The Secret History of the Mongols is the oldest surviving literary work in the Mongolic languages. Written for the Mongol royal family some time after the death of Genghis Khan in 1227, it recounts his life and conquests, and partially the reign of his successor Ögedei Khan.

The author is unknown and wrote in the Middle Mongol language using Mongolian script. The date of the text is uncertain, but the colophon to the text describes the book as having been finished in the Year of the Mouse, on the banks of the Kherlen River at Khodoe Aral, corresponding to an earliest possible figure of 1228.

While the Secret History was preserved in part as the basis for a number of chronicles such as the Jami' al-tawarikh, Shengwu qinzheng lu, and Altan Tobchi, the full Mongolian body only survived from a version made around the 15th century at the start of the Ming dynasty, where the pronunciation was transcribed into Chinese characters as a tool to help interpreters The Secret History is regarded as a piece of classic literature in both Mongolia and the rest of the world, and has been translated into more than 40 languages.

Content

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

thumbnail|right|A copy of The Secret History of the Mongols in the Government building in Ulaanbaatar, pictured

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

thumb|Initial pages of the Secret History published in 1908 by [[Ye Dehui. 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.

Mongolian

thumb|[[Tsendiin Damdinsuren, 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

Footnotes

Citations

Sources

  • The Secret History of the Mongols: full text, history, translations into Russian, English, French, Bulgarian, Spanish and Czech, original transliteration (Mirror)
  • The Secret History of the Yuan Dynasty: full text of the 1908 copy by Ye Dehui
  • Transcription with flexional morpheme boundaries and other additional annotation by John C. Street
  • The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century: Open Access translation by Igor de Rachewiltz