The Jami' al-Tavarikh of Rashid al-Din (d. 1318) was part of the Mongol Ilkhans’ effort to justify themselves as rulers in the Middle East. In the spiritual and political vacuum left by the end of the caliphate and under pressure from indigenous Iranian administrative elites to adopt local cultural signifiers, the Ilkhans embraced both Islamic and Iranian cultural traditions in their effort to consolidate the tenuous hold of a conquest dynasty. The dynastic history that Rashid al-Din compiled for his Mongol patrons cleverly integrates the family of Genghis Khan into the historiography of the Middle East. His world history similarly serves as a site of dynastic and imperial propaganda, frequently expressed through geographic and ethnographic notes about the regions of Western Asia. This paper examines one section of Rashid al-Din’s world history to show how he deploys his own scientific interests to explain the world in support of his patrons' political claims. Rashid al-Din’s pre-Islamic history has never been edited or translated because of circumstances surrounding its preservation. However, it provides the context for some of Rashid al-Din’s most creative use of the historical record. This paper begins with a discussion of the various impulses that inspired historical writing in the Islamic world to the time of Rashid al-Din. It then offers several examples from Rashid al-Din’s pre-Islamic history to show how his work was not just a stale rehearsal of previous accounts, but a reimagination of the past with the aim of justifying the Ilkhans' place in the world. Rashid al-Din’s pre-Islamic history sheds light on contemporary domestic and foreign policy concerns of the Ilkhanid state and helps explain why its author’s historical model quickly became obsolete.