. . . In Proximity with the Politics of the Altered Body
Sun Yaoting died in 1996, which is uncomfortably recent for the end of a 3,500‑year institution. He lived long enough to see colour television, the internet, and the first John Wick movie’s spiritual ancestors—those sleek, choreographed revenge fantasies where loyalty is absolute and betrayal is terminal. Sun Yaoting, last eunuch of the Qing court, would have understood that logic perfectly. His life was the final flicker of a system built on the same premise: if you want someone truly loyal, you take away everything else they could be loyal to.
The modern world finally killed the eunuch. It wasn't morality, nor enlightenment, but the collapse of the palace as a political machine. When the Forbidden City expelled its remaining eunuchs in 1924, it wasn’t a humanitarian gesture. It was a regime change. The Ottomans followed suit: the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 gutted palace power, and by the time the Republic of Turkey arrived in 1923, the Chief Black Eunuch was a ceremonial relic, photographed in ornate robes like a museum piece who hadn’t yet realized he’d been archived.
Those late‑era images—postcards of black eunuchs in tiled Ottoman corridors, group photos with veiled women in garden courtyards—feel like the last frames of a long franchise. You can almost hear the director calling cut. The institution was being retired.
But to understand why it lasted so long, you have to walk backward.
In the 19th century, the Ottoman system was already fraying. Tanzimat reforms stripped waqf control, slavery was curtailed, and the palace’s administrative arteries were rerouted. Yet the visual culture of the era captures a world where proximity to power was everything.
- Vanmour’s paintings of towering eunuchs in conical turbans,
- engravings of harem guardians in bright caftans
These men weren’t comic relief, court jesters, or clowns of any sort. They were gatekeepers, fixers, and sometimes kingmakers. If the Ottoman court had a Continental Hotel, the Kızlar Ağası was its Winston (last John Wick allusion).
Before the Ottomans, the Mamluks used eunuchs as trainers, overseers, and palace administrators. The Byzantines refined them into a bureaucratic class so indispensable that emperors trusted them with armies, treasuries, and succession politics. The Islamic courts that followed—Abbasid, Mamluk, Ottoman—didn’t invent the system; they inherited proven technology.
But the real high‑definition visuals of the Eunuch Backstage come from Persia.
In the Achaemenid world, eunuchs appear in the Persepolis reliefs as beardless attendants standing just behind the king—close enough to hear secrets, far enough to pose no dynastic threat. Scholars point to figures holding towels, fly‑whisks, or cups, smooth‑faced and calm amid the carved procession. Bagoas, the most famous of them, was a political operator who helped install and remove kings with the same efficiency as a Wick‑style gun merchant swapping out weapons mid‑fight. Later Persian courts, from the Sasanians to the Qajars, kept the model alive. Agha Mohammad Khan, founder of the Qajar dynasty, was himself a eunuch—proof that the system could produce rulers, not just servants.
Walk further back and the pattern sharpens.
Rome adopted eunuchs from the East; Byzantium perfected them. But the blueprint was older still. In the Neo‑Assyrian Empire, the ša rēši—literally “the one of the head”—appears in palace reliefs as a beardless figure beside the king, often holding a towel or fan. These weren’t timid attendants. Some,
- commanded armies,
- governed provinces, and
- negotiated treaties.
The earliest administrative records from Sumerian Lagash mention intentional castration for court service. The logic was brutally simple: remove the possibility of divided loyalty, and you create a human instrument whose entire identity is tied to the palace.
That’s the through‑line. Across empires, languages, religions, and continents, eunuchs thrived wherever rulers needed someone close enough to trust but structurally incapable of founding a rival dynasty. They were the original “underworld professionals”—the ones who could cross thresholds others couldn’t, who lived in the liminal spaces between public authority and private power. Ancient courts had their beardless attendants with fly‑whisks and scrolls.
And then modernity arrived with its paperwork, its nationalism, its bureaucratic transparency, and its suspicion of palace shadows. The architecture that sustained eunuchs—harems, inner courts, hereditary autocracies—collapsed. The Liminal Spaces became occupied by Deputy Ministers, Lawyers, Priests. Once the palace walls fell, the men who lived in their shadow had nowhere left to stand.
Sun Yaoting’s death didn’t just close a chapter. It closed a genre. The eunuch was never an oddity; he was a political solution. And when the world no longer needed that solution, the role vanished—not with a bang, but with a quiet, final fade‑out.
A Parallel System of Power: How Israel Managed Its Courts Without Eunuchs
Across the ancient Near East, eunuchs formed a recognizable administrative class, particularly in Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian courts. Their altered status made them eligible for roles that required proximity to the ruler, access to sensitive information, and a degree of loyalty that empires believed could be engineered. In these systems, the eunuch was not an anomaly but an institutional solution.
Israel did not adopt this model. Early legal codes, including Deuteronomy, restricted castrated men from full participation in the assembly, shaping the composition of the royal court for centuries. Instead of relying on surgically secured loyalty, Israelite governance leaned on hereditary officials, priestly authority, and the oversight of prophets who were often more disruptive than stabilizing. It was a system that produced fewer palace coups but significantly more public denunciations.
Foreign eunuchs did appear in Jerusalem, particularly during periods of Assyrian and Babylonian influence. Texts from the late monarchy reference non-Israelite eunuchs operating in or around the Judean palace, reflecting the region’s integration into larger imperial networks. Their presence was administrative rather than ideological; they were there because the empires that dominated the region used them, not because Judean society had adopted the practice.
After the Babylonian exile, Judean elites encountered eunuch-administered bureaucracies more directly. The Babylonian and Persian courts relied heavily on such officials, and Judean administrators served under them. Despite this exposure, there is no evidence that Jewish communities incorporated castration into their own political structures. The practice remained outside the boundaries of Jewish law and cultural norms.
By the Second Temple period, eunuchs were common in Hellenistic and Roman political systems, particularly in royal households and provincial administrations. Judea, however, continued to staff its institutions through priestly families, local councils, and appointed governors. The administrative record shows continuity rather than adaptation: a society surrounded by eunuch-based bureaucracies but not reshaped by them.
The contrast highlights two distinct approaches to managing proximity to power. Empires sought predictability through physical alteration; Israel sought it through legal and religious frameworks. Both systems produced loyal officials and internal crises, though only one required a pre-employment medical procedure. Observers at the time left no commentary on which method was more efficient, but the archaeological record suggests that neither eliminated political instability.
