Chronicle
The Secret History of the Mongols
Монголын нууц товчоо
Anonymous · 1240
Synopsis
The chronicle opens with a half-mythical genealogy, in which a grey-blue wolf and a fallow doe found the lineage. It then follows the childhood of Temüjin, son of a family fallen into destitution, from whom eight of his nine horses are stolen and who, in pursuing them, gains his first companion, then his rise among the clans until 1206, when he takes the title of Genghis Khan, and the conquests led by him and by his son Ögedei.
Context
The colophon dates the text to a year of the Rat, which scholars place in 1228, 1229, 1240, 1252 or 1264, and locates it on the banks of the Kherlen. The Mongolian original is lost: the complete text survives only through a transcription in Chinese characters made under the Ming, in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, in twelve parts and two hundred and eighty-two paragraphs. In the seventeenth century, the scholar Lubsandanzan took over two hundred and thirty-three paragraphs of it in his own chronicle. Palladius published a first translation in 1866; Paul Pelliot, Igor de Rachewiltz and, in French, Marie-Dominique Even and Rodica Pop followed.
Who it is for
A dense narrative, rich in genealogies, which is best read in an annotated edition; the French translation runs to 349 pages.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the principal Mongol account of Genghis Khan, translated into more than forty languages; its reuse in the Altan Tobchi is inscribed in the Memory of the World.
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