The East has known only three great men. Sakyamuni wasborn a prince around 500 BC in what is now Nepal.Distressed by human suffering, he left his family, achievedenlightenment through meditation, and became theBuddha. According to his teachings, life is painful, theorigin of pain is desire, the end of pain can be achieved byending desire, and the way to this is through right living.This philosophy of ‘cause and effect’ spread northwardsinto Tibet, where it absorbed the popular Bon religion andchanged greatly in nature. The resulting synthesis, knownas Lamaism, can be criticised as passive and fatalistic.Lamaism became popular among the Mongols1 during thereign of Qubilai Qahan (1215–1294).Confucius was born at around the same time as theBuddha, into China’s lower aristocracy. Confucius wantedto restore China to a golden age of peace. He also saidthat ‘the universe belongs to the public’, but although heemphasised the need for ethical conduct, he believedimplicitly in a society shaped by the hereditary right ofaristocrats. He helped to endow Chinese with the idea thatChina lay at the centre of the universe; and he persuadedordinary Chinese to confine their loyalties to their family1 The word ‘Mongol’ was used as a tribal name until 1206, whenTemüjin (Chinggis Qahan) was elevated to Great Qahan. Thename then became synonymous with the state until 1271,when the Great Qahan Qubilai introduced the name YuanDynasty. Since then, ‘Mongol’ has been used as a generalname for the Mongol people.and the emperor. Confucianism spread to the countries ofthe East that practised settled agriculture, but not tonomadic countries like Mongolia.Temüjin, the personal name of Chinggis Qahan, wasborn on the sixteenth day of the fourth lunar month in theyear 1162 into the family of a tribal leader. Somehistorians, for example the Persian Rashid al-Din (1247–1318), who was of Jewish origin, say that Chinggis wasborn earlier, in 1155, the Year of the Pig. Neither Jews norMuslims (nor, for that matter, Mongols) like pigs, andmany Persians deeply hated the Mongols, who set up adynasty (the Il-Qahan, which ran from 1265 to 1335), intheir country. So it was probably with some satisfactionthat Rashid al-Din determined 1155 as the year of birth ofthe Mongol world-conqueror. Chinggis did, however, die ina Pig Year, 1227.Mongol society developed in three stages. It rose on thebasis of a hunting economy in the forest regions to thenorth of the Mongol heartland. During this period wascreated the title mergen, meaning ‘a good hunter’ or ‘anintelligent person’. When the Mongols emerged from theforests, they created a new title, ba’atur, or ‘hero’, whichshows that the distinct Mongol tribes of the day were atwar with one another and were probably engaged in anomadic way of life. Around the eighth century, two newtitles appeared: noyan, meaning ‘lord’, and qan, usuallytranscribed in English as ‘khan’.In the sixth century, Turkic nomadic tribes, later knownas Orkhon Turkish, moved into the territory of present-dayMongolia and ruled the area until the middle of the seventhcentury, when they were replaced by the Uighurs (whostayed until the eighth and ninth centuries). By the tenthcentury, the Liao Dynasty (also known as Kitan) wasestablished in the eastern part of the region, present-dayManchuria. The Kitan were in power from 916 to 1119,when they, in turn, were replaced by another nomadicpeople, the Jin Dynasty, also known as Altan Ulus (1115–1234).