'Genghis Khan: Bring the Legend to Life' at the Franklin Institute

Mongolians call him “Chinggis,” erect massive statues in his honor, and affix his name and image to everything from currency and playing cards to beer bottles and bath mats. In his native land, Genghis Khan (1162-1227), famed for his murderous Mongolian hordes, has been both domesticated and deified, serving as a symbol of power, strength, order and resurgent nationalism.

A traveling exhibition, “Genghis Khan: Bring the Legend to Life” at the Franklin Institute, which runs until Jan. 3, 2016, seeks to convey some of Genghis’s complexity. Organized by Don Lessem, a local dinosaur expert and frequent visitor to Mongolia, it stresses that Genghis’s empire incorporated such modern features as religious freedom, a system of laws, passports, diplomatic immunity and meritocracy.

But those innovations left behind relatively few artifacts. One exception, featured in the exhibition, is a cast of a 13th or 14th century iron and silver passport medallion issued by Kublai Khan (1215-1294), one of Genghis’s grandsons, or a successor. Loosely translated, the inscription, conveying both authority and brutality, reads: “I am the emissary of the Khan. If you defy me, you die.”

Ceramics in varied styles, jewelry, artwork and textiles suggest that the Mongols valued craftsmanship, often by conscripted foreign artisans. But several galleries, with many of the exhibition’s more than 200 artifacts, attest to their martial predilections.

After Genghis’s death, most likely from disease or injuries from falling off a horse, his often-feuding sons and grandsons extended Mongolian hegemony from Vienna to the Pacific Ocean. They created the largest contiguous land empire in history before infighting, rebellion, invasion and the bubonic plague shattered it. An animated floor map demonstrates the Mongols’ stunning accretion of land over time.

The mostly chronological exhibits are dominated by weaponry, including swords and scabbards, bows and arrowheads, chain mail and leather armor. There are full-scale replicas of a traction trebuchet (a type of catapult) and a giant siege crossbow, technology borrowed from the conquered Chinese. A diorama shows Mongolian cavalry flanked by warriors. Murals depict sieges and videos re-enact them, noting that captured prisoners were sent to the front lines to fight. One sword displays the nicks and dents acquired in battle.

We learn that the Mongols’ elaborately curved bows, flexible armor, deceptive military tactics and equestrian prowess fueled their victories. And that they didn’t shy away from slaughtering innocents—or banqueting on top of a box in which Russian noblemen were suffocating. Terror was a weapon; Genghis fostered his horrific reputation to inspire submission. (“I am the punishment of God,” he is alleged—probably apocryphally—to have said.) The violent image turns out to be indelible.

“Genghis Khan” freely mingles the real and the reproduction. Most of the larger artifacts, including a Genghis statue that opens the exhibition and stone monuments celebrating the rule of the khans, are models or replicas. The show also creates satisfying immersive environments, including a Mongolian ger, or yurt, a characteristic wood-framed felt and canvas dwelling bursting with artwork, household wares and weaponry.

More problematic is the juxtaposition of artifacts from different periods, ranging from more than a millennium before Genghis Khan to the near-contemporary. This may be justified, in part, by the persistence of customs and styles—many Mongolians still live in yurts, rely on horses and practice shamanism—but it does blur distinctions between Genghis’s time and later eras.

The show is punctuated by videos from diverse sources, the best involving archaeology and experts rather than B-movie-style re-enactments. There are too many, in cramped spaces: Some overlap; others, nearly muted, are impossible to hear; still others distract from the reading of nearby labels. Earphones or audio guides—or dedicated theater space—would have been preferable.

Before he was Genghis, the Mongol leader was Temüjin, an outcast whose father was poisoned by a rival clan leader and whose mother struggled to raise a brood of children on her own. As a teenager, along with a brother, he murdered his older half-brother, who was a bully and a food thief. Later, he rescued his bride-to-be, Börte, who had been kidnapped. (Her story—along with those of other characters, real and fictional—is told by family-friendly interactive stations.)

As a young man, Genghis united the Mongols, and in 1206 he was named Genghis Khan, variously translated as great, oceanic or universal ruler. As his horsemen conquered Central Asia, he incorporated defeated peoples into his army. He also practiced polygamy, taking new wives and concubines with each conquest—a reputed five wives and 500 concubines. His legal code mandated death as a punishment for adultery, a seeming contradiction that Mr. Lessem explained this way: “The definition is stealing someone else’s wife—it’s cuckoldry that is the crime.”

In the 1230s, Genghis’s third son and principal successor, Ögedei, expanded an outpost in Western Mongolia into a walled capital, Karakorum, which became a center for music and crafts. Genghis’s grandson Kublai Khan, immortalized by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem (“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree”), conquered China, founded the Yuan Dynasty and welcomed the Venetian merchant Marco Polo.

But Kublai’s attempted invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, were costly failures. A typhoon helped destroy the second armada. Barnacle-encrusted pottery in the exhibition was salvaged from a shipwreck. After Kublai’s death, the increasingly fractious empire began to crumble.

A final gallery briefly covers the image of Genghis in popular culture, including such Hollywood productions as “The Conqueror” (1956), improbably starring John Wayne, and “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (1982), whose villain was inspired by the Mongolian warrior. It also offers the tantalizing suggestion that Genghis, thanks to all those wives and concubines, may have 16 million living descendants, most in the former Mongol territories. “We went with the most conservative estimate,” Mr. Lessem said.

A scientist in a video says the estimate derives from two sources: genetic data on the persistence of a distinctive Y chromosome passed from father to son and (unexplained) historical research. (The impressive exhibition catalog, “Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire,” details the genetics.) Whether reliable or not, the figure—like this exhibition—helps advance the Mongolian project to reclaim Genghis’s checkered legacy.

Author: Julia M. Klein | Source: The Wall Street Journal [July 16, 2015]