Question
Keeping the nomadic element of the Mongol and Bedouin societies in mind, how, in your opinion, did their respective historical experiences differ?
What explanations would you suggest account for these difference ?
Solution
The steppe dwellers themselves usually produced no literature, so our knowledge of nomadic societies comes Mongols are quite different and the Italian and Latin versions of Marco Polo’s travels to the Mongol court do not match.
Since the Mongols produced little literature on their own and were instead 'written about' by literati from foreign cultural milieus, historians have to often double as philologists to pick out the meanings of phrases for their closest approximation to Mongol usage.
The work of scholars like Igor de Rachewiltz on The Secret History of the Mongols and Gerhard Doerfer on Mongol and Turkic terminologies that infiltrated into the Persian language brings out the difficulties involved instudying the history of the Central Asian nomads.
As we will notice through the remainder of this chapter, despite their ineredible achievement there is much about Genghis Khan and the Mongol world empire still awaiting the diligent scholar’s scrutiny.
