chers). By this time, however, there already existed some orthodox Buddhist works of Tibetan origin (for example, Mi-la ras-pa and Sgam-po-pa); and from the 13th century onward, under the impetus given by the prolixity of religious houses and orders, there were produced such lengthy and numerous collections of historical and biographical works, treatises and commentaries, and liturgy and religious drama that Tibetan literature must be one of the most extensive in the world. Just as in the European Middle Ages there was little secular literature worth the name, so there is none in Tibetan except for a great epic (Rgyal-po Ge-sar dgra'dul gyi rtogs-pa brjod-pa, “The Great Deeds of King Gesar, Destroyer of Enemies”) that recounts the exploits of the king and magic hero Gesar. This work grew through the centuries, assimilating whatever material pleased the fancy of the bards.After the craft of printing from incised wood blocks was introduced from China, possibly in the 14th century, certain monasteries became famous printing houses. This form of printing continued until the Chinese invasion in 1959. Manuscripts and block-printed books are always of elongated shape, thus imitating the form of ancient Indian palm-leaf manuscripts. There are considerable collections in some European libraries—London, Paris, and Rome—but few translations are available, because of the small number of scholars of Tibet.Despite the phonetic changes in the spoken dialects since the script was fixed, the Tibetans (Tibetan language) have never changed their system of writing. Thus, once the literary language and the various types of script have been mastered, the reader has immediate access to all literature of the 7th to the 20th centuries, though changes in style and vocabulary have left many obscurities in the earliest works. Since there is no modern style of writing, the 20th-century colloquial language can be written only in the traditional medium (as though, for example, one had to write modern Italian with Latin spellings and grammatical forms); the Tibetans themselves compose even personal letters in a conventional literary style.David Llewelyn SnellgroveMongolian (Mongolia) literatureMongolian literature begins with the Secret History of the Mongols, an Imperial chronicle dealing with the life and times of Genghis Khan and his successors, written about 1240. Üligers, orally transmitted epic stories in verse, form the bulk of native literary expression. Highly stylized, these tales relate adventures of legendary heroes and villains. In spite of their great length (sometimes more than 20,000 lines), they are recited from memory by bards. Like other epics, such as the Greek Iliad and the Roman Aeneid, Mongolian epics are genuine artistic creations. The verses alliterate in couplets or quatrains, are seven or eight syllables long, and are characterized by parallelism. In addition to Genghis Khan, the epic stories tell of heroes such as Erintsen Mergen, Engke Bolod Khan, and Gesar Khan (the last of Tibetan origin). The villain of the epics is the many-headed monster, the manggus, whom the hero always defeats in the end.Historical chronicles represent another important form of indigenous literature. Usually beginning with the creation of the world from primordial elements, they attempt to link the Indian and Tibetan rulers with the house of Genghis Khan. Such are the Altan tobchi (“The Golden Button”), composed about 1655 and giving a world history down to Ligdan Khan (1604–34); another Altan tobchi (written about 100 years later); and the Erdeni-yin tobchi (“The Jeweled Button”), written in 1662 by Saghang Sechen.Mongolian written literature was profoundly influenced by the introduction of Buddhism about the end of the 1500s. Earlier surviving written works (on stone or paper) are mostly official documents; and no oral epics were written down until the late 1880s. The advent of Buddhism prompted translations of its sacred writings and related works. A Buddhist canonical collection, the Bka'-'gyur (or Kanjur; comprising the Sūtra and Vinaya of the 