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Genghis Khan: More Tombs to Plunder. (08/20/2001)
According to an ABCNews report on the Internet (08/20/2001), archeologists claim they may have discovered the tomb of Genghis Khan in Mongolia. Westerners have been looking for many centuries in the hope of recovering the wealth in gold and silver ornaments that may have been buried with him. According to long-standing legend, everyone who was present at the site where the great Khan was buried met an untimely end when they were murdered and entombed along with him. Along with a number of virgins, even a countless number, authorities also claim that as many as 100 soldiers were dispatched. The reasons given for the carnage vary from a desire to provide traveling companions for the great man on his afterlife journey to the next world up to the necessity of keeping the location of the tomb secret so that grave robbers would be unable to find and plunder the vast quantities of wealth buried with the Khan. In the ABCNews report another possibility is added to the second reason; that is,
"Keeping the location of Khan's tomb secret may have been an attempt to deter grave robbers from plundering a possible treasure trove buried with him, and may also be related to the shamanistic belief that disturbing the remains of the dead would destroy the soul of the interred."
Apart from several obvious logistical and logical problems, namely the one related to the fact that the person, or persons, who killed the soldiers and buried them, would also have to be killed and buried to prevent them from revealing the location as well, and so on and so forth, until there was no one left standing anywhere within ten thousands miles of the site capable of testifying to its location, the essential fact remains that legends of mass killings at the funerals of "great" men, especially oriental warriors, have always circulated in western Europe, after the fact of course, to demonstrate that the "eastern" enemy of Western civilization really was as horrible and as savage as popularly believed, on the one hand, and that he really did possess vast quantities of wealth, plundered from hapless Europeans during his western expansionistic wars, which rightfully belongs now, not to him, not to his people, but to the descendants of the ones he murdered when acquiring the vast quantities of wealth buried with him when he died.
Turning to another matter, if Genghis Khan really did reach out from his own death to kill hundreds of innocent people, his own people, to protect the secret of his burial ground, then there can hardly be an argument made that his tomb should now be protected to avoid the destruction of his soul by disturbing his remains. In fact, if justice is to be served at all, a campaign should be launched in international courts of law to have his corpse, not just disturbed, but dragged out of the ground and put on display in public squares around the world where people everywhere can curse and desecrate his bones for countless generations to come. But wait, a list of prominent museums has already been started to accommodate that traveling circus of perpetual desecration.
Archeology, as sciences go, has more to explain about its actual priorities than any other academic discipline one can imagine. In fact, every University Department of Archeology should endow a chair of Racial Hatred to head the development of its field activities and to organize its museum displays after the corpses of native people are removed from their graves. Any reasonable person, of course, would object to such a thankless characterization of a science that has brought such lasting and valuable knowledge, so many priceless artifacts, into public display for the enlightenment of the superior race that unearthed them in the first place. To preserve knowledge of the past, to enhance our understanding of human origins and development, to know better who we are, from whence we came, are just some of the justifications archeologists use to account for the fact that they are little more than grave robbers themselves. What plans do they have for the final resting place of Genghis Khan? What, if not a vast "treasure trove" of gold and silver ornaments, are they looking for?
Too harsh a judgment. Actually not nearly harsh enough. Egyptology was fueled in the 19th Century by an insatiable hunger for the mummified flesh of ancient Egyptians because Europeans believed that it possessed magic properties able to cure diseases. Tons of such flesh was consumed in Europe during the hay-days of its excavation. Vast fortunes were made selling it. The Spaniards, after they realized that the Inca always buried their dead with gold and silver ornaments attached to the corpse, began the systematic mining of native burial grounds. Vast fortunes were made by those early archeological mining engineers as they forced their native slaves to strip the corpses of their own ancestors of anything that might be deemed valuable in the insatiable gaze of greed-driven Europeans. Eventually, of course, such blatant acts of ghoulish cannibalism and necrophilia had to be rehabilitated. Why not turn it into a science? Why not call it Archeology?
Too bad then, too bad now, if a few worthless, subhuman corpses are desecrated in the process of extracting vast quantities of wealth from tribal, shamanistic tombs. The ironic part of this sad story, if Europeans only realized it, is that the soul (a term of infinite meaninglessness in shamanistic culture because no such thing exists) of the desecrated person is not the one that is destroyed in the process of disturbing its tomb. Native people always avoid grave sites and burial grounds, which are never hidden or concealed, because they believe that the grave-spirit of a deceased person has the power to damage their own well-being if they approach too closely to its final resting place. If Genghis Khan hid his grave, he did not hide it from other shamanistic people. Rather, and emphatically, he hid it from his European enemies because he knew them well enough to realize they would never abandon the search for the vast quantities of gold and silver he took to the grave with him. Finding a few bones to gnaw in the process, for any truly dedicated archeologist, is just an added glitter to the gold.