted into the hands of that pitiable creature – the eunuch. As the size of the harem grew, men indulged to satiety. Satiety within the individual harem meant boredom for the one man and neglect for the many women. Under these conditions ... satisfaction by perverse and unnatural means crept into society, particularly in its upper classes.


title: Harem

text: The marketing of human beings, particularly women, as objects for sexual use meant that elite men owned the vast majority of women they interacted with, and related to them as would masters to slaves. Being a slave meant relative lack of autonomy, and belonging to a harem caused a wife and her children to have little insurance of stability and continued support due to the volatile politics of harem life.


title: Harem

text: Elite men expressed in literature the horror they felt for the humiliation and degradation of their daughters and female relatives. For example, the verses addressed to Hasan ibn al-Firat on the death of his daughter read:


title: Harem

text: Even so, courtesans and princesses produced prestigious and important poetry. Enough survives to give us access to women's historical experiences, and reveals some vivacious and powerful figures, such as the Sufi mystic Raabi'a al-Adwiyya (714–801 CE), the princess and poet 'Ulayya bint al-Mahdi (777–825 CE), and the singing-girls Shāriyah (–70 CE), Fadl Ashsha'ira (d. 871 CE) and Arib al-Ma'muniyya (797–890 CE).


title: Harem

text: The harem system developed in the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates was reproduced by the Islamic realms which developed from them, such as in the Emirates and Caliphates in Muslim Spain, Al-Andalus, which attracted a lot of attention in Europe during the Middle Ages until the Emirate of Granada was conquered in 1492.


title: Harem

text: The most famous of the Andalusian harems was perhaps the harem of the Caliph of Cordoba. Except for the female relatives of the Caliph, the harem women consisted of his slave concubines. The slaves of the Caliph were often European saqaliba slaves trafficked from Northern or Eastern Europe; while male saqaliba could be given work in a number of tasks such as offices in the kitchen, falconry, mint, textile workshops, the administration or the royal guard (in the case of harem guards, they were castrated), female saqaliba were placed in the harem.


title: Harem

text: The harem could contain thousands of slave concubines; the harem of Abd al-Rahman I consisted of 6,300 women. They (the saqaliba concubines) were appreciated for their light skin. The concubines (jawaris) were educated in accomplishments to make them attractive and useful for their master, and many became known and respected for their knowledge in a variety of subjects from music to medicine.


title: Harem

text: A jawaris concubine who gave birth to a child attained the status of an "umm walad", and a favorite concubine was given great luxury and honorary titles such as Marjan, who gave birth to al-Hakam II, the heir of Abd al-Rahman III, who called her "al-sayyida al-kubra" (great lady).


title: Harem

text: Concubines were however always slaves subjected to lack of freedom and the will of their master, and Caliph Abd al-Rahman III is known to have executed two concubines for reciting what he saw as inappropriate verses and tortured another concubine with a burning candle when she refused sexual intercourse; the concubines of Caliph Abu Marwan al-Tubni (d. 1065) were reportedly so badly treated that they conspired to murder him, and women of the harem are also known to have been subjected to rape when rivaling factions conquered different palaces. Several concubines are known to have had great influence through their masters or their sons, notably Subh during the Caliphate of Cordoba, and Isabel de Solís during the Emirate of Granada.


title: Harem

text: The rulers of Afghanistan customarily had a harem of four official wives as well as a large number of unofficial wives for the sake of tribal marriage diplomacy.


title: Harem

text: They also had a large amount of enslaved women in the royal harem known as "kaniz" and "surati", guarded by the "ghulam bacha" (eunuchs). Habibullah Khan (r. 1901–1919) famously had at least 44 wives and hundreds of slave women (mostly Hazara) in his harem in the Harem Sara Palace. The women of the royal harem dressed in Western fashion since at least the reign Habibullah Khan but did not show themselves other than completely covered outside of the enclosed area of the royal palace. The royal harem were first abolished by king Amanullah Khan who in 1923 freed all slaves of the royal harem as well as encouraged his wife queen Soraya Tarzi and the other women of the royal family to unveil and live public lives. While the royal women returned to the purdah of the royal complex after the deposition of Amanullah in 1929, it was finally dissolved with the final unveiling of the royal women in 1959.


title: Harem

text: In the Muslim dynasties of Central Asia, the harem culture did not initially exist, since the customary nomad culture made it impractical. The wives of the rulers of the Golden Horde did not live secluded in a harem but was allowed to show themselves and meet unrelated men, and the system of harem gender segregation was not fully implemented in the Islamic dynasties of Central Asia until they stopped living a nomadic lifestyle, such as in the Crimea.


title: Harem

text: The household organization of the khans of the Giray dynasty in the Crimean Khanate is described first in the reign of Sahib I Giray, while most court offices were initiated by Sahib I Giray. It is clear that there were separate women's quarters in the court of Sahib I Giray, however complete gender segregation in the form of a harem does not appear to have been introduced until the 1560s.


title: Harem

text: The Giray court appear to have been organized in the slave household normal in other Muslim dynasties, and many of the officials and courtiers (such as the viziers and equerries) as well as the servants were enslaved, while some were free Muslim noble clients and ulema family members. The servants of the royal harem however were all clearly slaves, particularly the eunuchs, who guarded the harem and who were of Black African origin, imported from Africa via the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East and often trained in the Ottoman Imperial harem.


title: Harem

text: Inside the harem, the highest positions were that of "ana biyim" and "ulug biyim (ulug hani)", which were given to the khan's mother and to the khan's first wife or the eldest Giray princess, respectively. The royal women had their own property and administered their property from the harem through their legal agents, known as "vekils", who also acted as their intermediaries with supplicants and petitioners.


title: Harem

text: The princes and the khans normally married free Muslim daughters of the Circassian vassal begs, and trusted high officials; the khans also customarily practiced levirate marriage. Similar to what was normal in the royal harem of other Islamic dynasties, the khans had four official wives (all with their own separate quarters within the harem), and an unknown number of enslaved concubines. In 1669, the khan reportedly received fifteen Circassian slave virgins as an annual tribute from his subjects in the Caucasus; in the 1720s khan Saadet Giray reportedly owned twenty-seven slave concubines, and in the 1760s khan Qirim Giray owned about forty. But not all slave concubines were Circassians: some royal children are recorded to have been born by slave mothers from Central and Eastern Europe, but the occurrence of European women in the royal harem diminished in the 18th century when the Crimean slave raids to Eastern Europe were suppressed. Some of these women, though all formally concubines, would not have been the khan's concubines in practice but rather acted as the servants of his wives; this was the case in the Royal Ottoman harem as well, which served as the role model of the Giray harem.


title: Harem

text: The Giray princesses were normally married off to poor noblemen and vassals who would be provided with great dowries, which put the princesses in advantage to their husbands and made the husbands loyal to the Girays.


title: Harem

text: Initially, the royal women did not live in seclusion in the harem; they notably gave their own audiences to men, significantly the ceremonial visit of the Russian ambassador, who presented them with diplomatic gifts, but in 1564 the Russian ambassador was met with the message that such audiences were no longer to be given. The Giray women did continue to play a role in diplomacy, as they were allowed to exchange formal diplomatic correspondence with female rulers and consorts. Ğazı II Giray assigned his wife Han Tokai to act as a mediator and write to tsaritsa Irina Godunova, while he himself wrote to tsar Feodor I, negotiating the return of their son Murad Giray from Moscow in 1593.


title: Harem

text: There are few examples of politically active and influential women of the Giray harem. Only Nur Sultan, wife of Mengli I Giray, Ayse Sultan, wife of Devlet I Giray (r. 1551–1577) and Emine Sultan Biyim, wife of Mehmed IV Giray (1642–44 and 1654–66), have been historically acknowledged as politically influential.


title: Harem

text: The royal harem during the Khedivate of Egypt (1805-1914) was modelled after Ottoman example, the khedives being the Egyptian vice roys of the Ottoman sultans. Similar to the Ottoman Imperial harem, the harem of the khedive was modelled on a system of polygyny based on slave concubinage, in which each wife or concubine was limited to having one son.


title: Harem

text: The khedive's harem was composed of between several hundreds to over a thousand enslaved women, supervised by his mother, the walida pasha, and his four official wives (hanim) and recognized concubines (qadin). However, the majority of the slave women served as domestics to his mother and wives and could have servant offices such as the bash qalfa, chief servant slave woman of the walida pasha. The enslaved female servants of the khedive harem were manumitted and married off with a trousseau in strategic marriages to the male slaves (kul or mamluk) who were trained to become officers and civil servants, in order to ensure the fidelity of their husband's to the khedive when they begun their military or state official career. A minority of the slave women were selected to become the personal servants (concubines) of the khedive, often selected by his mother: they could become his wives, and would in any case become free as an umm walad (or mustawlada) if they had children with him. The Egyptian elite of bureaucrate families, who emulated the khedive, had similar harem customs, and it was noted that it was common for Egyptian upper-class families to have slave women in their harem, which they manumitted to marry off to male protegees. Muhammad Ali of Egypt reportedly had at least 25 consorts (wives and concubines), and Khedive Ismail fourteen.


title: Harem

text: This system started to change in 1873, when Tewfik Pasha married Emina Ilhamy as his sole consort, making monogamy the fashionable ideal among the elite, after the throne succession had been changed to primogeniture, which favored monogamy. Around the same time, the Tanzimat reforms abolished the custom of training male slaves to become military men and civil servants and replaced them with free students. The Anglo-Egyptian Convention for the Abolition of Slavery in 1877 officially banned the slave trade to Sudan, followed by the 1884 ban on the import of white women as slaves (the harem slave women were normally Circassian), a ban on the selling on existing slaves as well as the introduction of a law giving slaves the right to apply of manumission. All this gradually diminished the royal harem, though the royal harem as well as the harem of the elite families did still maintain a smaller number of both male eunuchs as well as slave women until at least World War I; Khedive Abbas II of Egypt bought six "white female slaves" for his harem in 1894, and his mother still maintained sixty slaves as late as 1931. The royal harem was finally dissolved when the royal women escaped seclusion and took on a public role in the 1930s.


title: Harem

text: Moulay Ismail, Alaouite sultan of Morocco from 1672 to 1727, had over 500 (enslaved) concubines. He is said to have fathered a total of 525 sons and 342 daughters by 1703 and achieved a 700th son in 1721.


title: Harem

text: Many of his concubines are only fragmentary documented. As concubines, they were slave captives, sometimes from Europe. One of them, an Irishwoman by the name Mrs. Shaw, was brought to his harem after having been enslaved and was made to convert to Islam when the Sultan wished to have intercourse with her, but was manumitted and married off to a Spanish convert when the Sultan grew tired of her; the Spanish convert being very poor, she was described by contemporary witnesses as reduced to beggary. Other slave concubines became favorites and as such were allowed some influence, such as an Englishwoman called Lalla Balqis. Another favorite was a Spanish captive renamed Al-Darah, mother to Moulay Ismail's once favorite son that he himself educated: Moulay Mohammed al-Alim; and to Moulay Sharif. Around 1702, Al-Darah tragically died strangled by Moulay Ismail whom Lalla Aisha had made believe she had betrayed him.


title: Harem

text: According to the writings of the French diplomat Dominique Busnot, Moulay Ismail had at least 500 concubines and even more children. A total of 868 children (525 sons and 343 daughters) is recorded in 1703, with his seven hundredth son being born shortly after his death in 1727, by which time he had well over a thousand children. The final total is uncertain: the "Guinness Book of Records" claims 1042, while Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer of the University of Vienna put the total at 1171. This is widely considered among the largest number of children of any human in history.


title: Harem

text: The king's wives, concubines, dancing girls and slaves were not the only women of the Mughal harem. Many others, including the king's mother, lived in the harem. Aunts, grandmothers, sisters, daughters and other female relatives of the king all lived in the harem. Male children also lived in the harem until they grew up. Within the precincts of the harem were markets, bazaars, laundries, kitchens, playgrounds, schools and baths. The harem had a hierarchy, its chief authorities being the wives and female relatives of the emperor and below them were the concubines.


title: Harem

text: Urdubegis were the class of women assigned to protect the emperor and inhabitants of the zenana. Because the women of the Mughal court lived sequestered under purdah, the administration of their living quarters was run entirely by women. The division of the administrative tasks was dictated largely by the vision of Akbar, who organized his zenana of over 5,000 noble women and servants. The women tasked with the protection of the zenana were commonly of Habshi, Tatar, Turk and Kashmiri origin. Kashmiri women were selected because they did not observe purdah. Many of the women were purchased as slaves and trained for their positions.


title: Harem

text: The women of the Mughal harem could exercise enormous political power. Nur Jahan, chief consort of Jahangir, was the most powerful and influential woman at court during a period when the Mughal Empire was at the peak of its power and glory. More decisive and proactive than her husband, she is considered by historians to have been the real power behind the throne for more than fifteen years. Nur Jahan was granted certain honours and privileges which were never enjoyed by any Mughal empress before or after. Nur Jahan was the only Mughal empress to have coinage struck in her name. She was often present when the Emperor held court, and even held court independently when the Emperor was unwell. She was given charge of his imperial seal, implying that her perusal and consent were necessary before any document or order received legal validity. The Emperor sought her views on most matters before issuing orders. The only other Mughal empress to command such devotion from her husband was Nur Jahan's niece Mumtaz Mahal, for whom Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum. However, Mumtaz took no interest in affairs of state and Nur Jahan is therefore unique in the annals of the Mughal Empire for the political influence she wielded.


title: Harem

text: The Imperial Harem of the Ottoman sultan, which was also called "seraglio" in the West, was part of Topkapı Palace. It also housed the valide sultan, as well as the sultan's daughters and other female relatives. Eunuchs and servant girls were also part of the harem. During the later periods, the sons of the sultan lived in the Harem until they were 12 years old.It is being more commonly acknowledged today that the purpose of harems during the Ottoman Empire was for the upbringing of the future wives of upper-class and royal men. These women would be educated so that they were able to appear in public as a wife. In general, however, the separation of men's and women's quarters was never practiced among the urban poor in large cities such as Constantinople, and by the 1920s and 1930s, it had become a thing of the past in middle and upper-class homes.


title: Harem

text: Some women of Ottoman harem, especially wives, mothers and sisters of sultans, played very important political roles in Ottoman history, and during the period of the Sultanate of Women, it was common for foreign visitors and ambassadors to claim that the Empire was, "de facto" ruled by the women in the Imperial Harem. Hürrem Sultan (wife of Suleiman the Magnificent, mother of Selim II), was one of the most powerful women in Ottoman history and wielded vast political power. The title of Haseki Sultan, was created for her and was used by her successors.


title: Harem

text: Kösem Sultan was one of the most powerful women in Ottoman history. Kösem Sultan achieved power and influenced the politics of the Ottoman Empire when she became Haseki Sultan as favourite consort and later legal wife of Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–1617) and valide sultan as mother of Murad IV (r. 1623–1640) and Ibrahim (r. 1640–1648), and grandmother of Mehmed IV (r. 1648–1687).


title: Harem

text: Kösem's son, Sultan Ibrahim the Mad, Ottoman ruler from 1640 to 1648, is said to have drowned 280 concubines of his harem in the Bosphorus. At least one of his concubines, Turhan Sultan, a Rus' girl (from the area around modern Ukraine) who came into the Ottoman Empire as a slave sold by Nogai slavers, survived his reign.


title: Harem

text: The royal harem played an important role in the history of Safavid Persia. The Safavid harem consisted of mothers, wives, slave concubines and female relatives, and was staffed with female slaves and with eunuchs who acted as their guards and channel to the rest of the world. Shah Sultan Hossain's (r. 1694–1722) court has been estimated to include five thousand slaves; male and female, black and white, of which one hundred were black eunuchs.


title: Harem

text: The monarchs of the Safavid dynasty preferred to procreate through slave concubines, which would neutralize potential ambitions from relatives and other inlaws and protect patrimony. The slave concubines (and later mothers) of the Shah's mainly consisted of enslaved Circassian, Georgian and Armenian women, captured as war booty, bought at the slave market or received as gifts from local potentates. The slave concubines were sometimes forced to convert to shia Islam upon entering the harem, and referred to as "kaniz". In contrast to the common custom in Islamic courts to allow only non-Muslim women to become harem concubines, the Safavid harem also contained Muslim concubines, as some free Persian Muslim daughters were gifted by their families or taken by the royal household to the harem as concubines.


title: Harem

text: The enslaved harem women could achieve great influence, but there are also examples of the opposite: Shah Abbas II (r. 1642–1666) burned three of his slave-wives alive because they refused to drink with him, as well as another wife for lying about her menstruation period, and Shah Safi (r. 1629–1642) stabbed his wife to death for disobedience.


title: Harem

text: Slave eunuchs performed various tasks in many levels of the harem as well as the general court. Eunuchs had offices in the general court, such as in the royal treasury and as the tutors and adoptive fathers of non-castrated slaves selected to be slave soldiers (ghilman), as well as inside the harem, and served as a channel between the secluded harem women and the outside court and world, which gave them a potentially powerful role at court.


title: Harem

text: In the early Safavid period, young princes were placed in the care of a "lala" (high-ranking Qizilbash chief who acted as a guardian) and eventually given charge of important governorates. Although this system had the danger of encouraging regional rebellions against the shah, it gave the princes education and training which prepared them for dynastic succession. This policy was changed by Shah Abbas I (1571-1629), who "largely banished" the princes to the harem, where their social interactions were limited to the ladies of the harem and eunuchs. This deprived them of administrative and military training as well as experience of dealing with the aristocracy of the realm, which, together with the princes' indulgent upbringing, made them not only unprepared to carry out royal responsibilities, but often also uninterested in doing so. The confinement of royal princes to the harem was an important factor contributing to the decline of the Safavid dynasty.


title: Harem

text: The administration of the royal harem constituted an independent branch of the court, staffed mainly by eunuchs. These were initially black eunuchs, but white eunuchs from Georgia also began to be employed from the time of Abbas I.


title: Harem

text: The mothers of rival princes together with eunuchs engaged in palace intrigues in an attempt to place their candidate on the throne. From the middle of the sixteenth century, rivalries between Georgian and Circassian women in the royal harem gave rise to dynastic struggles of an ethnic nature previously unknown at the court. When Shah Abbas II died in 1666, palace eunuchs engineered the succession of Suleiman I and effectively seized control of the state. Suleiman set up a privy council, which included the most important eunuchs, in the harem, thereby depriving traditional state institutions of their functions. The eunuchs' influence over military and civil affairs was checked only by their internal rivalries and the religious movement led by Muhammad Baqir Majlisi. The royal harem reached such proportions under Sultan Husayn (1668–1726) that it consumed a large part of state revenues. After the fall of the Safavid dynasty, which occurred soon afterwards, eunuchs were never again able to achieve significant political influence as a class in Persia.


title: Harem

text: In the Islamic Khanates of Central Asia, harems existed until the introduction of Communism by the Soviets after the Russian Revolution.


title: Harem

text: The royal harem of the ruler of the Khanate of Khiva (1511-1920) in Central Asia (Uzbekistan) was composed of both legal wives and slave concubines. The khan had four legal wives, who were obliged to be practicing Muslim women.


title: Harem

text: Aside from his legal wives, enslaved women were acquired from slave markets. These were obliged to be non-Muslims since Muslims could not be slaves. The enslaved girls were initially given as servants to the khan's mother. She provided them with an education after some of them were selected to be the concubines to the khan.


title: Harem

text: Only the khan's legal wives were allowed to give birth to his children, and the slave concubines who conceived were given a forced abortion. The women could be sold off if they did not please the khan, or given in marriage to his favored subjects. The son of the khan were not allowed to inherit his father's concubine, so when a khan died, his concubines were sold at the slave market. Men were normally not allowed to visit the harem, but Jewish tradeswomen were allowed in to sell their wares, such as clothes, to the harem inhabitants.


title: Harem

text: The royal harem of the ruler of the Emirate of Bukhara (1785-1920) in Central Asia (Uzbekistan) was similar to that of the Khanate of Khiva. The last Emir of Bukhara was reported to have a harem with 100 women, but also a separate "harem" of ‘nectarine-complexioned dancing boys’. The harem was abolished when the Soviet conquered the area and the khan was forced to flee; he reportedly left the harem women behind, but did take some of his dancing boys with him.


title: Harem

text: The harem of the monarchs of the Qajar dynasty (1785-1925) consisted of several thousand people. The harem had a precise internal administration, based on the women's rank.


title: Harem

text: As was customary in Muslim harems, the highest rank of the harem hierarchy was that of the monarchs' mother, who in Qajar Iran had the title "Mahd-e ʿOlyā" (Sublime Cradle). She had many duties and prerogatives, such as safeguarding the harem valuables, particularly the jewels, which she administered with the help of female secretaries.


title: Harem

text: In contrast to what was common in the Ottoman Empire, where the sultans normally only had slave consorts, the Qajar shah's also had a custom of diplomatic marriages with free Muslim women, daughters of Qajar dignitaries and princes. Another phenomena of the Qajar harem was that the Shah entered two different kinds of marriages with his harem women: "ṣīḡa" (temporary wife), which was often done with concubines, and "ʿaqdī" (permanent wife), which was a promotion. The wives and slave concubines of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar came from the harems of the vanquished houses of Zand and Afšār; from the Georgian and Armenian campaigns, as well as from the slave markets and presented as gifts to the shah from the provinces.


title: Harem

text: Every consort had white and black slave servants (women or eunuchs), whose number varied according to her status. Some wives had their own residence and stables. There were different types of female officials within the harem: some managed the royal coffeehouse inside the harem; a body of female sentinels commanded by women officials "protected the king's nightly rest"; women called "ostāds" (masters), supervised the group of female dancers and musicians who entertained the harem and were housed with their servants in a separate compound. Young slave boys below puberty (ḡolām-bačča) served as servants and playmates in the harem. Eunuchs were mainly African slaves.


title: Harem

text: The women of the harem were responsible for everything inside the harem quarters, but the harem were guarded from the other parts of the palace (biruni) by the eunuchs, who together with the visits from relatives, physicians and tailors served as links to the outside world for the women, but the women were not allowed to leave the harem themselves.


title: Harem

text: The harem women had daily entertainments such as music, dance, theatrical performances and games. They studied the arts, calligraphy and poetry, and entertained themselves and the shah with music, dance and singing, and by reciting verses and telling stories, which the shah enjoyed at bedtime. The harem had its own theatre where passion plays (taʿzia) were performed, and one of the shah's wives was the custodian of all the paraphernalia. Toward the end of the Qajar dynasty, foreign tutors were allowed into the harem.


title: Harem

text: Inside the harem, women performed religious functions such as rawża-ḵᵛāni (commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Ḥosayn at Karbalā); preached from the pulpit on the day of ʿĀšurā (q.v., the 10th of Moḥarram) and direct the ritual of sina-zadan (beating of the chest).


title: Harem

text: The Qajar harem also had the political influence and intrigues common in royal harems. Until a regulated succession order to the throne was established by Nāṣer-al-Din Shah (r. 1848–1896), the harem was a place of intense struggle by mothers of potential heirs to have their own sons elected heir to the throne as well as material benefits for themselves, higher ranks for members of their own families, or precedence for their own children. Nāṣer-al-Din Shah's mother Jahān Ḵānom Mahd-e ʿOlyā wielved a major influenced with secured his own succession and the dismissal and subsequent assassination in of Prime Minister Mirzā Taqi Khan Amir Kabir, and Nāṣer-al-Din Shah's favorite wife Anis-al-Dawla brought about the dismissal of the Premier Mirza Hosein Khan Moshir od-Dowleh in 1873. Both Persian policymakers as well as foreign diplomats, therefore, sought support within the royal harem.


title: Harem

text: The practice of female seclusion witnessed a sharp decline in the early 20th century as a result of education and increased economic opportunity for women, as well as Western influences, but it is still practiced in some parts of the world, such as rural Afghanistan and conservative states of the Persian Gulf region. Since the early 1980s, a rise in conservative Islamic currents has led to a greater emphasis on traditional notions of modesty and gender segregation, with some radical preachers in Saudi Arabia calling for a return to seclusion of women and an end of female employment. Many working women in conservative societies have adopted hijab as a way of coping with a social environment where men are uncomfortable interacting with women in the public space. Some religious women have tried to emulate seclusion practices abandoned by their grandmothers' generation in an effort to affirm traditional religious values in the face of pervasive Westernization.


title: Harem

text: Eunuchs were probably introduced into Islamic civilizations (despite castration being Islamically forbidden) through the influence of Persian and Byzantine imperial courts. The Ottomans employed eunuchs as guardians of the harem. Istanbul's Topkapı Palace housed several hundred eunuchs in the late-sixteenth century. The head eunuch who guarded the entrance of the harem was known as "kızlar ağası." Eunuchs were either Nilotic slaves captured in the Nile vicinity and transported through ports in Upper Egypt, the Sudan and Abyssinia, or European slaves such as Slavs and Franks.


title: Harem

text: According to Encyclopedia of Islam, castration was prohibited in Islamic law "by a sort of tacit consensus" and eunuchs were acquired from Christian and Jewish traders. Al-Muqaddasi identifies a town in Spain where the operation was performed by Jews and the survivors were then sent overseas. Encyclopedia Judaica states that Talmudic law counts castration among mutilations entitling a slave to immediate release so that the ability of Jewish slave traders to supply eunuchs to harems depended on whether they could acquire castrated males.


title: Harem

text: The dark eunuch was held as the embodiment of the sensual tyranny that held sway in the fantasized Ottoman palace, for he had been "clipped" or "completely sheared" to make of him the "ultimate slave" for the supreme ruler. In the Ottoman court, white eunuchs, who were mostly brought from castration centers in Christian Europe and Circassia, were responsible for much of the palace administration, while black eunuchs, who had undergone a more radical form of castration, were the only male slaves employed in the royal harem.


title: Harem

text: The chief black eunuch, or the Kizlar Agha, came to acquire a great deal of power within the Ottoman Empire. He not only managed every aspect of the Harem women's lives but was also responsible for the education and social etiquette of the princes and young women in the Harem. He arranged for all ceremonial events within the Harem including weddings and circumcision parties, and even notified women of death sentences when "accused of crimes or implicated in intrigues of jealousy and corruption."


title: Harem

text: Nineteenth-century travelers accounts tell of being served by black eunuch slaves. The trade was suppressed in the Ottoman Empire beginning in the mid-19th century, and slavery was legally abolished in 1887 or 1888. Late 19th-century slaves in Palestine included enslaved Africans and the sold daughters of poor Palestinian peasants. Both Arabs and Jews owned slaves. Circassians and Abazins from North of the Black Sea may also have been involved in the Ottoman slave trade.


title: Harem

text: The former Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini had six wives, for example, and members of the Nigerian chieftaincy system have historically had as many as three hundred of them. In most cases, African polygamy have however not lived secluded from contact with men, or prevented from moving outside of the harem. In some non-Muslim African cultures, however, the royal wives did live in harems, in the sense of living in seclusion from mixing with men.


title: Harem

text: The royal wives of the Oba of Benin lived in seclusion in the women's quarters of the Royal Palace; they were allowed to receive women visitors, but no male visitors were allowed to enter the harem, and they themselves normally did not leave it and were never seen in public.


title: Harem

text: In Mexico, Aztec ruler Montezuma II, who met Cortés, kept 4,000 concubines; every member of the Aztec nobility was supposed to have had as many consorts as he could afford.


title: Harem

text: There were no support for a harem in Buddhist writings. However, harems have nevertheless been common for Buddhist royal rulers. Normally, the royal Buddhist harems of South East Asia were not as strict as Muslim harems and did allow the women some limited freedom outside of the harem, but the royal harem of Cambodia was particularly severe, and secluded women for fear that they would be unfaithful.


title: Harem

text: The king of Cambodia had a royal harem consisting of hundreds of women. In a custom common for royal rulers in South East Asia, girls were sent to the king's harem by powerful local families all over the country, as tributes and living acknowledgements of their submission, and the king's right to rule. The girls sent to the harem became court ladies and given a number of different tasks. After every coronation, the new king and his main wife and queen would appoint the palace women to different ranks and tasks: after the queen came the four wives called "preah moneang" or "preah snang rank"; then the "preah neang"-wives; the "neak moneang"-wives and the "neak neang"-wives. Other palace women became servants, singers or dancers. The harem women could be seen in public only on a few ceremonial occasions but were otherwise not allowed contact with the outside world and communicated with it through go-betweens in the shape of female old palace women servants called "ak yeay chastum".


title: Harem

text: When Cambodia became a French colony, the French colonial officials viewed an abolition of the royal harem and an emancipation of the harem women as a part of modernization, as well as a way of cutting the costs of the royal court. After the death of king Norodom in April 1904, the French officials took control of the royal finances, reviewed the allowances of each person in the royal palace, and reduced the number of the number of women that the king could support, effectively dissolving the harem. King Sisowath (r. 1904–1927) did keep some of the "No kang chao" (concubines) he had prior to his accession, but no more were added, and the custom of giving daughters as tribute to the royal harem had waned by 1913; after this, the palace women, at least officially, were servants and staffed the royal ballet corps.


title: Harem

text: The harem likely existed in Hindu India before the Islamic conquest. It is for example mentioned in the Ancient stories of Buddha. However, it appears to have become more common and strict after the Islamic conquests.


title: Harem

text: After the Islamic conquest of India and the loss of Hindu rulership, the gender segregation and seclusion of women practiced by the Muslim conquerors were adopted also by Hindus in India, where it became known as "purdah". It is noted that the whole society became more gender segregated after the Muslim conquests onward and men and women more separated; in Bengal, for example, where men and women had previously worked together reaping, men started to do the reaping alone and women referred to the more domestic task of husking. Male Hindu rulers commonly had harems as well as Muslim rulers in India from the Middle ages until the 20th-century. One of the factors why upper-class Hindu men started to seclude women in harems after the Muslim conquest was the practice of the Muslim conquerors to place the wives of defeated Hindus in their harems, and the disruption of the Hindu caste system that followed from the mixing of Hindus and Muslims. The seclusion of Hindu women was thus a way or preserving caste.


title: Harem

text: "Harem" is also the usual English translation of the Chinese language term "hougong" ("hou-kung"; ), in reference to the Imperial Chinese Harem. "Hougong" refers to the large palaces for the Chinese emperor's consorts, concubines, female attendants and eunuchs.


title: Harem

text: The women who lived in an emperor's "hougong" sometimes numbered in the thousands. In 1421, Yongle Emperor ordered 2,800 concubines, servant girls and eunuchs who guarded them to a slow slicing death as the Emperor tried to suppress a sex scandal which threatened to humiliate him.


title: Harem

text: In Muscovite Russia the area of aristocratic houses where women were secluded was known as "terem". However, aristocratic Muscovite women were not entirely secluded from mixing with men: it was a common custom for the lady of the house to greet a male guest with a welcoming drink ritual when he arrived. She was also waited upon male staff as well as female upon retiring to her chamber.


title: Harem

text: A distinct, imaginary vision of the harem emerged in the West starting from the 17th century when Europeans became aware of Muslim harems housing numerous women. In contrast to the medieval European views, which conceived Muslim women as victimized but powerful through their charms and deceit. During the era of European colonialism, the "imaginary harem" came to represent what Orientalist scholars saw as an abased and subjugated status of women in the Islamic civilization. These notions served to cast the West as culturally superior and justify colonial enterprises. Under the influence of "One Thousand and One Nights", the harem was often conceived as a personal brothel, where numerous women lounged in suggestive poses, directing their strong but oppressed sexuality toward a single man in a form of "competitive lust".


title: Harem

text: A centuries-old theme in Western culture is the depiction of European women forcibly taken into Oriental harems as evident, for example, in the Mozart opera "Die Entführung aus dem Serail" ("The Abduction from the Seraglio") concerning the attempt of the hero Belmonte to rescue his beloved Konstanze from the "seraglio"/harem of the Pasha Selim; or in Voltaire's "Candide", in chapter 12 of which the old woman relates her experiences of being sold into harems across the Ottoman Empire.


title: Harem

text: Much of Verdi's opera "Il corsaro" takes place in the harem of the Pasha Seid—where Gulnara, the Pasha's favorite, chafes at life in the harem, and longs for freedom and true love. Eventually, she falls in love with the dashing invading corsair Corrado, kills the Pasha, and escapes with the corsair—only to discover that he loves another woman.


title: Harem

text: "The Lustful Turk" was a Victorian novel published in 1828. The novel focuses on a Western woman who is forced into sexual slavery in the harem of the Dey of Algiers. Similar themes were expressed in A Night in a Moorish Harem, an erotic novel of 1896 when a shipwrecked Western sailor is invited into a harem and engages in "illicit sex" with nine concubines.


title: Harem

text: The 1919 novel "The Sheik", by E. M. Hull, and the 1921 film of the same name are probably the most famous novels from the "desert romance" genre which flourished after the conclusion of the First World War, involving relationships between Western women and Arab sheiks. The novel has received strong criticisms for its central plot element: the idea that rape leads to love, i.e. forced seduction. Other criticisms have been directed at ideas closely related to the central rape plot: that for women, sexual submission is a necessary and natural condition; and that rape is excused by marriage. Historians have also criticized the orientalist portrayal of the Arabs in the novel and the film.


title: Harem

text: "Angelique and the Sultan", part of the Angélique historical novel series by Anne and Serge Golon and later made into a film, has the theme of a 17th Century French noblewoman captured by pirates and taken into the harem of the King of Morocco. Thereupon, she stabs the King with his own dagger when he tries to have sex with her and stages a daring escape.


title: Harem

text: The Russian writer Leonid Solovyov, adapting the Middle Eastern and Central Asian folktales of Nasreddin into his book "Возмутитель спокойствия" (English translations under the varying titles "The Beggar in the Harem: Impudent Adventures in Old Bukhara", 1956, and "The Tale of Hodja Nasreddin: Disturber of the Peace", 2009) added prominently the theme of Nasreddin's beloved being taken into the harem of the Emir of Bukhara and the protagonist's efforts to extract her from there - a theme completely absent from the original folktales.


title: Harem

text: "A Study in Scarlet", the first of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries, applies many of the above conventions to the historically different phenomenon of Mormon polygamous marriage. In the wild days of the early Mormon settlement of Utah, the protagonist's beloved is kidnapped and placed against her will in the "harem" of a Mormon elder, where she dies. Having failed to rescue her, the protagonist is bent on deadly revenge on the kidnappers - which is the background to the mystery solved by Holmes.


title: Harem

text: In H.G. Wells' "The War in the Air", civilization breaks down due to global war. With the world reverting to barbarism, a strongman takes over a town and among other things starts forcing young women into a harem which he is building up. The protagonist must fight and kill him in order to save his girlfriend from being included.


title: Harem

text: Science Fiction writer Poul Anderson included among the adventures of his Galactic Secret Agent Dominic Flandry an episode where one of Flandry's love interests is forcibly taken into the harem of the corrupt planetary governor Harald and must be rescued. The far-future harem described follows the well-established literary depictions of a harem, except that the place of the traditional eunuchs is taken by extraterrestrials.


title: The Human League

text: The Human League are an English synth-pop band formed in Sheffield in 1977. Initially an experimental electronic outfit, the group signed to Virgin Records in 1979 and later attained widespread commercial success with their third album "Dare" in 1981 after restructuring their lineup. The album contained four hit singles, including the UK/US number one hit "Don't You Want Me". The band received the Brit Award for Best British Breakthrough Act in 1982. Further hits followed throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, including "Mirror Man", "(Keep Feeling) Fascination", "The Lebanon", "Human" (a second US No. 1) and "Tell Me When".


title: The Human League

text: The only constant band member since 1977 has been lead singer and songwriter Philip Oakey. Keyboard players Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh both left the band in 1980 to form Heaven 17. Under Oakey's leadership, the Human League then evolved into a commercially successful new pop band, with a new line-up including female vocalists Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley. Since the mid-1990s, the band have essentially been a trio of Oakey, Catherall and Sulley with various sidemen.


title: The Human League

text: Since 1978, the Human League have released 9 studio albums, a remix album, a live album, 6 EPs, 29 singles and 13 compilation albums. They have had 6 Top 20 albums and 13 Top 20 singles in the UK and had sold more than 20 million records worldwide by 2010. As an early techno-pop act that received extensive MTV airplay, they are regarded as one of the leading artists of the 1980s Second British Invasion of the US.


title: The Human League

text: Before adopting the name the Human League, the band briefly had two previous incarnations. In early 1977, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, who had met at youth arts project "Meatwhistle", were both working as computer operators. Their musical collaboration combined pop music (such as glam rock and Tamla Motown) with avant-garde electronic music. With the price of electronic components dropping in the mid-1970s, equipment became more affordable for the average consumer; Ware and Marsh purchased a Korg 700S synthesizer together and learned how to play it. Their musical reputation spread, and they were invited to play at a friend's 21st birthday party. For the party, Ware and Marsh formed themselves into an informal band called The Dead Daughters. Their live highlight was a rendition of the theme of the British TV series "Doctor Who."


title: The Human League

text: After a few more low-key, private performances, Ware and Marsh decided to officially form a band. Joined by their friend Adi Newton and another synthesizer (a Roland System-100), they formed The Future and began to create music in their own rehearsal facility in a disused cutlery workshop in the centre of Sheffield. Although The Future was never signed and did not release material commercially at the time, a collection of demos from this period was released retrospectively on CD in 2002 titled "The Golden Hour of the Future," mixed by Richard X. The association with Adi Newton was short; Newton left The Future and went on to form Clock DVA. Ware at this point decided that he needed a singer rather than another keyboard player. The reason for this was twofold: record companies had been reluctant to sign The Future, as they could not offer any "marketable" songs, and therefore a talented singer was required for any chance of commercial success; also the group only owned two synthesizers and could not afford a third.


title: The Human League

text: Ware and Marsh searched for a vocalist, but their first choice, Glenn Gregory, was unavailable (Gregory eventually became the lead singer of their subsequent band Heaven 17). Ware then decided to invite an old school friend, Philip Oakey, to join the band. Oakey was working as a hospital porter at the time and was known on the Sheffield social scene for his eclectic style of dress. Although he had no musical experience, Ware thought he would be ideal as lead singer for The Future as "he already looked like a pop star". When Ware called on Oakey, he found he was out, so asked him to join the Future by leaving a note stuck to his front door. He accepted the invitation, but early sessions were awkward. Oakey had never sung in front of an audience before, could not play keyboards and only owned a saxophone (which he could barely play). Listening to one of Ware and Marsh's demos, Oakey was inspired to write some lyrics which later became the single "Being Boiled".


title: The Human League

text: With a new line-up, sound, and vocalist, Ware decided that the band needed a new name. It would also allow them to approach record companies again from a different angle. Ware suggested "The Human League", after a group in the science-fiction board game "". In the game, the Human League arose in 2415 A.D. and were a frontier-oriented society that desired more independence from Earth. Oakey and Marsh agreed on the new name, and in early 1978 The Future became The Human League.


title: The Human League

text: Using "Future" material, the Human League released a demo tape to record companies under their new name. The tape contained versions of "Being Boiled", "Toyota City" and "Circus of Death". Ware's friend Paul Bower of Sheffield new-wave band "2.3", who had just recorded a single for Bob Last's Edinburgh-based independent label Fast Product, took their demo to Last and he signed the band.


title: The Human League

text: The band released their first single, "Being Boiled", in June 1978, which became Fast Product's third release. Although a limited release—because it was unique and at odds with everything else on the market—it was picked up on by "NME", who championed the band, although one guest reviewer, John Lydon of Public Image Limited, condemned the band as "trendy hippies".


title: The Human League

text: Boosted by critical praise, on 12 June 1978 the band played their first live gig together at Bar 2 in Sheffield's Psalter Lane Art College (latterly Sheffield Hallam University); a plaque commemorated the event until the Psalter Lane site officially closed on 31 August 2008.


title: The Human League

text: With their reliance on technology and tape machines, the band had been nervous about playing live. After the Psalter Lane performance, they worried that they had appeared static and uninspiring. A friend of Oakey's who had been in the audience, Philip Adrian Wright, who also had an art and photography background, was invited to become the band's Director of Visuals, with a remit to "liven up" the stage performance with slides, film clips and lighting.


title: The Human League

text: In August 1978 the band recorded a session for John Peel, including a re-worked version of "Being Boiled."


title: The Human League

text: The band's live performances began to gain momentum and acclaim, and they were asked to support first The Rezillos (featuring future band member Jo Callis), then Siouxsie and the Banshees, as early as September 1978. In December 1978, David Bowie appeared in the audience and later declared to "NME" that he "had seen the future of pop music".


title: The Human League

text: In April 1979, the Human League released their first EP on the Fast Product label entitled "The Dignity of Labour", which contained four experimental instrumentals. Although the EP barely charted, major record labels began approaching the band in an attempt to lure them away from Fast. In May 1979, the band accepted an offer by Richard Branson's Virgin Records. Because of his label's early support, the band offered Bob Last the position as band manager.


title: The Human League

text: In June 1979, the Human League supported Iggy Pop on his European tour, before settling into recording their first single for Virgin. Despite promising them creative freedom, Virgin demanded sweeping changes to the band's style for their first single, in order to make it more commercial. The label required the band to use conventional instruments and vocals as well as synthesizers. Because the League had accepted a large financial signing advance, Ware was in no position to refuse but insisted that any releases in this style be credited to a pseudonym.


title: The Human League

text: The band's first single under Virgin Records was the disco influenced "I Don't Depend on You", released in July 1979 under the pseudonym "The Men". The single did not chart and had very little in common with the previous work of the Human League. It did, however, feature female vocals by guests Lisa (Liza) Strike and Katie Kissoon, sounding like the yet-to-be-formed future Human League of 1981.


title: The Human League

text: Because the imposed style had not worked, Virgin permitted the band to return to their original style and the band recorded and released their first full studio album "Reproduction" in August 1979. The album and the single "Empire State Human" failed to make an impact on the charts. After these flops, Virgin cancelled the band's December 1979 tour. By this time, the Human League's role as UK electronic pioneers was usurped by Gary Numan, when his single "Are 'Friends' Electric?" became a huge hit in the UK in mid-1979.


title: The Human League

text: In March 1980, the band—which had not yet hit the singles charts—was namechecked in a UK hit song by The Undertones. The track "My Perfect Cousin", which would peak at #9 on the UK charts in May, contained a dig at the perceived "arty" Human League in the lyric:


title: The Human League

text: In April 1980, the band was able to release an EP entitled "Holiday '80," containing the principal track "Marianne" and a cover of "Nightclubbing" (written by Bowie and Iggy Pop). The seven-inch version of "Holiday '80" did well enough to get the band their first TV appearance on BBC TV "Top of the Pops" on 8 May 1980 opening a Peter Powell presented show with Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2". This was to be the only high-profile TV appearance by the Oakey/Marsh/Ware trio on British television, with the sole exception of BBC2's "Mainstream" programme in late 1979, organised and presented by the artist Brian Clarke, an early supporter of the band. A performance in the studio, complete with slideshow, was broadcast of the tracks "The Path of Least Resistance" and the current minor hit "Empire State Human".


title: The Human League

text: In May 1980, the band toured the UK. Philip Adrian Wright was now playing incidental keyboards in addition to his visuals role. It was the last time all four members performed together live. Also in May, the band released their second studio album "Travelogue." More commercial-sounding than "Reproduction," it peaked at No. 16 in the UK, giving the band their first real success. As a result, "Empire State Human" was re-released and the band made their second appearance on "Top of the Pops", even though it only reached No. 62 in the singles chart.


title: The Human League

text: Because of their lack of commercial success, Virgin refused to release further singles from "Travelogue." The Human League was booked to conduct a tour of the UK and Europe from October to November 1980, but the lack of success after two years of hard work and perceived lack of faith by Virgin set about severe internal conflict within the band.


title: The Human League

text: Equipment used in this period were: Roland Jupiter 4, Korg 770, Roland System 100 consisting of 1 × 101 keyboard, 2 × 102 expanders, 2 × 104 sequencers and 103 mixer, plus taped backing for rhythm and drum parts.