The Secret History of the Mongols and Its Chinese Transmission

Record summary

The Secret History of the Mongols survives principally through a Chinese transcription and translation of Mongolian, accompanied by Chinese glosses. Its accounts of sacred ancestry, heaven, shamanic authority and imperial legitimacy make it relevant to comparisons between historiography, epic tradition and religious narrative. The surviving form is not a transparent original: reconstruction depends on Chinese characters, later editions and philological interpretation. Modern scholarship also disputes how much of the work should be read as oral epic, court history or ideologically shaped dynastic narrative.