The Secret History of the Mongols is the oldest surviving
Mongolian-languageThe Mongolian language is the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. It has about 5.7 million speakers, including over 90% of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region of China...
literary work. It was written for the
MongolThe Mongol Empire was an empire from the 13th and 14th century spanning from Eastern Europe across Asia. It is the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world...
royal family some time after
Genghis KhanGenghis Khan , ; 1162–1227), born , was the founder, Khan and Khagan of the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous empire in history....
's death in AD 1227, by an
anonymousAnonymity is derived from the Greek word ανωνυμία, meaning "without a name" or "namelessness". In colloquial use, anonymous typically refers to a person, and often means that the personal identity, or personally identifiable information of that person is not known.More strictly, and in reference to...
author and probably originally in the
Uyghur scriptMongolian script , or Hudum Mongolian script , was the first of many writing systems created for the Mongolian language and the most successful until the introduction of Cyrillic to Mongolia in 1946...
, though the surviving texts all derive from
transcriptionTranscription is the conversion into written, typewritten or printed form, of a spoken-language source, as in the proceedings of a court hearing. It can also mean the conversion of a written source into another medium, as by scanning books and making digital versions...
s into
Chinese characterA Chinese character, also known as a Han character , is a logogram used in writing Chinese , Japanese , less frequently Korean , and formerly Vietnamese , and other languages...
s dating from the end of the 14th century.
The
Secret History is regarded as the single significant native
MongolianThe name Mongol specifies one or several ethnic groups, now mainly located in Mongolia, China, and Russia.-Definition:...
account of Genghis Khan. Linguistically, it provides the richest source of pre-classical Mongolian and
Middle MongolianMiddle Mongolian is an ancient Mongolic language formerly spoken in the Mongol Empire and later on in Greater Mongolia during the 13th to 15th century.-Definition and historical precessors:...
. The
Secret History is regarded as a piece of classic literature in both
MongoliaMongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It borders Russia to the north and the People's Republic of China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only 24 miles from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator,...
and the rest of the world.
Content
Like many texts during the period, it contains elements of folklore and poetry, and is not really as factual as some
historiansHistory is the study of the human past, with special attention to the written record. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it often attempts to investigate objectively the patterns...
would have wanted. It is also at times inconsistent. The work sets out with a rather mythical genealogy of
TemüjinGenghis Khan , ; 1162–1227), born , was the founder, Khan and Khagan of the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous empire in history....
's family. The description of Temüjin's life begins with the kidnapping of his mother
HoelunHoelun was the mother of Genghis Khan and the wife of his father Yesugei, the chief of the Kiyad clan.-Early life:Hoelun was born to the Olkhunut tribe. She later was engaged to a member of the Merkit tribe, but was abducted by Yesugei on her way back to the Merkit camp around 1153AD. Yesugei made...
by his father
YesügeiYesügei Baghatur , literally meaning Yesügei Warrior in the Mongolian language, as chief of the Kiyad clan, the father of Temüjin , Khasar, Temüge, Temulun, Khajiun, Bekhter, and Belgutei. Yesügei was the son of Bartan-Baghatur, who was the son of Qabul Khan, who was recognized as a Khagan by the...
. It then covers Temüjin's early life, the difficult times after the murder of his father, the many conflicts, wars, and plots before he gains the title of
Genghis KhanGenghis Khan , ; 1162–1227), born , was the founder, Khan and Khagan of the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous empire in history....
in 1206. The later parts of the work deal with Genghis' and Ögödei's campaigns, and the text ends with Ögödei's reflections on what he did well and what he did wrong. Several passages of the
Secret History appear in slightly different versions in the 17th century Mongolian chronicle
Altan TobchiThe Altan Tobchi is a national chronicle and set of Mongolian judicial laws over historical content in the 17th century. It was written in 1604. Some parts of the 13th century Mongolian The Secret History of the Mongols appear in Altan Tobchi...
.
Rediscovery and translations
The only surviving copies of the work are transcriptions of the original Mongolian text with Chinese characters, accompanied by a (somewhat shorter) in-line glossary and a translation of each section into Chinese. In China, the work had been well-known as a text for teaching Chinese to read and write Mongolian during the
Ming DynastyThe Ming Dynasty , or Empire of the Great Ming , was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history," was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...
and the Chinese translation was used in several historical works, but by the 19th century, copies had become very rare. The first to discover the Secret History for the west and offer a translation from the Chinese glossary was the
RussiaRussia , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia . It is a semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n
sinologistSinology in general use is the study of China and things related to China, but, especially in the American academic context, refers more strictly to the study of classical language and literature, and the philological approach...
Palladiy Kafarov. The first translations from the reconstructed Mongolian text were done by the German sinologist Erich Haenisch (edition of the reconstructed original text: 1937; of the translation: 1941, second edition 1948) and
Paul PelliotPaul Pelliot was a French sinologist and explorer of Central Asia. Initially intending to enter the foreign service, Pelliot took up the study of Chinese and became a pupil of Sylvain Lévi and Édouard Chavannes....
(ed. 1949).
Arthur WaleyArthur David Waley CH, CBE was a noted English Orientalist and Sinologist.-Life:Waley was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, as Arthur David Schloss, son of the economist David Frederick Schloss. Of Jewish heritage, he changed his surname to his paternal grandmother's maiden name, Waley, in...
published a partial translation of the
Secret History, but the first full translation into English was Francis Woodman Cleaves,
The Secret History of the Mongols: For the First Time Done into English out of the Original Tongue and Provided with an Exegetical Commentary, 1. (Harvard-Yenching Institute) Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. The archaic language adopted by Cleaves was not satisfying to all, and between 1971 and 1985,
Igor de RachewiltzIgor de Rachewiltz is a prominent Mongolist working in Australia. He was born in Rome in 1929. De Rachewiltz family was of Polish noble roots. His grandmother was a Tatar from Kazan in eastern Russia who claimed lineage from the Golden Horde...
published a fresh translation in eleven volumes of the series
Papers on Far Eastern History accompanied by extensive footnotes commenting not only on the translation but also various aspects of Mongolian culture. (Brill released
Igor de RachewiltzIgor de Rachewiltz is a prominent Mongolist working in Australia. He was born in Rome in 1929. De Rachewiltz family was of Polish noble roots. His grandmother was a Tatar from Kazan in eastern Russia who claimed lineage from the Golden Horde...
' edition as a two-volume set in 2003.)
External links
- The Secret History of the Mongols: full text, history, translations into Russian, English, French, Bulgarian, Spanish and Czech, original transliteration
- The Secret History of the Mongols: partial text
- Timothy May: Extensive review of the publication of Rachewiltz's translation and notes September 2004
- Lingua Mongolia: first 21 paragraphs of the Secret History in Chinese transcription, Pinyin, and Traditional Mongolian script
- Modern Mongolian Version (and audio files) -ELibrary.MN
- Secret History Wiki Public Domain Translation Project
- "The Secret History of the Mongols," a comic strip by Otgonbayar Ershuu. Text to historical sources. Translation from Mongolian to German: Renate Bauwe Mongolian comic book, Mongolian painting, miniature