Western Mongolia - Mongolia - page 456

History Jack Weatherford
& Dulmaa Enkhchuluun
Over the past 2000 years, there is possibly no other place on the planet that has exported
as much history as Mongolia. Hordes of warriors rode their small but powerful horses
down from the Mongolian Plateau in three dramatic waves - Hun, Turk and, finally, Mon-
gol - to challenge and transform the world. The steppe warriors not only conquered na-
tions, they swept up whole civilisations and reassembled them into intercontinental em-
pires of a scale never before reached by any other people.
Although each of the three waves produced its distinctive influence, the name of Ching-
gis Khaan has achieved a unique spot in the world's imagination. He created the nation in
1206 and named it after his Mongol lineage. Mongols still maintain an intimate tie to him,
but beyond the use of his iconic image and name, there seems to be surprisingly little to
show of him in the nation. Chinggis Khaan did not leave a monument to himself, a temple,
pyramid, palace, castle or canal, and even his grave was left unmarked in the remote area
where he grew up and hunted as a boy. As he himself wished, his body could wither away
so long as his great Mongol nation lived - it is that nation today that is his monument.
Anthropologist Jack Weatherford wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern
World , for which he received the Order of the Polar Star, Mongolia's highest state honour.
The lack of tangible ties to Chinggis Khaan presents both a challenge and an opportun-
ity to visitors; Mongolia does not yield its history promiscuously to every passer-by. Its
story is not told in great books, large stone monuments or bronze statues. A hiker crossing
a hilltop can easily find etchings of deer with baroque configurations of antlers, soaring
falcons or shamans without faces, but how would they know if the image was etched last
year by a bored herder, a century ago by a pious lama or 25,000 years ago by a passing
hunter? A small stone implement could have been abandoned on that same site centuries
ago by a Hun mother preparing a family meal or by a Turk warrior on a raid; the modern
visitor might easily be the first human to clutch it in 3000 years. These artefacts don't
come labelled, classified and explained - the stories of the steppe are incomplete - but
you'll find that Mongolia's history emerges slowly, from the objects, the soil and the land-
scape around you.