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The True Appearance and Essence of Chingiz Khan
Perhaps you know that the outstanding academic historian D. Iskhakov once wrote: “The true history of the Tatars — a people in every respect historical — has not yet been written” (2000).
However, since 2007, five books have been published by the independent historian Gali Yenikeev, offering a new — or rather, a “well-forgotten old” — perspective on an unwritten (hidden) yet substantial part of the history of the Tatars and Central Eurasia.
In his works, Gali Yenikeev demonstrates with facts that official history contains many falsifications and slanders about the Tatars — portraying them as “wild nomads, bloodthirsty conquerors,” and so on. Moreover, a common narrative in academic historiography holds that the Tatars “were not a historically significant people; in fact, they were not a people at all, but merely a Mongolic‑speaking nomadic tribe wiped out by Chingiz Khan — and, later, perhaps, merely a kind of social group within the Golden Horde.”
However, as Yenikeev discovered, we should first of all understand the true meaning of the names “Mongol” and “Tatar” (“Tartar”) in medieval Eurasia.
According to data from many medieval sources, the name “Mongol” until the 17th–18th centuries denoted belonging to a political community and was not an ethnic name. Meanwhile, the name “Tatar” was “the name of Chingiz Khan’s own ethnos (nation).” Also, “…Chingiz Khan and his people did not speak the language we now call ‘Mongolian’…” (the academician-orientalist V. P. Vasiliev, 19th century). This is confirmed by many little-known facts. In fact, Chingiz Khan was among the medieval Tatars and was an outstanding, progressive leader of the Turkic peoples.
Notably, sources that remain little known to the wider public indicate that the ancient and medieval Tatars were a highly developed society, advanced both spiritually and materially. Already in ancient times, they possessed a legal system that in many aspects surpassed Roman law.
While the medieval Tatars have often been vilified or dismissed in historical narratives, they were in fact the creators of the first Eurasian constitution — known in Tatar as Great Yasu, or “Great Scripture.”
Thus, the Tatars of Chingiz Khan — the medieval Tatars — were one of the Turkic nations whose descendants now live among many of the fraternal Turkic peoples of Eurasia: the Tatars, Kazakhs, Bashkirs, Uyghurs, and many others. But over time, many of their descendants became spiritually disconnected and forgot the invaluable doctrine and covenants of the creators of the Great Yasu…
And very few people know that the ethnos of the medieval Tatars — which halted the westward expansion of the Persians and the Chinese in the medieval centuries — is still alive, despite the policies of the Romanov tsars and the Bolshevik dictators, who divided and scattered this ethnos among different nations…
All of the above, and much more about the true history of the Tatars and other fraternal Turkic peoples — a history that was hidden from us — has been written about in detail and substantiated in the book “Chingiz Khan and Tatars: Myths and Reality.” This is the very first book by the independent Tatar historian Gali Yenikeyev, published in Kazan in 2007.
Since then, Gali Yenikeev has written and published several more books that shed light on a significant yet concealed part of the history of both modern Tatars and many representatives of related contemporary Turkic peoples, as well as many modern Russians.
The book “Chingiz Khan and Tatars: Myths and Reality” has been thoroughly revised by the author and supplemented with new materials and findings developed in the years since the first edition, and translated into English.
The book contains a wealth of previously little-known historical facts, as well as maps and illustrations. This e-book (in English) can be easily found on the internet.
On the cover of this book, you can see the true appearance of Chinghiz Khan — his lifetime portrait.
Also in the ancient Tatar historical source “About the Clan of Chinghiz Khan,” its author records the words of Chingiz Khan’s mother: “My son Chingiz looks like this: he has a golden bushy beard, he wears a white fur coat, and rides a white horse.” As we can see, the portrait by an unknown medieval artist largely corresponds to the words of the Hero’s mother, preserved in this ancient Tatar epic. Therefore, this portrait — which corresponds to the information in the Tatar source as well as data from other sources — we believe most reliably conveys the appearance of Chingiz Khan…
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