Secret History of the Mongols

The work begins with a semi-mythical genealogy of Genghis Khan, born Temüjin. According to legend, a blue-grey wolf and a fallow doe begat the first Mongol, named Batachiqan. Eleven generations after Batachiqan, a widow named Alan Gua was abandoned by her in-laws and left with her two boys Bügünütei and Belgünütei. She then bore three more sons with a supernatural glowing man who came in through the smoke-hole at the top of the ger. The youngest of Alan Gua's three divinely-born children was Bodonchar, founder of the Borjigin. The description of Temüjin's life begins with the kidnapping of his mother, Hoelun, by his father Yesügei. It then covers Temüjin's early life following his birth around 1160; the difficult times after the murder of his father; and the many conflicts against him, wars, and plots before he gains the title of Genghis Khan in 1206. The latter parts of the work deal with the campaigns of conquest of Genghis and his third son Ögedei throughout Eurasia; the text ends with Ögedei's reflections on what he did well and what he did wrong. == Value ==

Scholars of Mongolian history consider the text hugely important for the wealth of information it contains on the ethnography, language, literature and varied aspects of the Mongol culture. Its value as a historically accurate source is more controversial: whereas some experts, such as René Grousset, assess it positively in this regard as well, others, such as Igor de Rachewiltz, believe that the value of the source lies primarily in its "faithful description of Mongol tribal life", In 2004 the Government of Mongolia decreed that a copy of The Secret History of the Mongols covered with golden plates was to be located to the rear part of the Government Palace in Ulaanbaatar. == Scholarship ==

. The rows with large characters represent Mongolian phonetic transcription in Chinese characters, with the right-hand smaller characters representing the glosses The Secret History ends with a colophon stating its original date of completion at Khodoe Aral: The original text corresponding to this date has not survived to the present day. The Year of the Rat in question has been conjectured to be 1228 (Cleaves, Onon), 1229 (Rachewiltz), 1240,). This title was altered to Secret History of the Yuan Dynasty () when it was included as part of the Yongle Encyclopedia. While modern definitive versions are all based on these Ming-era copies, various partial copies of the text have been found in Mongolia and Tibet (Tholing Monastery). The most notable of these is the Altan Tobchi (), an expanded Mongolian Buddhist-influenced narrative written in 1651 and discovered in 1926 that contains two-thirds of the Secret History verbatim. Hanlin Academy text , a Russian monk who was the first to translate the work into a foreign language The Ming-era text was compiled at the Hanlin Academy as an aid to help interpreters learn Mongolian, consisting of three parts: a transcription of the Mongolian pronunciation in Chinese characters; an interlinear gloss in Chinese; and a running, often abridged translation into Chinese. Due to this work's compilation almost a century after the original, it has been noted that the Mongolian transcriptions would likely reflect the pronunciation of the then-Mongols in Beijing, rather than the original Middle Mongol of Genghis Khan's era. This text, divided according to length into 12 parts and 282 sections, was eventually folded into the Yongle Encyclopedia as a 15-part work in 1408. The original 12-part work was also published around 1410 in Beijing. After the fall of the Ming and rise of the Qing dynasty these texts began to be copied and disseminated. The oldest dated full copy is of the 12-part version in 1805 by (1766–1835), kept in the National Library of China. A copy of the 15-part version was made by (1728–1814) around the same time, and this copy is kept by Saint Petersburg State University. A version based on the 1805 text was published in 1908 by Ye Dehui, with subsequent scholarship collating this and other partial copies of the Secret History of the Yuan Dynasty to high accuracy. Altan Tobchi '' After the disintegration of the Mongol Empire, the Mongols retreated to form the Northern Yuan, and a cult of worship formed around the image of Genghis Khan as a supernatural being amidst a decline in literacy. This resulted in works such as the Chinggis Qaan-u Altan Tobchi () containing an apocryphal image of the Khan that replaced the semi-historical narrative of the Secret History. Starting in the late 16th century, Tibetan Buddhism gained a foothold amongst the Mongols, and an increase in literacy resulted in a new Altan Tobchi being created by an unknown author in the 1620s. This Altan Tobchi included the earlier parts of the Secret History and combines it with the earlier apocryphal legend cycle. In 1651, the monk Lubsang-Danzin expanded this narrative (now usually called the Lu Altan Tobchi after the author) and included a full two-thirds of the Secret History. This was discovered in 1926 by from Dornod, as part of the academic and cultural revival in the Mongolian People's Republic. == Translations ==

The Secret History has been translated into over 40 languages. Mongolian , author of the 1947 adaptation into modern Mongolian (1875–1932) was the first native Mongolian scholar to attempt a reconstruction of The Secret History, in 1915–17, though it was published only posthumously in 1996. Tsengde's son Eldengtei and grandson Ardajab continued this work and published a translation in 1980 in Hohhot. The Inner Mongolian authors Altan-Ochir and Bokekeshig independently published reconstructions of the text in Kailu in 1941 as part of the national revival in Mengjiang. The most influential adaptation of the work into modern Mongolian was completed by Tsendiin Damdinsüren in 1947 using Mongolian script, a subsequent version in Mongolian Cyrillic was published in 1957 and is considered a classic of modern Mongolian literature. The archaic language adopted by Cleaves was not satisfying to all and, between 1972 and 1985, Igor de Rachewiltz 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, which was published as a two-volume set in 2003. In 2015 this was republished as an open access version omitting the extensive footnotes of the original. The Daur Mongol scholar Urgunge Onon published the first translation into English by a native Mongolian in 1990, based on a 1980 Inner Mongolian version by Eldengtei. This was republished as The Secret History of the Mongols: The Life and Times of Chinggis Khan in 2001. A further English translation by Christopher P. Atwood appeared in 2023. == References ==