Modern Copyright can Hurt our Study of Ancient History

A few years ago, I was hired by a historical consulting agency to help put together primary source documents for an electronic textbook.

I was assigned to find primary source information and texts on the Mongolian Empire. I was tasked with putting a number of primary sources together to tell a story only using these primary sources. My only restriction was that any documents I found had to be in the public domain. Copyrighted materials would cost the publisher money to get the rights to, which they wanted to avoid.

I thought this would make things easy! Of course any document about Genghis Khan and Mongolia would be public domain! While this is true, translations were not.

In the West, we did not really care about Mongolian history or really even Chinese history until the Chinese Communist revolution in 1949. It is at this point that the West began to actively study the history of the East as only in light of current events was it seen as important. It was not until the 50s, 60s, and 70s, that the histories written by the Chinese and the Mongolians about themselves were translated into English.

For the life of Genghis Khan, the book I wanted to use was “The Secret History of the Mongols,” a 13th century primary source history written by the Mongols. It was first translated into English in 1966. There have been a number of excellent translations since. Yet, I could not use them because all the translations were under copyright. (This is a GROSS over-simplification, but as a rule of thumb we were to consider anything less than 95 years old still in copyright.)

I still needed to find primary sources, which I did. There were a number of Russian primary sources that described the Mongol invasion. These sources had been translated in English in the 18th and 19th centuries. So there was no issue using them. Many described the Mongols as demons and how quickly they would devastate the towns and cities they came across. Many of these accounts were written by priests and many used apocalyptic language describing the invasion as God destroying the sinful. This was the history of the event written by the victims.

While these sources were important, I was frustrated I could not also include the Mongolian account, which told a very different story. It was an account of a people that were, in their view, very firm but fair. The Mongols would always give a town or city the chance to join them. If they did, the town was safe, the people were protected and the communities kept their autonomy. They would have to pay a tithe and consider the Mongols their overlords, but they kept their land, language, culture, and religion. If this offer was refused, the horde would show no mercy and raze the entire community and move on.

I was putting together an account of the 13th century Mongol invasion in the 21st century, but could not use the Mongol’s own history, because its translation in English was too new to be considered a public document.

While I did my best and am very proud of the work I did, that work was not as good as it should have been because I could not include the most important documents on the subject. The narrative I created using my primary sources was inevitability skewed and incomplete.

And on a slightly lighter note, one thing I did learn studying Mongolia is that its capital is Ulaanbaatar!