For the past 800 years, human beings have been faced with one unresolved puzzle – the burial place of Genghis Khan. This is a question has found its way into the 21st century and now technologists claim that we can use satellites to finally find answers.
The Mongolian ruler is one of the most feared historical figures who led from 1162 to 1227. He was raised as a humble child and grew up to establish one of the most iconic empires in history. His campaign started off by uniting the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian plateau whom he used to conquer large parts of China and central Asia. Even after his death, his descendants expanded the empire’s coverage penetrating to places as far as Poland, Korea, Vietnam and Syria, reports History.
Genghis Khan superb empire
At the peak of its existence, the Mongols were in charge of 11 to 12 million contiguous square miles, an area about the size of Africa. With each Genghis Khan, there were hundreds if not thousands who were slaughtered for opposing him. But he was a considerate leader and allowed the freedom to worship, abolished torture, established the first international postal system and encouraged trade. His death happened in 1227 during a military campaign against the Chinese kingdom of Xi Xia. Historians are yet to discover his final resting place up to this date.
But now there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel as a satellite may be used to do exactly that.
Mr Har-Noy set out on a mission to locate the final resting place of the Mongol Empire founder. To help him out with the expedition, a satellite imagery firm DigitalGlobe gave him some imagery of the potential areas to lookout for.
These are photos shot from space and there are plenty of them. No person knows the tomb’s appearance, making it a difficult task to spot a location to begin the search.
This prompted Mr Har-Noy to crowd source for some clues.
He made three visits to Mongolia so as to conduct investigation on what he terms the photographs “anomalies.”
Will we find the tomb?
Is there a likelihood of the anomalies being one of the burial sites? No – he refutes, but adds that he encountered some “ancient archaeological sites that are still in need of investigation.”
His experience throughout the search motivated him to create TomNod – a crowd sourcing platform that offered satellite imagery from DigitalGlobal to people running their own projects. This firm was eventually bought by DigitalGlobal.
This is just one of the many examples in which complex, high-resolution satellite images have been given to scientists, amateurs, governments and businesses through cloud tools that have the potential of managing these huge data files.
Teams are working together using the satellite imageries to spot the location of ancient tombs. Soon enough, we may know the actual burial place of the Mongolian ruler who died as a result of health complications inflicted by a horse accident. He died on August 18, 1227, just before the Xi Xia were crushed.
