800 years ago, this man,
called Timuyin and better known as Genghis Khan,
“The King of the Universe”,
managed to create the largest empire ever known in the history of humanity.
It all begin in the year 1190 when Genghis Khan
managed to bring together the different nomadic tribes of Mongolia
in a single, powerful army of 200,000 men.
This, and his undoubted military genius,
enabled him to conquer vast territories,
stretching from the Pacific to the heart of Europe,
and from northern Siberia to India, Iran and Turkey.
His armies – relatively small, highly disciplined,
extremely well coordinated and with innovative military skill
and great mobility, were organised into “toumans”,
a basic formation of 10,000 warriors on horseback.
The Mongol hordes lived out in the field and their battle tactics
consisted of surprise attacks, charging at the enemy flanks
and rearguard before launching heavy cavalry assaults.
With the end of the Khan dynasty,
a series of civil wars threw the country into confusion,
until, in 1578, Buddhism was established as the form of government,
under the leadership of Altan Khaan. Two centuries later,
Mongolia came under Chinese control,
until 1924 when, with the creation of the soviet bloc,
the country converted to communism and became a satellite of the USSR.
With the arrival of the Russians,
Mongolia underwent rapid changes,modernising and industrialising.
Buildings, bridges, roads, railway lines, factories and schools
were constructed…and the nomads looked on in astonishment as,
virtually overnight, their country was transformed
from a primitive feudal society to the progress of the twentieth century.
Ulan Bator became the new, cosmopolitan capital
of this renewed country, designed in accordance with the cold,
impersonal urban planning standards of the Soviets.
The result is an atmosphere which gives the visitor
the impression of having landed in a lost, remote city in Siberia.
But with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989,
and the consequent disintegration of the Soviet bloc,
the Russians left just as quickly as they had arrived,
and overnight Mongolia was completely paralysed,
suffering political and economic collapse
from which it has still far from recovered.
Since then, the city has rapidly deteriorated,
and its inhabitants struggle to survive as best they can.
The situation in rural areas is also dramatic,
and every day hundreds of families arrive in the city,
fleeing from poverty and hunger.
The new settlements which have been established
in recent years have doubled the surface area of Ulan Bator
and it is calculated that around forty per cent of the city’s inhabitants
still live in “gers”, the houses of the nomads.
But in any case, and despite the great empires,
invasions, civil wars and political and social experiments,
in the interior of the country few things have changed since the time of Genghis Khan.
On the vast Siberian steppes, where winter lasts for ten months,
the life of these nomads is virtually the same as that of their ancestors.
The horse is still their means of transport,
and they continue to live by cattle-rearing and hunting.
This is the story of three ethnic groups which,
though they inhabit the same territory,
have different cultures and traditions.
But with one common denominator,
they are all HEIRS OF GENGHIS KHAN.
What this man has just found are dinosaur bones.
Since Roy Chapman Andrews,
whose life inspired the character of Indiana Jones,
discovered the first dinosaur eggs in the Gobi,
in 1921, this desert has become a magnificent laboratory for scientists and palaeontologists.
With their excavations, have been able to find answers to many questions,
establishing, for example,
that the dinosaurs disappeared from the Gobi
as a result of avalanches and sand storms at least sixty million years ago.
The most important discovery was made in 1993,
when a joint team of American and Mongolian palaeontologists,
sponsored by the New York Natural History Museum,
found over one hundred complete skeletons and a number of fossils
of dinosaurs incubating their eggs, some of them with the embryos still intact.
And though the majority of these finds are now on display
in the major museums of the west,
the Ulan Bator Natural History Museum is a magnificent place
to find out more about these animals
that lived on earth 250 million years ago.