Historiography of the Mongols
Topic: Nomadic Empires: The Mongols · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 2 "An Empire Across Three Continents"
Meaning
The historiography of the Mongols means how their history has been written and studied. The steppe peoples produced no literature of their own. Most of what we know comes from chronicles and travel accounts by city-based writers, who were often ignorant of nomads and biased against them. These writers usually cast nomads as "barbarians". However, some scholars who served the Mongols wrote friendly accounts, even praise. The sources are in many languages, including Chinese, Mongolian, Persian and Arabic, so historians must also study languages closely. Russian scholarship on the Mongols began in the 18th–19th centuries. Later, Soviet Marxist historians described Mongol society as moving from a tribal system to a feudal one.
Example
V.V. Bartold wrote positively about Genghis Khan, and Stalin's censors objected. His works appeared in nine volumes only in the 1960s, under the more liberal Khrushchev. B.Y. Vladimirtsov did important Soviet-era work on Mongol language, society and culture.