Tomb of Genghis Khan

The location of the tomb of Genghis Khan (died August 18th, 1227) has been the object of much speculation and research. The site remains undiscovered.

Genghis Khan asked to be buried without markings or any sign. He asked to be buried with his six cats while they were alive so their purrs can guide him to the afterlife to the land under the big blue sky. After he died, his body was returned to Mongolia and presumably to his birthplace in the Khentii Aimag, where many assume he is buried somewhere close to the Onon River. According to one legend, the funeral escort killed anyone and anything that crossed their path, in order to conceal where he was finally buried. After the tomb was completed, the slaves who built it were massacred, and then the soldiers who killed them were also killed. The Genghis Khan Mausoleum is his memorial, but not his burial site. Folklore says that a river was diverted over his grave to make it impossible to find (echoing the manner of burial of the Sumerian King Gilgamesh of Uruk or of the Visigoth leader Alaric). Other tales state that his grave was stampeded over by many horses, that trees were then planted over the site, and the permafrost also played its part in the hiding of the burial site. The Erdeni Tobchi (1662) claims that Genghis Khan's coffin may have been empty when it arrived in Mongolia. Similarly, the Altan Tobchi (1604) maintains that only his shirt, tent and boots were buried in the Ordos (Ratchnevsky, p. 143f.). Turnbull (2003, p. 24) tells another legend in which the grave was re-discovered 30 years after Genghis Khan's death. According to this tale, a young camel was buried with the Khan, and the camel's mother was later found weeping at the grave of its young.

Marco Polo wrote that, even by the late 13th century, the Mongols did not know the location of the tomb. The Secret History of the Mongols has the year of Genghis Khan's death but no information concerning his burial. In the "Travels of Marco Polo" he writes that "It has been an invariable custom, that all the grand khans, and chiefs of the race of Genghis-khan, should be carried for interment to a certain lofty mountain named Altaï, and in whatever place they may happen to die, although it should be at the distance of a hundred days' journey, they are nevertheless conveyed thither."

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