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The Secret History of the Mongols

© John Walsh

It is often said that history is written by the victors but in the case of the Mongols, this is really not the case. Instead, it is those people who were terrified, despoiled and ruined by the ravening hordes who have passed on to us their views. We therefore have an opinion of the Mongols based primarily on their military ability and their capacity to destroy whole cities full of people and provinces full of agriculture. More recently, there have been some attempts to rehabilitate the people, pointing out the prosperity that came to many of those who had been conquered and showing that nomadic pastoralism was not necessarily a primitive or backwards form of lifestyle compared to sedentary agriculture.

However, the Mongols also have a history of their own. It is the Secret History of the Mongols and it was written most probably either in 1228 or 1240. That was the time of the rule of Ogedei, the grandson of the great Genghis Khan and it contains some descriptions of his rule. Yet most of the work is in the tradition of Mongolian narrative verse, the kind of poetry that was created by bards and singers and used as a form of oral history to help the different tribes to remember their provenance and the cultural practices that kept them together. The Mongolian lifestyle is one of herding and hunting and promotes both individualism and the awareness of the need for assistance from neighbours and families from time to time.

One of Genghis Khan's most enduring and wise decisions was to introduce writing to his people. Prior to his rule, Mongolians had a language but no written script. Yet he realised that to administer a state as large as the Mongolian Empire was to be, written orders, communications and precedents would be essential. The script that was adopted - for there was no need for the Mongols to invent their own when so many conquered peoples could supply something ready made for them - was the Sogdian, which had been prevalent in Central Asia for hundreds of years and was widely understood by merchants travelling the region. It was fairly unusual in that written Mongolian uses vertical rather than horizontal ordering of words. This is a problem for modern Mongolians in using information technology, although there is no intrinsic reason why a vertical script cannot be just as useful as a horizontal one.

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