Many of these foreigners lived in Khara Khorum involuntarily, conscripts from conquered cities. People of many nationalities walked its warrens of narrow streets: Chinese, Muslims, even a lone Frenchman - Guillaume Boucher, the goldsmith who designed the fountain. Fitzhugh, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Natural History and a co-editor of the new book. “It wasn’t Cairo, but people compared it to European cities,” says William W. Surrounded by tall mud walls, The Mongol capital rose up out of the blank plains. The name Khara Khorum means “black tent,” Rossabi says. Now archaeologists who’ve worked on the site believe that they might have located The Palace of the Great Khan, home of the fabled silver fountain. The traveling exhibit, at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in Texas through September 7, 2009, and then at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for three months starting October 10, 2009, will showcase some of those artifacts for the first time on American soil. A book of new scholarship, “Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire,” coming out in June details major finds that archeologists have made in recent years, which shed light on what life was like in the city as the Mongols transitioned from raiders to rulers. The ruins now lie beneath sand and scrubby vegetation, but lately there’s been renewed interest in Khara Khorum. “It was as if you put Venice in Kansas,” says Don Lessem, producer of a new Genghis Khan exhibit touring the country now. So in 1235, Genghis’s son, Ogodei, began building a city near the Orkhon River, on the wide-open plains.

“They had to stop rampaging and start ruling,” says Morris Rossabi, who teaches Asian history at Columbia University. As the empire continued to expand, though, the Khans realized the need for a permanent administrative center. When Genghis took power in 1206, Mongolian tribes lived in tents, which they moved while migrating across the grasslands with their livestock. Like the rest of his fierce horsemen, Genghis Khan – whose cavalry pounded across the steppe to conquer much of Central Asia – was born a nomad. The Khans had come a long way in just a few decades. When a silver angel at the top of the tree trumpeted, still more beverages spouted out of the pipes: wine, clarified mare’s milk, a honey drink, rice mead – take your pick.

It took the shape of “a great silver tree, and at its roots are four lions of silver, each with a conduit through it, and all belching forth white milk of mares,” wrote William of Rubruck, a Franciscan friar who toured the Mongol capital, Khara Khorum, in 1254. Of all the wonders in The Palace of the Great Khan, the silver fountain most captivated the visiting monk. It is decorated with a phoenix flanked by demons.Ĭourtesy of the Institute of Archaeology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences One of the riches found at Khara Khorum, this gold alloy bracelet dates from the 14th century.

Civ 5 mongols