Mongols

Mongols

The Mongols first appear in Chinese sources at the end of the Tang dynasty (618–907), but must have been a linguistically distinct people long before then, since the Mongolian language—actually a set of closely related dialects—had already had a long history by the time it was first written down in the thirteenth century. It is a branch of the Altaic family and is related to the Turkic and Tungus languages and more distantly to Korean and Japanese. Its closest ancient relatives, including Kitan, are all now extinct.

At the time that they were first noticed by the Chinese, the Mongols lived somewhat to the north of the present territories of the Mongols in what is now Mongol Buriyatia, around Lake Baikal. Other Mongols today live throughout the territories of the Mongolian People's Republic, in Inner Mongolia (part of China), in Manchuria, and in various northern Chinese provinces, including Qinghai and Xinjiang, and along the lower Volga, where they took up residence in the eighteenth century. Recent migrations of Mongols have been to South Korea, where there are now 17,000, mostly illegal, and as far afield as Israel.

Traditional Mongol Life

By the time of Temüjin (d. 1227), the later Genghis Khan, the Mongols had moved considerably to the south and were centered about the Onon and Kerlen rivers, in what is now the north-central part of the Mongolian People's Republic.

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