Jack Weatherford

speaker

3,108 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2025 last heard Aug 2025

Jack Weatherford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Lex Fridman Podcast · #476 – Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire · 1 Aug 2025 podcast

It has a lot of good information.

And by the time you get to the life of Temujin, the reason we know these intimate things is because that person, Shekihutuk, he was there, sleeping in the same gear with the people.

So we even see in there, he will record instances where Bershta sits up in bed,

and tells her husband, okay, you gotta do this, you gotta do that, you can't do this anymore, we can't think of, you know, it's all recorded, right?

So it's a very intimate document.

And this is one reason that it was secret, it was only for the family.

They were trying to uphold Chinggis Khan's prohibition against putting out information about the family.

So it was secret for a very long time.

so much so that scholars began to think it didn't exist.

And then in the 19th century, a Russian academic who was working in China at the time, in Beijing, he discovered a manuscript, which was very, very odd, that people didn't think was anything because it's all Chinese characters, but it makes no sense in Chinese.

But he recognized, but if you read it,

pronounce it, it makes sense of Mongolian.

And so it was in this code that had been used to record the information in Chinese.

So they were recording the sounds.

The sounds, correct.

They used Chinese characters to record sounds, which is always problematic in some little areas.

You're not exactly sure what the name is or something like that.

But it was a very unusual document.

And then once they found it, they realized that some of the Persian documents had incorporated part of that already.

So that was very helpful to me because some of the Persians I trust very much and I like their work very much.

Showing 701–720 of 3,108 · page 36 of 156