The diverse tribes who once lived in what is now Mongolia surely knew their own version of the ongoing struggle for land and resources along the Chinese border in the
early centuries BC and AD. I'm here to speak for my ancestors.
History, even loosely retold, records the impressions of the victors.
The diverse tribes who once lived in what is now Mongolia surely knew their own version of the ongoing struggle for land and resources along the Chinese border in the
early centuries BC and AD. I'm here to speak for my ancestors.
Most people today know the diverse tribes that once terrorized Eurasia as the
Huns.
Hun is the modern Mongol word (of Turkic origin) for "human", and is
probably what the people (including those who invaded Europe under Attila) called
themselves, though those they raided had less polite names for them.
The Secret History of the Mongols, written some time in the 1100's,
recounts the existence of the legendary and sacred Hunnic ancestors of the Mongols:
the Blue Wolf and
the White Fallow Doe. Some sources suggest that the Blue Wolf himself
came from one of the Turkic-speaking tribes who inhabited the steppes in the early
centuries, A.D., but no one really knows for sure.
The Blue Wolf and Fallow Doe represent the ancestral Male
and Female Principles of all Life,
the Sky and Earth, the Light and the Dark. One is not whole and balanced
without the other. It is fitting that these ancestors are
fabled to have given rise to the great people named "Mongols" by Chingghis
Khan, the most famous descendant of the Blue Wolf and Fallow Doe.
Here is their legend.
