Here's a man who needs no introduction: Genghis Khan, Mongolian warlord and conqueror of pretty much everyone. He's got a bad rap today--John Kerry famously cited Genghis as the role model for war crimes--but his achievement really was phenomenal. To tell a very long story briefly, he whipped the nomadic Mongol tribes into an army that no conventional military of the time could beat. The Mongols weren't very sophisticated technologically, but they could move fast, strike hard, and live off the land, like a Blitzkrieg of Boy Scouts. Amazing stuff, and well worth researching.
Anyway, you'd think that a fellow who built an empire would want to be memorialized after his death--you know, build a pyramid or something. But that's not how Genghis rolled. Instead, he went the stealth route:
Genghis Khan asked to be buried without markings, according to the customs of his tribe. After he died, his body was returned to Mongolia and presumably to his birthplace in Khentii Aimag, where many assume he is buried somewhere close to the Onon River and the Burkhan Khaldun mountain (part of the Kentii mountain range). According to legend, the funeral escort killed anyone and anything across their path to conceal where he was finally buried. [...] Folklore says that a river was diverted over his grave to make it impossible to find [...]. Other tales state that his grave was stampeded over by many horses, over which trees were then planted, and the permafrost also did its part in hiding the burial site.
It may seem strange at first, but really this is more dramatic than a pyramid: the Khan is buried in a legend, and no amount of stone piled into precise triangles can rival the imagined splendor of a lost tomb.
Except there's a problem with lost tombs: people try to find it, and later civilizations invent technologies that make the treasure hunt easier: "Finding Hidden Tomb Of Genghis Khan Using Non-Invasive Technologies". Gone are the days when adventurous archaeologists rely on dim rumor and legends, as Schliemann did when he hunted for Troy using Homer's Iliad. Instead, these hunters of the Khan's tomb are using satellite photography to find promising sites. Then it gets even more high-tech:
Except there's a problem with lost tombs: people try to find it, and later civilizations invent technologies that make the treasure hunt easier: "Finding Hidden Tomb Of Genghis Khan Using Non-Invasive Technologies". Gone are the days when adventurous archaeologists rely on dim rumor and legends, as Schliemann did when he hunted for Troy using Homer's Iliad. Instead, these hunters of the Khan's tomb are using satellite photography to find promising sites. Then it gets even more high-tech:
"Once we've narrowed down this region in Mongolia to a certain area," Lin continues, "we'll use techniques such as ground penetrating radar, electromagnetic induction and magnetometry to produce non-destructive, non-invasive surveys. We'll then work with people in UCSD's electrical engineering department to develop visual algorithms that will allow us to create a high-resolution, 3-D representation of the site."
Yeah, what he said.
I find this depressing, actually. Yes, discovery is always interesting, but these days the techological advantages take a lot of the glamor out of it: it's like shooting down dragons with surface-to-air missiles. (Kaiju films and anticlimax notwithstanding, I believe that would work.) There's also the cheery confidence that accompanies these sorts of announcements: the smugness of science for popular consumption, that behaves as if it's figured out everything of real importance, and now is just trimming out the corners. Alas, we laypersons often buy that labcoated swagger, and so yawn when new discoveries are proclaimed.
It was not always so. Once discovery went hand-in-hand with adventure, and science was actually exciting, not merely interesting. I refer, of course, to the era of the scientific boy adventurer. Tom Swift was the first, I believe, a venerable Stratemeyer Syndicate character, but he had many successors, notably Danny Dunn (loved those!) and Jonny Quest. These dashing young inventors made science of all kinds--chemistry, biology, archaeology, electronics, engineering--seem brimming with exciting possibilities. Not that it isn't, but the SBAs never spent tedious hours in a lab, or methodically administering a controlled double-blind experiment. The SBAs got done with the real science as quickly as possible, and got on with the adventuring. ("Of course, the antigravity paint is safe! Let's paint ourselves with it and fly!")
This excursus on scientific boy adventurers is not, in fact, a rabbit trail. There is a connection back to the tomb of Genghis Khan. That connection may be found in a book I read years ago and never forgot, though I forgot the main character's name. I found it at my grandmother's lakehouse, tucked into one of the low shelves in her livingroom. It was bound like a Hardy Boys novel, but it wasn't Frank or Joe Hardy; nonetheless, the cover and title were interesting enough to capture my attention, and I read it through that afternoon. Then, years past. I don't know where the book is now: my grandmother died my senior year of high school, and her belongings divided amongst the family, and though I have many of her books, I don't have that one. But even though the name of the hero slipped away, I always remembered the plot: the search for a hidden valley in the Himalayas, which revealed a forgotten colony of Mongols, guarding the massive sepulcher of Genghis Khan. (The climax involved fireworks and a theatrical "resurrection" of the Khan, but the details escape me.) So, when I read the article cited above, I recalled that old book and tried to find it again. I was unable to do so for eight months. But now, thanks to Google and Wikipedia, here's the cover that attracted my attention all those years ago:
I find this depressing, actually. Yes, discovery is always interesting, but these days the techological advantages take a lot of the glamor out of it: it's like shooting down dragons with surface-to-air missiles. (Kaiju films and anticlimax notwithstanding, I believe that would work.) There's also the cheery confidence that accompanies these sorts of announcements: the smugness of science for popular consumption, that behaves as if it's figured out everything of real importance, and now is just trimming out the corners. Alas, we laypersons often buy that labcoated swagger, and so yawn when new discoveries are proclaimed.
It was not always so. Once discovery went hand-in-hand with adventure, and science was actually exciting, not merely interesting. I refer, of course, to the era of the scientific boy adventurer. Tom Swift was the first, I believe, a venerable Stratemeyer Syndicate character, but he had many successors, notably Danny Dunn (loved those!) and Jonny Quest. These dashing young inventors made science of all kinds--chemistry, biology, archaeology, electronics, engineering--seem brimming with exciting possibilities. Not that it isn't, but the SBAs never spent tedious hours in a lab, or methodically administering a controlled double-blind experiment. The SBAs got done with the real science as quickly as possible, and got on with the adventuring. ("Of course, the antigravity paint is safe! Let's paint ourselves with it and fly!")
This excursus on scientific boy adventurers is not, in fact, a rabbit trail. There is a connection back to the tomb of Genghis Khan. That connection may be found in a book I read years ago and never forgot, though I forgot the main character's name. I found it at my grandmother's lakehouse, tucked into one of the low shelves in her livingroom. It was bound like a Hardy Boys novel, but it wasn't Frank or Joe Hardy; nonetheless, the cover and title were interesting enough to capture my attention, and I read it through that afternoon. Then, years past. I don't know where the book is now: my grandmother died my senior year of high school, and her belongings divided amongst the family, and though I have many of her books, I don't have that one. But even though the name of the hero slipped away, I always remembered the plot: the search for a hidden valley in the Himalayas, which revealed a forgotten colony of Mongols, guarding the massive sepulcher of Genghis Khan. (The climax involved fireworks and a theatrical "resurrection" of the Khan, but the details escape me.) So, when I read the article cited above, I recalled that old book and tried to find it again. I was unable to do so for eight months. But now, thanks to Google and Wikipedia, here's the cover that attracted my attention all those years ago:
(This is how one finds Genghis Khan's Tomb.)
Published in 1947, The Lost City was the second of the Rick Brant series of scientific adventure novels. There were 23 Rick Brant novels published between 1947 and 1968, with a 24th published in a limited edition, "like one untimely born." As forgotten as the Rick Brant series may be today, its influence may be felt in one detail of the Jonny Quest cartoons, the Indian boy, Hadji: Rick had his own Hindu sidekick, a youth named Chahda.
So, that, dear reader, is my adventure of Genghis Khan's tomb: a minor quest of discovery, I grant, but meaningful to me, and hopefully diverting and entertaining for you.
1 comment:
KHAAAAAAAN!!!!!
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