Dr. Dotno Pount

I studied Mongolian and Chinese history and philology with Prof. Atwood here at Penn. I wrote my dissertation on the Cult of Chinggis Khan, focusing on the period before 1636, when the Dayan Khanid princes ruled Mongolia under the aegis of the Great Khan, whose kingship was conceptualized as a direct continuation from that of the Mongol Empire. 

The Cult of Chinggis Khan has a large body of transmitted texts, and a major part of my dissertation is to produce a critical edition of this material. I regularly update my GitHub page with my newest collation of the transcribed text. I have been using the TEI method to encode these texts, and will eventually make this repository of text easily accessible through extensive indexing and other ways of improving searchability. I am concurrently working on their translations to English as I compile the hypertext edition.

These texts are of special importance because they contain the only written material from Mongolia from a period from which no other texts have survived -- from the late 15th to early 16th centuries. The prayers passed down to our time include a great variety of language, and so it is possible to tease apart the time-depth of each piece, at least in relative terms.

I am also maintaining an online repository of rare historical materials from Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, where I am making available all copies of "Materials on Culture and History" (文史资料) I can find.