By SHELTON BUMGARNER
FNY Guest Blogger
Whenever I hear the name Genghis Khan, I think of James T. Kirk screaming “KHAAAAAAAN!” and that cool music as Khan’s ship and the Enterprise duked it out in that big space cloud.
But I digress.
A Khan of a different sort is yet again in the news. For a number of reasons, Genghis Khan’s grave has yet to be discovered. But some old dude wants to find it, potential centuries old curse be damned.
Kravitz, who also has developed an admiration for Genghis Khan’s contributions to civilization, said he first became interested in the Mongolian conqueror 45 years ago when a friend gave him a history book to while away the time during service in the U.S. Army in Germany. Although trained as a lawyer and for years busy most of the time on the commodities trading floor, Kravitz said, he read everything he could find on Genghis Khan. In the process, he accumulated a collection of books and documents that he said graduate students still come to consult. But most passionately, he has since 1992 tried to solve the mystery of Genghis Khan’s tomb by making nearly annual research expeditions to the Mongolian steppes.
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The mystery has remained intact over the years in large measure because Mongolians want it that way. Many of the country’s 2.8 million inhabitants have clung to the ancient belief that it would be sacrilegious to dig up anyone’s tomb, much less Genghis Khan’s. In addition, to avoid any nationalist-based opposition, Soviet bureaucrats who ran Mongolia for most of the 20th century closed off the area where the tomb was most likely to be found — the same area that interests Kravitz today — fueling the mystique.
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For many Mongolians, however, there is still something vaguely wrong about digging around in a place that has potentially held its secret for 800 years. Traditional families to this day hold funerals in strict intimacy, sometimes in the hours just before dawn to avoid notice, and many believe disturbing Genghis Khan could bring bad luck.
“Oh, you hear these rumors from time to time,” said a skeptical Foreign Ministry official, Luuzan Gotovdorjiin, when asked whether the Kravitz dig is on to something. “But I have my doubts. Genghis Khan is Genghis Khan.”
Be sure to read the rest on your own.
One Comment
Having just recently read “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World”
by Jack Weatherford, I found this artilce quite interesting. Weatherford, who has worked for years with Shagdaryn Bira, secretary general of the International Association for Mongol Studies and Mongol authority menrtioned in the article. provides the full back-story on the great Khan, which is very different from the negative caricatures with which everyone is familiar. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Mongolia, the Khan or the (generally positive, according to Weatherford) impact of the Mongol invasions on the development of the modern world.