The Secret History of the Mongols

"The Secret History of the Mongols gets its name because it’s thought that it was only supposed to be read by Mongols, really only by the royal family. It is a book that may have started to be written shortly after Chinggis Khan’s death. We don’t know who the author is. There’s been all sorts of speculation. For a long time it was thought to be by Shiqi Qutuqu, who was an adopted brother, or adopted son—depending on how you interpret the relationship—of Chinggis Khan. There’s also been a suggestion that it could have been written by Ögödei, who was the second ruler of the Empire and the son of Chinggis Khan. And I’ve even seen a suggestion that it might have been a woman within the Mongol court—who, we don’t know. The authorship of The Secret History remains a bit of a mystery, which is also part of the allure because, depending on who it might be, you can ask why they are emphasising this or that. It disappeared for a while. We know of it today because during the Ming dynasty it was discovered and it was used to train interpreters and translators in Mongolian. One of the initial texts we had of it was actually in Chinese, but with the Chinese phonemes, or the Chinese characters being used for phonemes, to get the syllables to recreate the work into Mongolian. But we’ve also found it in other, later Mongol chronicles, where they just took it and inserted it. So, we know when it existed and we have references to it in the sources, but we don’t have an original copy. It’s not like the many versions of Marco Polo’s Travels or something along those lines, where there are 20 different manuscripts. What’s great about The Secret History of the Mongols is that it has information that is not in other sources. It has a lot of details about the life of Chinggis Khan as a child. What we get from it is the good, the bad and the ugly. We find out that he was afraid of dogs. If you’ve ever met a Mongolian dog, and you’re a stranger, you know why he might be afraid of them as a nine-year-old kid. We find out that he murdered his stepbrother. The Secret History tells us all about it and why it was done. For someone who’s really interested in military history, the other thing about it is the discussion of the battles, his tactics and so forth. We get the sense of the book’s intended audience through the way they describe things and the terms they use. They never define these terms because the audience would automatically have known what is meant by them. In many ways it’s also a frustrating book because some of the dates don’t work out correctly, there is some muddling of events that takes some time to unravel, but it’s also fascinating because this is how the Mongols viewed the rise of their empire. It’s an official document, but yet, also inaccessible to the public and ‘secret’. There have been many translations, not only in English, but other languages. In English, there are three primary ones. The first one was by Francis Cleaves, a scholar at Harvard. He made the odd choice of translating it into King James English because he felt that captured its almost scriptural character. However, that also makes it difficult to read for many people. Paul Kahn then took the Cleaves version and made it more accessible. However, the fault with that one was that he got rid of the ‘begats’—’someone begat someone, who begat…’ and so on. This simplifies the text, but I’m very interested in how these lineages develop. So that new version is nice but, at the same time, kind of frustrating. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there is also one by a former Russian prince, Igor de Rachewiltz, whose family left the Soviet Union when it was forming. He ended up in Australia and translated it in a series of chapters for the Papers in Far Eastern History , an academic journal and the predecessor to East Asian History . Eventually he went back and re-examined his translation and published it with Brill, which is a very fine academic publisher, but very expensive. It came out in two volumes back in 2004 and then, a few years later, he put out a third volume, which had the corrections to his translation and updates to the footnotes. In the first volume, about half or maybe a third of it is the actual translation. The second volume is all notes and indexes and things like that. The third volume consists of corrections, often going back to the footnotes, updating them on new things he’s learned. For someone like me, a scholar of the Mongol Empire, the translation notes are brilliant. They’re essential. You can’t do without this book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But it’s terribly expensive. It’s not something people are just going to order off the shelves of a bookstore—the price is just prohibitive. However, a few years ago, the late John Street, a scholar at the University of Madison, who specialized in Mongolian language and linguistics, went through and made an abridged edition of it, which is an ebook that can be downloaded through the University of Washington Press, with their CEDAR off-print . The text is all there but he eliminated the academic framework with the notes. He kept notes to a minimum as they are primarily useful to scholars. So that is the version I typically use in the classroom. You also get Igor de Rachewiltz’s excellent translation, which is very accessible. There’s also a third translation I want to mention by Urgunge Onan, who was a Mongolian who came over to the West in the mid-twentieth century. He ended up at the University of Leeds and then, eventually, at Cambridge. His translation is also very good and very accessible, although a little bit skimpier on the notes. It’s a bit less expensive that Rachewiltz’s. There are some differences of interpretation between the translations but, if you read any of them, you’ll get the same basic understanding. The book is a cross between a history, a chronicle and an epic. There are sections of verse and then narrative. It was meant for a very specific audience—the royal family and the elites of the Mongol Empire. I don’t know if your average Mongol, if they were literate, had access to it. It tells us the story of Chinggis Khan. So, it is a memorial to his life. There is a chapter that starts dealing with the reign of his successor, Ögödei, at the very end. In part, it is a handbook on how you should rule and how you should do things. There are many examples of what is right and what is wrong, how to treat people, how not to treat people and what you should and shouldn’t do. And, in many ways, Chinggis Khan is the exemplar. After he dies he becomes the model of everything. He is the founding father of the Mongol Empire. Just as many Americans venerate the Founding Fathers of this country, perhaps in an exaggerated way, we get the same thing with Chinggis Khan. He is the role model for everyone. And, often, in other sources, when someone is being accused of mismanagement or improper behavior, they are said to have veered from the the yasa and yosun of Chinggis Khan, the yasa being the laws, the yosun being the custom or traditions. So, it served all sorts of purposes and it’s a magnificent book. You can’t really understand the Mongols without it because it gives you their perspective and also, by reading it, we understand what was important to them . Yes. He was the epitome of leadership. Today we have this very weird popular view of Chinggis Khan. You often hear people being described as being ‘to the right of Chinggis Khan’. It doesn’t work. He was a social revolutionary. He alienated many aristocrats because he wanted a more equitable distribution of treasure and loot after victories. He reorganized society to make one single people, the Mongols. Of course, a lot of this was done with a lot of screaming and kicking—don’t get me wrong. Many of the people he favoured were former servants and slaves. They rose to high positions and eventually, because he favored them so much, he often extended these benefits to their children and grandchildren, so that they eventually became a new aristocracy. “You often hear people being described as being ‘to the right of Chinggis Khan’. It doesn’t work. He was a social revolutionary” Using modern terms or morals to try to describe him is unhelpful. He was a man of the 13th century and he behaved as a man of the 13th century, as a Mongol of the 13th century. But he was also a bit of a revolutionary, not only in society and through his legal system, but also in warfare. He was, simply, a remarkable man, of the kind that doesn’t come around too often. Certainly there were negatives because you don’t establish an empire like that without killing a lot of people. On the other hand, a lot of people were being killed. The last couple of Mongol khans had been executed by being nailed to wooden donkeys by the emperor of the Jin dynasty. It was a pretty gruesome way to die. No."