Genghis Khan and the Story of the Taj Mahal

While I am in the mood for book reviews, I would like to highlight these 2 other books that I've recently read.

Gengkhis Khan - Life, Death and Resurrection by John Man

Genghis Khan is one of history's immortals: a leader of genius and the founder of the world's greatest land expire - twice the size of Rome's.

What really fascinated me was in John Man's introduction where he highlighted an article that appeared in the March 2003 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics. It is found that there is a common pattern to several dozen of their sample men (DNA from 2,000 men across Eurasia was studied), irrespective of where they came from.

If the proportion of men with this pattern is extrapolated across the entire population of that area, the startling conclusion is that 16 million men are in effect part of the one vast family.

Moreover, most of the slightly different local variations were represented in just one of the selected area - Mongolia. This suggests a startling hypothesis: that one man living in Mongolia in the twelfth century has scattered his genetic material across half of Eurasia, with the result that it is now shared by ONE in 200 men living today! And that man could well be Genghis Khan!

Another fascinating point is the relationship I found in this book to A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time - The Story of the Taj Mahal by Diana & Michael Preston. Not that the books are related.

But, did u know ...
"that the dreadful Tamerlane - Timur-i-Leng, the tyrant from Uzbekistan - claimed to be a Genghisid? That was why Timur's descendant Babur called himself 'Mughal' when he seized power in India in the early sixteenth century, establishing a dynasty that ended only when the British shuffled the last Mughal off the throne in 1857" (John Man).

And so begins The Story of the Taj Mahal.

Timur was Babur's great-great-great-grandfather on his father's side. He was a chieftain of the nomadic Barlas Turks. Like that of Genghis Khan before it, the empire of Timur was divided on his death among his family rather than being left to a single heir. Babur was much prouder of his Timurid, or what he thought of as his Turkish, descent rather thand of his Mongol inheritance. His comment that "were the Mongols a race of angels it would still be a vile nation' encapsulated his view of them and he would have been much affronted that the dynasty he was to initiate in India became known as the Moghuls, from a corruption of the Persian word for Mongol.

And that is how Moghuls came about.

Babur was Shan Jahan's great great grandfather. It was in 1631 that the heartbroken Moghul Emperor, Shah Jahan, created the exquisite and extravagant memorial, the Taj Mahal, in memory of his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal. It took 20 years to complete and involved over 20,000 labourers, depleting the Moghul treasuries.