On October 6, 2004, a Japanese and Mongolian research team located the palace of Genghis Khan, who had succeeded in uniting warring Mongol tribes and as Mongol leader, in 1206, expanded his empire across Eurasia – from China to Hungary – and to make it one of the most powerful in the world at that time.
We read in the “Daily” of October 7 that the ruins of the palace were discovered in the steppe, 250 kilometers east of the capital, Ulaanbaatar. “Genghis Khan built his palace around 1200, following the simple design of the tent. The researchers discovered porcelain vessels at the excavation site, which were made during the time of Genghis and helped to identify the ruins as the palace of the Mongol emperor. A description of the scene outside the palace by an envoy of the Chinese Tang Empire in 1232 coincides with the archaeological team’s discoveries.
The element that made this discovery even more important was that the scientists believed that the tomb should be located near the findings, “according to ancient papyri, which state that the nobles of the court went to the mausoleum of Genghis, a place of funeral ceremonies, every day”. Genghis Khan’s tomb has remained one of the enduring mysteries of archaeology. According to legend, to keep it a secret, his huge burial party killed anyone they saw on their way to it, while the servants and soldiers who attended the funeral were then slaughtered. According to the “Daily” publication, Professor of Archeology Shinpei Kato, a member of the Japanese research team, “explains that an ancient Chinese text speaks of a young camel that was buried with Genghis, under the gaze of its camel mother, so that the faithful animal would lead the relatives of Genghis to the grave of her child, but also of the warlord.” Even Marco Polo had written that, at the end of the 13th century, the Mongols did not know the location of the tomb.
Attempts to find the tomb had been made in the past. In 1920, the French diplomat Saint-Jean Perce together with Henri Picard Destelant, Dr. Jean-Augustin Boussier and the director general of the Chinese Post Office organized an expedition to Mongolia in the footsteps of Genghis Khan. Much more recently, in the 1990s, Japanese archaeologists conducted investigations, and in 2001 a joint American-Mongolian expedition found a walled burial ground on a hillside near the town of Bachiret. However, the expedition “was forced in 2002 to abandon excavations after being accused by a senior Mongolian government official of destroying the tombs of historical leaders.”
In the same article, it is stated that for the Japanese archaeologist and his team, the discovery of the tomb of the Mongol warlord was not their exclusive mission, he pointed out, however, “that its location and study would help clarify the mysteries that cover his empire. “Genghis Khan conquered Eurasia, creating a mighty empire. There must have been a constant exchange of cultural data between the East and the West of the time, mainly in terms of the exchange of goods. If we discover grave goods, we may be able to write a new page of human history.”
Column Editor: Myrto Katsigera, Vassilis Minakakis, Antigone-Despina Poimenidou, Athanasios Syroplakis
