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DURING the seven decades of Communist rule in Mongolia, Genghis Khan's name could scarcely be spoken in his own homeland, because the government then saw an interest in the Mongols past as a threat to its power. In Mongolia today, vodka, cigarettes, and a chocolate bar carry his name, and the two most popular brands of beer are Genghis and Khan. Genghis's portrait adorns Mongolian postage stamps, paper money, and World Wide Web sites. Young people on horseback sing songs about him; Mongolia's best rock band bears his name.
Yet Genghis Khan is still a missing person in Mongolian history. Only now is the study of Mongol history and culture emerging, after the democratic revolution of 1990 and the subsequent withdrawal of Soviet troops.
Through the auspices of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and the newly formed Genghis Khan Institute, I am working with a team of Mongolian scholars to search for information about Genghis's life. My primary collaborator is the archaeologist Lhagva, who is a descendant of one of Genghis Khan's bodyguards and who, like most Mongolians, uses only one name. Combining the perspectives of several disciplines, our team is comparing documents about Genghis written in many Asian and European languages, and conducting fieldwork at the sites associated with his life eight centuries ago. We hope to reconstruct the history of the Mongol Empire and to assess its continuing influence-not only on Mongolia, but also on the surrounding countries.
Arguably the most famous Asian of the last 2,000 years, Genghis Khan created an empire that was more than twice the size of any other conqueror's in history, and that endured for more than a century and a half after his death. Almost everything we know about him came from the descendants of people he conquered, and they have seen him as merely one of many bloodthirsty savages-such as Attila the Hun and Tamerlane-who periodically erupted from the steppes like some evil force of nature to ravage the superior civilizations around them.
In fact, as our research shows, he left behind much more than ruined buildings and bleached bones. He changed the course of history, leaving an indelible mark on China, Russia, India, the Middle Eastin fact, all of the countries from Vietnam to Hungary,...