To The Latter Class Belonged Chinghiz And His MONGOLS
Proper, With A Number Of Other Tribes Detailed By Rashiduddin, And These I
Take To Be In A General Way The MUNGUL Of Our Text.
The Ung on the other
hand, are the UNG-kut, the latter form being presumably only the Mongol
plural of UNG.
The Ung-kut were a Turk tribe who were vassals of the Kin
Emperors of Cathay, and were intrusted with the defence of the Wall of
China, or an important portion of it, which was called by the Mongols
Ungu, a name which some connect with that of the tribe. [See note pp.
288-9.] Erdmann indeed asserts that the wall by which the Ung-kut dwelt
was not the Great Wall, but some other. There are traces of other great
ramparts in the steppes north of the present wall. But Erdmann's arguments
seem to me weak in the extreme.
[Mr. Rockhill (Rubruck, p. 112) writes: "The earliest mention I have
found of the name Mongol in Oriental works occurs in the Chinese annals
of the After T'ang period (A.D. 923-934), where it occurs in the form
Meng-ku. In the annals of the Liao Dynasty (A.D. 916-1125) it is found
under the form Meng-ku-li. The first occurrence of the name in the Tung
chien kang mu is, however, in the 6th year Shao-hsing of Kao-tsung of the
Sung (A.D. 1136). It is just possible that we may trace the word back a
little earlier than the After T'ang period, and that the Meng-wa (or
ngo as this character may have been pronounced at the time), a branch of
the Shih-wei, a Tungusic or Kitan people living around Lake Keule, to the
east of the Baikal, and along the Kerulun, which empties into it, during
the 7th and subsequent centuries, and referred to in the T'ang shu (Bk.
219), is the same as the later Meng-ku.
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