Big Jilm

gently-tongued-by-stephen-fry:

Stephen
Well, the thing is, in Mongolian tradition, er, when a great ruler like that – and there was no great ruler as great as Genghis Khan obviously – he had to be anonymous. No one could know. So this gave them a real problem. According to Marco Polo, 20,000 people were killed to keep his burial place secret.

All the slaves who excavated the grave were killed by soldiers, and then all the soldiers who killed the slaves were killed – that’s how bad it was – until they suddenly realised they were in danger of killing everybody who knew where the grave was, so what they did – this is really peculiar – they realised, right, camels have got long memories. Okay. So what they – this is really unpleasant – a suckling baby camel they killed in front of it’s mother by the grave where they were going to bury Genghis Khan, right? And then they took the mother away and they buried the baby camel next to Genghis Khan. So that’s who’s to the right of Genghis Khan.