The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century.

• Author: Street, John C.
• Position: Book review

The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century. Two volumes. By IGOR DE RACHEWILTZ. Brill's Inner Asian Library, vols. 7.1 and 7.2. Leiden: BRILL, 2004. Pp. cxxvii + 1347. $214.

For those interested in Mongolian language, history, and culture, this is a landmark publication. It is the culmination of thirty-five years of research by a specialist in Sino-Mongolian studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, a scholar of extraordinary abilities and remarkable persistence in pursuing his investigations of an extremely important but problematic text.

The thirteenth-century text known as the Secret History of the Mongols (Mong[gamma]ol-un ni[gamma]uca tob-ciyan, Ch. Yuan ch'ao pi-shih; hereinafter "SH") is the longest early record of the Mongolian language, and quite correctly called by de Rachewiltz (p. xxv) the "most important literary monument of the Mongolian-speaking peoples." In effect a rambling account of the life of Chinggis Qan by some contemporary who knew him well, it is a fascinating work of art, containing epic, poetic, and dramatic passages; the style sometimes rich and dignified, sometimes vigorous and colloquial. The work is, despite a certain amount of Turkic influence, "a true and original Mongol product, unique of its kind[:] for no other nomadic or semi-nomadic people has ever created a literary masterpiece like it, in which epic poetry and narrative are so skillfully and indeed artistically blended with fictional and historical accounts" (p. xxvi).

The earliest and most complete SH text that has come down to us offers special problems, many stemming from the fact that it was written not in the vertical Uighur script which the Mongols began to use in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, but in an elaborate phonological transcription in Chinese characters produced more than a century and a half after the text's initial composition. Each word and suffixal morpheme was given an independent gloss, and each of the 282 "sections" into which the text is arbitrarily divided was provided with a free translation into Chinese. Spacing between transcription characters originally represented a sort of punctuation, but this was largely lost during copying of the text. De Rachewiltz rightly points out (p. lxv) that the Chinese transcription "gives us only the phonetic representation of how the Ming transcribers read the [then-extant] manuscript of the Secret History in Uighur...