Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Jack Weatherford [10]
Through no credit or skill of my own, I arrived in Mongolia at a time when it suddenly seemed possible to answer those questions. For the first time in nearly eight centuries, the forbidden zone of his childhood and burial was open at the same time that the coded text of the Secret History had finally been deciphered. No single scholar could complete the task, but working together with a team from different backgrounds, we could begin to find the answers.
As a cultural anthropologist, I worked closely with the archaeologist Dr. Kh. Lkhagvasuren, who had access to much of the information collected by his professor and mentor Dr. Kh. Perlee, the most prominent archaeologist of twentieth-century Mongolia. Gradually, through Lkhagvasuren, I met other researchers who had spent many years working secretly and, almost always, alone on studies they could never write down or publish. Professor O. Purev, a Communist Party member, had used his position as an official researcher of party history to study the shamanist practices of the Mongols and to use that as a guide to interpreting the hidden meanings in the Secret History. Colonel Kh. Shagdar of the Mongolian army took advantage of his station in Moscow to compare the military strategies and victories of Genghis Khan as described in the Secret History with those in Russian military archives. A Mongolian political scientist, D. Bold-Erdene, analyzed the political techniques Genghis Khan used in getting and acquiring power. The most extensive and detailed studies of all had been made by the geographer O. Sukhbaatar, who had covered over a million kilometers across Mongolia in search of the history of Genghis Khan.
Our team began working together. We compared the most important primary and secondary texts from a dozen languages with the accounts in the Secret History. We hunched over maps and debated the precise meaning of different documents and much older analyses. Not surprisingly, we found vast discrepancies and numerous contradictions that were difficult to reconcile. I soon saw that Sukhbaatar was a literalist, an extreme empiricist for whom every statement in the Secret History was true, and he had taken the job of proving it with scientific evidence. But Purev thought nothing in the history should be taken at its literal meaning. According to him, Genghis Khan was the most powerful shaman in history, and the text was a manuscript of mysteries that chronicled, in symbolic ways, his rise to that position. If it could be unlocked, it would again provide a shaman’s blueprint for conquering and controlling the world.
From the beginning of our combined work, it was apparent that we could not sift through the competing ideas and interpretations without finding the places where the events happened. The ultimate test of each text’s veracity would come when it lay spread out on the ground at the place where the events allegedly happened. Books can lie, but places never do. One quick and exhausting overview of the main sites answered some questions but presented many more. We realized that not only did we have to find the right place, but to understand the events there, we had to be there in the right weather conditions. We returned repeatedly to the same places in different seasons of the year. The sites lay scattered across a landscape of thousands of square miles, but the most significant area for our research lay in the mysterious and inaccessible area that had been closed since the time of Genghis Khan’s death. Because of the nomadic life of Genghis Khan, our own work became a peripatetic project, a sort of archaeology of movement rather than just place.
Satellite images showed a Mongolian landscape void of roads yet crisscrossed with thousands of trails leading in seemingly every direction over the steppe, across the Gobi, and through the mountains; yet they all stopped at the edge of the Ikh Khorig, the closed zone. Entry into the homeland of Genghis