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The Harem Ağası, head of the black eunuchs of the Ottoman Imperial Harem. A eunuch (/ ˈ juː n ə k / ⓘ YOO-nək) is a male who has been castrated. [1] Throughout history, castration often served a specific social function. [2] The earliest records for intentional castration to produce eunuchs are from the Sumerian city of Lagash in the ...
A cariye or imperial concubine.. The Imperial Harem (Ottoman Turkish: حرم همايون, romanized: Harem-i Hümâyûn) of the Ottoman Empire was the Ottoman sultan's harem – composed of the concubines, wives, servants (both female slaves and eunuchs), female relatives and the sultan's concubines – occupying a secluded portion (seraglio) of the Ottoman imperial household. [1]
The head eunuch who guarded the entrance of the harem was known as kızlar ağası. [181] Eunuchs were either Nilotic slaves captured in the Nile vicinity and transported through ports in Upper Egypt, the Sudan and Abyssinia, [182] or European slaves such as Slavs and Franks. [179]
The harem system was an important part of Ottoman-Egyptian society as well; it attempted to mimic the imperial harem in many ways, including the secrecy of the harem section of the household, where the women were kept hidden away from males who were outside of their own family, the guarding of the women by black eunuchs, and also having the ...
Image of a 17th-century Kizlar Agha, from the Rålamb Book of Costumes. The kizlar agha (Ottoman Turkish: قيزلر اغاسی, Turkish: kızlar ağası, lit. ' "agha of the girls" '), formally the agha of the House of Felicity (Ottoman Turkish: دار السعاده اغاسي, Turkish: Darüssaade Ağası), [1] was the head of the eunuchs who guarded the Ottoman Imperial Harem in ...
Eunuchs was for a long time used in relatively small numbers, exclusively inside harems, but the use of eunuchs expanded significantly when eunuchs started being used also for other offices within service and administration outside of the harem, a use which expanded gradually during the Umayyad Caliphate and had its breakthrough during the ...
Since the eunuchs served both the harem and the emperors, it was believed that they were able to carry valuable information that could either break or create an emperor's status, so out of fear, Chinese bureaucrat-scholars always depicted eunuchs negatively as greedy, evil, cunning, and duplicitous.
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 , as well as inside the harem, and served as a channel between the secluded harem ...