ART REVIEW : ‘Genghis Khan’ Relives Ancient Glory : The Inner Mongolia exhibition at the Museum of National History is impressive and enlightening in its scope.

The 13th-Century equivalent of the bogyman or the threat of nuclear war was something called “The Mongol Hordes.” If a frustrated mother in China, Russia, India or Iran wanted to scare the kids off to bed, all she had to say was, “If you don’t shape up Genghis Khan will get you.”

China’s legendary Great Wall was built to stop invasions by Genghis and his predecessors from the northern steppes. It didn’t work. Mongol soldiers shot arrows backward from their mounts with deadly precision. Some pierced armor, others whistled signals. Cavalrymen could ride for days without dismounting, subsisting by sucking blood from wounds in their horses’ necks. In 1264 Genghis’ successor Kublai Khan established the Mongol capital at Beijing.

Before he died in 1227, at around age 65, Genghis Khan conquered much of the known world. Stretching north from Korea to Hungary, it was the largest empire that ever existed. Barbarously cruel, brilliantly gifted, loyal and sometimes wise, his name means “perfect warrior.”

Now he lays siege to Los Angeles in the form of a traveling exhibition at the Museum of Natural History titled “Genghis Khan: Treasures From Inner Mongolia,” including some 200 objects. Most have never before been seen out of Mongolia. Quite a few are so newly discovered or so long forgotten, they have never even been seen in China.

The show was organized by the museum in partnership with the People’s Republic of China, organized by Adam T. Kessler, a Los Angeles-based archeologist specializing in blue and white porcelain. Kessler spent the past several years surveying archeological sites in Inner Mongolia, one of five autonomous regions of China.

The fruit of his sometimes Indiana Jones-esque adventures is an exhibition with two faces, one impressive, the other enlightening. It’s being promoted as a blockbuster treasure show that could be slightly misleading for anybody nurtured on glitzy extravaganzas like “Treasures of Tutankhamen” or “The Chinese Exhibition.”

It is a scholarly exercise that ends chronologically with Genghis Khan and the Yuan dynasty. The first star of this show is Ordos Man, a prehistoric Mongolian that proved that Homo sapiens existed on the steppes some 35,000 years ago.

What can be learned from such a vastness of time? For one thing, the catalogue suggests that many of these inscribed artifacts prove their types to have earlier origins than presently indicated by conventional museum dating. More philosophically, the show suggests common cultural roots for the Chinese and Mongolians who have historically been about as chummy as the Serbs and the Croats. Just who invented what will probably always remain a poetically apt mystery. Real people won’t confine themselves to racial or social categories. They intermingle. Nowhere is that clearer than here, where the ancient silk route was the trading highway between East and West.

If all that makes the show appear a kind of thinking man’s blockbuster, those who like to go to museums to have their eyeballs entertained will not come away unrewarded either. They can marvel at everything from ferocious weaponry to textiles so old and delicate they suggest a wistful princess from Shangri-La. People who like the museum’s dioramas will get a kick out of the tableau of Mongolians in native costume standing next to their yurt.

You can see the beginnings of the famous ceremonial bronze wine vessels of dynastic China in a small, energetically squat gui that can be no more recent than the 4th Century BC. A shallow ewer from the same period is not so unusual in its stylized animal motifs, but almost humorously winsome in its humanoid legs.

Pseudo-sophisticates like to jibe at the gold objects in such shows, but the fact is artisans lavished their best skills on works in the immortal metal. Here is a headdress from the Warring States Period that ended about 200 BC, which looks like a crown in two parts. The headband depicts horses and tigers. The skullcap bears a turquoise-headed eagle wired together so he moved with the wearer. Even more fascinating pictorially are a couple of gold plaques depicting fighting animals. They seem to be observed from above as if the artist watched from horse or hill.

A hands-down highlight here is a funerary room from the Liao dynasty of the 10th to 12th centuries. It centers on a gilded bronze funerary mask of wonderful peace and pathos. But here the seduction of gold gives way to the astonishment of seeing tomb furniture and a painted coffin of wood that may be almost 1,000 years old. The climate of the steppes has preserved these wooden objects long after they would have crumbled to sawdust elsewhere.

There is so much aesthetic gratification here it’s enough to make the art crowd change museums. Ceramics not only show the vigorous intermingling of Asian and Islamic styles, they produce a variety of effects from lyric delicacy to the power of unleashed nature. A potbellied Jun -ware censer from the Southern Song dynasty looks as solid as a bowling ball, but it’s covered with a lavender glaze that manages to suggest both moving air and roiling water. It’s an effect a modern artist would kill to master. It’s testament to the genius of these ancient civilizations.

* Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Blvd . ; through May 22, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (213) 744-3466.