"The Date of the Secret History of the Mongols Reconsidered," by Christopher Atwood

Reviewed by: "The Date of the Secret History of the Mongols Reconsidered," by Christopher Atwood Michal Biran Christopher Atwood, "The Date of the Secret History of the Mongols Reconsidered," JSYS 37, 2007: 1–48. The Secret History of the Mongols is the only extant native thirteenth-century source for the rise of Mongol Empire and the first known literary work compiled in Mongolian. This epic chronicle is of unique importance for the study of the early Mongol Empire, since most of what we know of the Mongols was penned by the Mongols' subjects or neighbors, not by the Mongols themselves. The full text, detailing the origins of Chinggis Khan (r. 1206–1227), his rise to power and his reign, as well as that of his son and heir Ögödei (r. 1229–1241), survives mainly in a Mongolian transcription to Chinese with interlineal Chinese translation, which was used by the Ming court's bureau of translators for studying Mongolian. It ends with a colophon that ascribes the writing to the seventh month of a mouse year during a Great Assembly (Yeke quriltai; 大會), without giving a more specific date. The exact dating of this anonymous chronicle preoccupied scholars since the nineteenth century at least, with several years (1228, 1240, 1252, 1264, etc.) suggested as possible dates of compilation. Atwood's article is a bold and comprehensive attempt to reopen this multilayered question. [End Page 227] Atwood argued for 1252, a date which explains both the pro-Toluid bias of the work, its homogeneity and its anachronisms, which appear even in its first chapters. The main argument against this dating is that there was no attested assembly, let alone a Great Assembly during this year, though Atwood suggests that in a year in which major decisions such as sending Qubilai to north China and Hülegü to the Middle East took place, convening a qurlitai certainly makes sense. Atwood's complex argument (to which this introduction cannot do justice) is based on a penetrating reading of the text as well as comparisons to its partial citations in later (seventeenth-century and after) Mongolian chronicles, notably the Altan Tobchi ("The Golden Book"), as well as other contemporary sources—Chinese and Persian—some of them based on Mongol sources different from The Secret History that did not survive. It manifests Atwood's virtuosic command of Mongolian and Chinese sources and his awareness of the role of Persian sources. Atwood's elegant solution was not unanimously accepted. Notably, the master-translator of the Secret History into English, the late Igor de Rachewiltz (1929–2016) responded in a long article of his own, in which he agreed with Atwood that the oeuvre had been compiled by one hand and mostly tampered with before Qubilai's reign, but gentlemanly suggests that 1228, or actually 1229, was the compilation date of the first ten chapters. De Rachewiltz drew attention to the fact—noticed only after Atwood's challenge—that The Secret History locates Ögödei's coronation in a mouse year (1228), instead of a rooster year (1229). Hence the Great Assembly of the colophon should have been Ögödei's enthronement quriltai. The later chapters describing Ögödei's reign, which the Ming authors defined as an appendix, were probably added in 1240, as they fail to mention Ögödei's death; the text as a whole was tampered with later by pro-Toluid hands.1 This explanation also has its problems (e.g. leaving a few embedded anachronisms in the first chapters unexplained). The question, as Atwood himself notes, is likely to remain open, yet this JSYS article certainly took its resolution quite a few steps forward. [End Page 228] Michal Biran The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Footnotes 1. Igor de Rachewiltz, "The Dating of the Secret History of the Mongols—A Re-interpretation," Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher (Neue Folge) 22 (2008): 150–84; Igor de Rachewiltz, comp. The Secret History of the Mongols, Vol. 3: Supplement (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1–2. Copyright © 2021 Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies

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