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The Art and Culture of Mongolia:
100 B.C.-19th century
Second floor, rooms 365-367
The first room (367) presents the celebrated group of relics, compris-
ing clothes, fabrics and household objects, from the tumuli of Noin-Ula
in the northern part of Mongolia, investigated by Kozlov. The tumuli
were the burial place of Hun chiefs, the Huns having formed at the end
of the third century B.C. a vast nomadic empire, which included the
lands of Mongolia, western China, and part of Central Asia. The Hun
tumuli at Noin-Ula date from the beginning of the Christian era. Room
366 is devoted entirely to items belonging to the time of Jenghiz-Khan's
empire; what attracts most interest here is the "Jenghiz Stone", a very
ancient relic of Mongolian writing. It is a granite stele with a text and
was erected in 1225 at the order of Jenghiz in honour of his nephew
Isunke. Of further interest are some architectural details- stone dragon
statues and roof from a thirteenth-fourteenth century palace belonging
to a relative of Jenghiz-Khan. The ruins of the palace, situated five kilo-
metres from the village of Konduy in the province of Chita, were ex-
cavated in 1957 by a joint expedition of scholars from the USSR and the
Mongolian People's Republic. In the third room (365) there are ex-
amples of the Mongolian art of the sixteenth to nineteenth century-paint-
ing, sculpture and craft work.
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