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The Mongolsby Jeremiah Curtin
Combined Books, Pennsylvania (Originally published 1908 by Little Brown), republished in 1996, 426pp, $14.95
The classic history of the Mongol tribes by one of the world's great scholars.
EXCERPT
rom an obscure and uncertain beginning the word Mongol has gone on
increasing in significance and spreading geographically during more than ten
centuries until it has filled the whole earth with its presence. From the time
when men used it at first until our day this word has been known in three
senses especially. In the first sense it refers to some small groups of
hunters and herdsmen living north of the great Gobi Desert; in the second it
denotes certain peoples in Asia and Eastern Europe; in the third and most
recent, a worldwide extension has been given it. In this third and the broad
sense of the word Mongol has been made to include in one category all
yellow skinned nations, or peoples, including those too with a
reddish-brown, or dark tinge in the yellow, having also straight hair, always
black, and dark eyes of various degrees of intensity. In this sense the word
Mongol co-ordinates vast numbers of people, immense groups of men who
are like one another in some traits, and widely dissimilar in others. It
embraces the Chinese, the Coreans, the Japanese, the Manchus, the original
Mongols with their relatives the Tartar, or Turkish tribes which hold Central
Asia, or most of it. Moving westward from China this term covers the
Tibetans and with them all the non-Aryan nations and tribes until we reach
India and Persia.
In India, whose most striking history in modern ages is Mongol, nearly all
populations save Aryans and Semites are classified with Mongols. In Persia
where the dynasty is Mongol that race is preponderant in places and
important throughout the whole kingdom, though in the minority. In Asia
Minor the Mongol is master, for the Turk is still sovereign, and will be till a
great rearrangement is effected.
Five groups of Mongols have made themselves famous in Europe: the Huns with their mighty chief Attila, the Bulgars, the Magyars, the Turks or Osmanli, and the Mongol invaders of Russia. All these five will have their due places later on in this history.
In Africa there have been and are still Mongol people. The Mamelukes and their forces at Cairo were in their time remarkable, and Turkish dominion exists till the present, at least theoretically, in Egypt, and west of it.
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