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Morris Rossabi, Christopher P. Atwood. The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources., The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 3, September 2023, Pages 1423–1520, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad332
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Primary sources on the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Mongol Empire span much of Eurasia. From one end of East Asia all the way to southern Europe, various peoples wrote about the largest contiguous land empire in world history. Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Turkic, Franco-Italian, and Latin, among other accounts or histories, have survived, although the Chinese and Persian records and The Secret History of the Mongols are the most voluminous. Because mastery of all these languages is impossible for any specialist on the Mongols, translations into the most commonly known languages are necessary.
Christopher P. Atwood’s The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources offers translations of five Chinese works on the early Mongols. Several of these sources have already been translated into German, Russian, or Mongolian, but they are now available in English. Like some chronicles, sections of these texts are dry and hardly make for engrossing reading. Listings of minor battles or rebellions are tedious, but there are important compensations. Descriptions of the customs of the so-called Tatars, their military uniforms and equipment, banquets, dances, calendar, food, and beliefs are valuable and offer information on the Mongols and other inhabitants of East Asia in the thirteenth century. They also provide views of Chinese attitudes toward their neighbors, as well as their stereotypes about the pastoralists along their northern borders.
