China -- Description and travel; Siberia (Russia) -- Description and travel; Velikaia Siberskaia magistral
That the march of Mongols down the long way of history has been so
little appreciated is the sword’s obeisance to the pen. Save for the
mendacious memoirs of Tamerlane, and a few Ouighour inscriptions in
Central Asia, chronicles there are virtually none. So story has found a
peg for the clipped tails of Alcibiades’ dogs, but scarcely a word for
the deeds of those who won the world from the Yellow Sea to the Baltic,
from the Persian Gulf to the Arctic. Only where the annals of the race
have been written in the blood of the peoples they conquered are the
events to be traced; only by assembling the alien and hostile evidences
of the encircling nations can one shape the outline of Mongolia’s
mighty past. History takes from the Confucian Book of Records the story
of the earliest emigration to the east; from Herodotus the descent upon
Mesopotamia and the struggle with Persia on the west. It gleans from
the Chinese archives the doings of the Hiung-nu--the Huns; from the
documents of the Byzantine Empire the descent on Europe of the same
Mongolian “Scourge of God.” It culls from Arab historiographs the facts
of the southern conquests of Genghis Khan; from Russian monasteries the
tale of the northward march of his lieutenant Batui.
The outlines of Mongolia’s career are patched and gathered from her
frontier lands, yet silhouetted against the far recesses of time they
grow steadily clearer and more colossal.
In the year given by most as 2852 B.C., a tribe, whose earliest
folk-lore and traditions point to an origin in the cradle of the Hordes
near Urga, was pushing seaward down the valley of the Yellow River.
Like the children of Israel, they were in constant conflict with the
“barbarian” aborigines. This tribe became in due time the Chinese
nation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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