structural:scholar_edition
The Secret History of the Mongols is the oldest surviving literary work in the Mongolian language. Written for the Mongol royal family some time after the death of Genghis Khan in 1227, it recounts his life and conquests, and partially the reign of his successor Ögedei Khan. The author is unknown and wrote in the Middle Mongol language using Mongolian script. The date of the text is uncertain, as the colophon to the text describes the book as having been finished in the Year of the Mouse, on the banks of the Kherlen River at Khodoe Aral, corresponding to an earliest possible figure of 1228. While the Secret History was preserved in part as the basis for a number of chronicles such as the Jami' al-tawarikh, Shengwu qinzheng lu, and Altan Tobchi, the full Mongolian body only survived from a version made around the 1400s at the start of the Ming dynasty, where the pronunciation was transcribed into Chinese characters as a tool to help interpreters under the title The Secret History of the Yuan Dynasty. About two-thirds of the Secret History also appear in slightly different versions in the 17th-century Mongolian chronicle Altan Tobchi by Lubsang-Danzin. The Secret History is regarded as the single most significant native Mongolian account of Genghis Khan. Linguistically, it provides the richest source of pre-Classical Mongol and Middle Mongol. The Secret History is regarded as a piece of classic literature in both Mongolia and the rest of the world, and has been translated into more than 40 languages.