"The Secret History" is a very unusual document, and I happen to love it very much, but I said, you know, Genghis Khan allowed nothing to be written about him in his lifetime. People couldn't take notes, even the army was... he, Genghis Khan, ordered the invention of the alphabet for the Mongol people, and it was adapted from the Uyghur people. And so to this day, it's often called "The Uyghur alphabet," the Uyghur alphabet. So he had ordered that, and he'd ordered his children to learn to read and write, and some did, I think most did not, but some did, but one of the things he did with every campaign, even the one at the Merkit, when he rescued Borte, was, he always adopted one orphan, and that child became a full member of the Mongol nation in his household, his mother, Hoelun, would raise the child. So she eventually had a whole household full of boys of different tribes, but they all became very high-ranking members of the government. And one was a Tatar boy who turned out not to be so great as a soldier, but he could read and write, he was the best. And later, eventually he became the supreme judge, appointed by Genghis Khan, of course, and so when Genghis Khan died, he recognized it was important, not just to write down the law, that's all Genghis Khan allowed to be written in blue books. Only the law, nothing about him, or campaigns, or military, anything, but Shigi Qutuqu was his name. Shigi Qutuqu realized that this was gonna be lost, that this is a great historic thing that has happened. So he compiled the work, part of it, I don't know, other people contributed, helped him, just a little bit unclear. The Mongols, they don't specify, they always tell you exactly where something happens. So we know exactly where it happened in Mongolia, you can still go to that spot where he wrote it. That's very important to the Mongols. And we also know it's the year of the mouse, so it was 1228. Genghis Khan had died in '27. So he wrote down, it begins with what we would say are the myths, although I'm not sure they're myths, but the origins of the myths, it begins with the marriage of Gray Blue Wolf with a Tawny Deer. Then some people say, "Well, that's kind of myth. It's totemic." And Mongols mostly, they look at me, I asked them about this, they said, "What? He was named Blue Gray Wolf, she was named Tawny Deer. They married, you know." They're very practical about it, and they think they're real people. Maybe they were or not, I don't know. But so this earlier history is just the genealogy, as it should be, who knows? But it's also in there, because like Bodonchar, they call him Bodonchar the fool, the ancestor of Temujin. He's cast out, because he's just so dumb, the rest of the family doesn't want him, and his father is undetermined who he was, he kidnapped a Uriankhai woman, she has the child, who becomes ancestor, so it's a confusing mess, but I tend to think it's probably accurate. He has a lot of good information, and by the time you get to the life of Temujin, the reason we know these intimate things is because that person, Shigi Qutuqu, he was there, sleeping in the same ger with the people. So we even see in there, he will record instances where Borte sits up in bed, and tells her husband, "Okay, you gotta do this, you gotta do that. You can't do this anymore. We can't think," you know, it's all recorded, right? So it's a very intimate document. And this is one reason that it was secret, it was only for the family. They were trying to uphold Genghis Khan's prohibition against putting out information about the family. So it was secret for a very long time. So much so, the scholars began to think it didn't exist. And then in the 19th century, a Russian academic, who was working in China at the time in Beijing, he discovered a manuscript, which was very, very odd, that people didn't think was anything, because it's all Chinese characters, but it makes no sense in Chinese. But he recognized, but if you read it, pronounce it, it makes sense to a Mongolian. And so it was in this code that had been used to record the information in Chinese.
The sounds, correct. They used Chinese characters to record sounds, which is always problematic in some little areas, you're not exactly sure what the name is or something like, but it was a very unusual document. And then once they found it, they realized that some of the Persian documents had incorporated part of that already, so that was very helpful to me, 'cause some of the Persians I trust very much, and I liked their work very much. And so it was helpful that it already existed, and all of it, some of it existed in Mongolian, other Mongolian sources that were written later. Some of it was just incorporated. So it seemed to be fairly genuine, but it wasn't 100% pure. It had, little things had happened to it along the way. Some things have been snipped here and there, and a few words changed, and like sometimes for Temujin, they call him Genghis Khan, well, he wasn't the Khan then. And sometimes they call him Khan, which is like chief, and other times Han, which is emperor. Well, in Mongol, it is a big difference, you know, so the little things like this that move around, that you're not sure why, but it's a document that I have great faith in. It was not published in English until 1982, but Francis Woodman Cleaves at Harvard University translated it in the '50s. It was ready for publication, and he was having trouble with the publisher, and so it didn't appear for nearly 30 years. It was supposed to be two volumes, the first volume is the translation, the second volume was going to be the notes, and the second volume was lost. To this day, it hasn't been found. I would love to see that. But anyway, now it's in all languages, just about, in the world.
