WASHINGTON: Roll over George Washington, and tell Tom Jefferson the news: Genghis Khan is the new father of democracy.

Well, not quite.

It’s true the notorious conqueror’s (1162-1227) reputation is more cemented in Western minds as a marauder and village-burner than as a progenitor of representative government. But according to a new exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History, the unifier of the Mongol peoples and scourge of Europe and Asia had a more populist side.

“Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan” takes an intriguing point of view: that the country’s recent, 11th-hour embrace of democracy — the formerly Communist state only ratified its new constitution in 1992 — is actually a reconnection with principles first introduced eight centuries ago during the reign of Genghis Khan.

While curator Paula Sabloff is quick to remind visitors that the leader ran a military state, not a democracy, “Modern Mongolia” makes the case that Genghis Khan introduced some form of what the Western world sees as the pillars of democracy several years before the signing of the Magna Carta.

The structure of the exhibition, which takes an in-depth look at only about the last 100 years of history, is tripartite.

Beginning around the turn of the 20th century, “Modern Mongolia” moves from the tail end of the country’s existence as a Chinese colony to its break from Chinese control in 1921.

It was then, with the military and political assistance of the Russian Bolshevik party, that Mongolia became an independent nation — and the second communist country in the world.

The third and final section examines the Mongolia of today, a mixed nation of nomadic herdsmen and urbanites, since the call for the end of Communist rule in the late 1980s.

Cleverly, the exhibition uses a series of yurts or, in Mongolian, “gers” (the round, tentlike structures that many central Asian nomads still live in and which can be disassembled in under an hour) to illustrate how Mongolian culture has evolved over the past century.

One full ger and two cutaway half-gers have been set up with stoves, furniture, clothing, toys, and secular and religious decorations to trace the profound changes in spiritual practice, dress, economy and lifestyle that have occurred since the early 1900s.

“Modern Mongolia” paints a lively portrait of a neophyte democracy that planted the seeds of modern Mongolian politics nearly a millennium ago.—Dawn/The LAT/WP News Service.