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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
294
MARCO POLO BOOK I.
beside the GREAT WALL known as the Rampart of Gog and Magog," and being there he tries to find a reason why those names should have been applied to it. Why they were really applied to it we have already seen. (Supra, eh. iv. note 3.) Abulfeda says : " The Ocean turns northward along the east of China, and then expands in the same direction till it passes China, and cornes opposite to the Rampart of Vájúj and Májúj ; " whilst the same geographer's definition of the boundaries of China exhibits that country as bounded on the west by the Indo-Chinese wildernesses ; on the south, by the seas ; on the east, by the Eastern Ocean ; on the north, by the land of Ycjzíj and If d zij, and other countries unknown. Ibn Batuta, with less accurate geography in his head than Abulfeda, maugre his travels, asks about the Rampart of Gog and Magog (Sadd Ydjúj wa Majúj) when he is at Sin Kalán, i.e. Canton, and, as might be expected. gets little satisfaction.
Apart from this interesting point Marsden seems to be right in the general bearing of his explanation of the passage, and I conceive that the two classes of people whom Marco tries to identify with Gog and Magog do substantially represent the two genera or species, TURKS and MONGOLS, or, according to another nomenclature used by Rashiduddin, the White and Black Tartars. To the latter class belonged Chinghiz and his MONGOLS proper, with a number of other tribes detailed by Rashiduddin, and these I take to t_e in a general way the MUNGUL of our text. The Ung, on the other hand, are the UNG-kut, the latter form being presumably only the Mongol plural of UNG. The Ung-kút were a Turk tribe who were vassals of the Kin Emperors of Cathay, and were intrusted with the defence of the Wall of China, or an important portion of it, which was called by the Mongols Ung zr, a name which some connect with that of the tribe. [See note pp. 288-9. ] Erdmann indeed asserts that the wall by which the Ung-kut dwelt was not the Great Wall, but some other. There are traces of other great ramparts in the steppes north of the present wall. But Erdmann's arguments seem to me weak in the extreme.
[Mr. Rockhill (Rubruck, p. I 12) writes : " The earliest mention I have found of the name Mongol in Oriental works occurs in the Chinese annals of the After Tang
period (A.D. 923-934), where it occurs in the form Afen -ku. In the annals of
the Liao Dynasty (A.D. 916-1125) it is found under the form illeng-ku-li. The first occurrence of the name in the Tung chien kan mu is, however, in the 6th year Shac-hsing of Kao-tsung of the Sung (A.D. 1136). It is just possible that we may trace the word back a little earlier than the After T'ang period, and that the Menwa (or ngo, as this character may have been pronounced at the time), a branch of the Shih-wei, a Tungusic or Kitan people living around Lake Keule, to the east of the Baikal, and along the Kerulun, which empties into it, during the 7th and subsequent centuries, and referred to in the T'ang shu (Bk. 219), is the same as the later Meng-ku. Though I have been unable to find, as stated by I-Ioworth (History, i. pt. I. 28), that the name M n-ku occurs in the T'ang shu, his conclusion that the northern Shih-
wei of that time constituted the Mongol nation proper is very likely correct
I. J. Schmidt (Ssanang Setzen, 38o) derives the name Mongol from 171on, meaning ` brave, daring, bold,' while Rashideddin says it means ` simple, weak ' (d' Ohsson, i. 22). The Chinese characters used to transcribe the name mean ` dull, stupid,'
and ` old, ancient,' but they are used purely phonetically The Mongols of
the present day are commonly called by the Chinese Ta-tzű, but this name is resented by the Mongols as opprobrious, though it is but an abbreviated form of the name Ta-to-tzű, in which, according to Rubruck, they once gloried."—H. C.]
Vincent of Beauvais has got from some of his authorities a conception of the distinction of the Tartars into two races, to which, however, he assigns no names : " Sunt autem duo genera Tzrtarorum, diversa guidem habentia idiomata, sea' unlearn le;em ac ritu/n, sicut Franci et Theutonici." But the result of his effort to find a realisation of Gog and Magog is that he makes Guyuk Kaan into Gog, and lllanu Kaan into Magog. Even the intelligent Friar Ricold says of the Tartars : " They say themselves that they are descended from Gog and Magog : and on this account they are called 1llogoli, as if from a corruption of Maso;oli." (Abulfeda in 1? schin, IV.
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