A meeting of civilisations: The mystery of China's celtic mummies

[icymist]

The discovery of European corpses thousands of miles away suggests a hitherto unknown connection between East and West in the Bronze Age. Clifford Coonan reports from Urumqi
Published: 28 August 2006

Solid as a warrior of the Caledonii tribe, the man's hair is reddish brown flecked with grey, framing high cheekbones, a long nose, full lips and a ginger beard. When he lived three thousand years ago, he stood six feet tall, and was buried wearing a red twill tunic and tartan leggings. He looks like a Bronze Age European. In fact, he's every inch a Celt. Even his DNA says so.

But this is no early Celt from central Scotland. This is the mummified corpse of Cherchen Man, unearthed from the scorched sands of the Taklamakan Desert in the far-flung region of Xinjiang in western China, and now housed in a new museum in the provincial capital of Urumqi. In the language spoken by the local Uighur people in Xinjiang, "Taklamakan" means: "You come in and never come out."

The extraordinary thing is that Cherchen Man was found - with the mummies of three women and a baby - in a burial site thousands of miles to the east of where the Celts established their biggest settlements in France and the British Isles.

DNA testing confirms that he and hundreds of other mummies found in Xinjiang's Tarim Basin are of European origin. We don't know how he got there, what brought him there, or how long he and his kind lived there for. But, as the desert's name suggests, it is certain that he never came out.

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[xchrom]

1. this is the most wonderful story.

talk about lost -- this crew along with other tribesman making there way from the subcontinent wo eventually land in france, england, etc -- turns back some how and lands in the desert just outside china proper.

it's wonderful and it's a great picture of how people wander all over the place.

the plaid fabrics really get me going.

[JuniperLea]

2. Love it! Thanks for posting! n/t

[Odin2005]

3. Whoever wrote that article is an idiot.

The Taklamakan Mummies were the ancestors of an ancient ethnic group called the Tocharians. the similarities with the Tocharians and the Celts are just thier shared Indo-European cultural and genetic heiritage, The Tocharians are no more closely related to the Celts then they are to any other Northern European Indo-European culture group like the Germanics and Slavs













The Tocharians moved into NW China before the Celts existed

[brook]

4. Absolutely fascinating.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

[depakid]

5. Very cool-

"Best preserved of all the corpses is Yingpan Man, known as the Handsome Man, a 2,000-year-old Caucasian mummy discovered in 1995.

He had a gold foil death mask - a Greek tradition - covering his blond, bearded face, and wore elaborate golden embroidered red and maroon wool garments with images of fighting Greeks or Romans."

[semillama]

6. Another mummy in the news, from Mongolia

http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060824/sc_afp/germanymongolia_060824181854

This one is a Scythian.


I too think the term "celt" is bandied about too much, especially considering that the people themselves never called themselves that.

Still, the important thing about these mummies is that they show an early east-west trade connection, far earlier than what was thought in the past.

In all, I can't help but think about the Caucasian bandit in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and admire that little touch of authenticity it led to the film, although most people probably thought it was a blooper! Not that I'm saying the dude was supposed to be a Caucasian native of Western China, just that it wouldn't be that surprising to find a wandering white guy out east, so to speak.

[htuttle]

7. When I first saw the pictures of these years ago...

...I just couldn't stop giggling when I saw the hat one of the women wore. It was a tall, black conical hat, identical to the one you'd see on a classic Halloween witch.

"I guess witches really DID wear hats like that!" was all I could think...

[Odin2005]

8. I got a kick out of the which hat, too

I mean Jesus, It looks like something out the the Wizard of OZ. :rofl:

[Odin2005]

9. Here's the Wiki Article on the mummies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies

The Tarim mummies are a series of Caucasoid mummies which have been excavated in the Tarim Basin (Eastern Central Asia, today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China), and dated to the 2nd and 1st millennium BC. Some tests <1> have found the mummies to contain European genes, confirming the earlier suggestion that the mummies are of Indo-European descent giving further support to the idea of migrations of speakers of Indo-European languages at a very early period, suggesting the possibility of cultural exchange with the Chinese world since around 1st millennium BC.

And the Article on the Tocharians: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians

There is evidence both from the mummies and Chinese writings that many of them had blonde or red hair and blue eyes, characteristics also found in present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Central Asia, due to the populations' high genetic diversity. This suggests the possibility that they were part of an early migration of speakers of Indo-European languages that ended in what is now the Tarim Basin in western China. According to a controversial theory, early invasions by Turkic speakers may have pushed Tocharian speakers out of the Tarim Basin and into modern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and northern India.