- How could an ancient mummy found in remote China have
red hair and caucasian features? The answer has sparked a battle over smuggled
DNA, Western imperialism, and history as we know it.
-
- Until he first encountered the mummies of Xinjiang,
Victor Mair was known mainly as a brilliant, if eccentric, translator
of obscure Chinese texts, a fine sinologist with a few controversial ideas
about the origins of Chinese culture, and a scathing critic prone to penning
stern reviews of sloppy scholarship. Mair's pronouncements on the striking
resemblance between some characters inscribed on the Dead Sea Scrolls
and early Chinese symbols were intensely debated by researchers. His magnum
opus on the origins of Chinese writing, a work he had been toiling away
at for years in his office at the University of Pennsylvania, was eagerly
anticipated. But in 1988, something profound happened to Mair, something
that would touch a nerve in both the East and the West, raising troubling
questions about race, racism, and the nature of history itself.
-
- That year, Mair had led a group of American travellers
through a small museum in Ürümchi, the capital of China's remote
northwesternmost province, Xinjiang. Mair had visited the museum several
times before, but on this occasion a new sign pointed to a back room.
"It said something like 'Mummy Exhibition,' " recalled Mair,
"and I had the strangest kind of weird feeling because it was very
dark. There were curtains, I think. Going in, you felt like you were entering
another world."
-
- In a glass display case so poorly lit that visitors
needed to use flashlights to look at its contents, Mair spied a bizarre
sight. It was the outstretched body of a man just under six feet tall,
dressed in an elegantly tailored wool tunic and matching pants, the colour
of red wine. Covering the man's legs were striped leggings in riotous
shades of yellow, red, and blue, attire so outrageous it could have come
straight from the pages of Dr. Seuss. But it was not so much the man's
clothing that first riveted Mair's attention. It was the face. It was
narrow and pale ivory in colour, with high cheekbones, full lips, and a
long nose. Locks of ginger-coloured hair and a greying beard framed the
parchment-like skin. He looked very Caucasian: indeed he resembled someone
Mair knew intimately. "He looked like my brother Dave sleeping there,
and that's what really got me. I just kept looking at him, looking at
his closed eyes. I couldn't tear myself away, and I went around his glass
case again and again and again. I stayed in there for several hours. I
was supposed to be leading our group. I just forgot about them for two
or three hours."
-
- Local archaeologists had come across the body a few
years earlier while excavating in the Tarim Basin, an immense barren of
sand and rock in southern Xinjiang. The region was not the kind of place
that generally attracted well-dressed strangers. At the height of summer,
temperatures in the basin soared to a scorching 125 degrees Fahrenheit,
without so much as a whisper of humidity, and in winter, they frequently
plunged far below freezing. The desert at the basin's heart was one of
the most parched places on Earth, and its very name, the Taklamakhan,
was popularly said to mean "go in and you won't come out." Over
the years, the Chinese government had found various uses for all this
bleakness. It had set aside part of it as a nuclear testing range, conducting
its blasts far from prying eyes. It had also built labour camps there,
certain that no prisoner in his right mind would try to escape.
-
- The Taklamakhan's merciless climate had one advantage,
however. It tended to preserve human bodies. The archaeologists who discovered
the stranger in the striped leggings marvelled at the state of his cadaver.
He looked almost alive. They named him Cherchen Man, after the county
in which he was found, and when they set about carbon dating his body,
they discovered that he was very, very old. Indeed, the tests showed that
he had probably roamed the Tarim Basin as early as the eleventh century
bc. When Mair learned this, he was astonished. If the mummy was indeed
European in origin, this would undermine one of the keystones of Chinese
history.
-
- Scholars had long believed that the first contacts between
China and Europe occurred relatively late in world history -- sometime
shortly after the mid-second century bc, when the Chinese emperor Wudi
sent an emissary west. According to contemporary texts, Wudi had grown
tired of the marauding Huns, a nomadic people whose homeland lay in what
is now southwest Mongolia. The Huns were continually raiding the richest
villages of his empire, stealing its grain and making off with its women.
So Wudi decided to propose a military alliance with a kingdom far to the
west, beyond Mongolia, in order to crush a common foe. In 139 bc, the emperor
sent one of his attendants, Zhang Qian, on the long trek across Asia.
Zhang Qian failed to obtain the alliance his master coveted, but the route
he took became part of the legendary Silk Road to Europe. In the years
that followed, hundreds of trading caravans and Caucasians plied this
route, carrying bundles of ivory, gold, pomegranates, safflowers, jade,
furs, porcelain, and silk between Rome and the ancient Chinese capital
of Xi'an.
-
- Nationalists in China were very fond of this version
of history. It strongly suggested that Chinese civilization, which had
flowered long before Zhang Qian headed west, must have blossomed in isolation,
free of European influence, and it cast early Chinese achievements in
a particularly glorious light. In one popular book, The Cradle of the
East, Chinese historian Ping-ti Ho proudly claimed that the hallmarks
of early Chinese civilization -- including the chariot, bronze metallurgy,
and a system of writing -- were all products of Chinese genius alone.
According to Ping-ti Ho, those living in the ancient Celestial Kingdom
had never stooped to borrowing the ideas of others and their inventive
genius surpassed that of the West.
-
- Mair, a professor of Chinese in the department of Asian
and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, had long
doubted this version of history. He suspected that the Chinese had encountered
Westerners from Europe long before the emperor Wudi dreamed up his military
alliance. Several early Chinese books, for example, described tall men
with green eyes and red hair that resembled the fur of rhesus monkeys.
Most scholars dismissed these accounts as legendary, but Mair wasn't so
sure. He thought they were descriptions of Caucasian men. During his studies
of Chinese mythology, he had found stories strikingly similar to those
in early Greek and Roman tales. The parallels were too frequent to be mere
coincidences. And he kept stumbling across words in early Chinese texts
that seemed to have been borrowed from ancient languages far to the west.
Among these were the words for dog, cow, goose, grape, and wheel. But
though Mair repeatedly argued the case for early trade and contact between
China and the West, he had no hard archaeological evidence of contact,
and no one took him very seriously. "People would laugh at me. I
said that East and West were communicating back in the Bronze Age and
people just said, 'Oh yeah? Interesting, but prove it.' "
-
- Never for a moment did Mair expect to find the kind
of flesh-and-blood vindication that Cherchen Man promised. Still, he was
wary of a hoax. The man's tailored woollen clothing, with all the complex
textile technology it implied, was unlike anything Mair had ever seen
from ancient Asia, let alone a remote outpost like Xinjiang. The mummy
itself seemed almost too perfectly preserved to be true. "I thought
it was part of a wax museum or something, a ploy to get more tourists.
How could they have such advanced textile technology three thousand years
ago? I couldn't put it into any historical context. It didn't make any
sense whatsoever."
-
- Mair began asking his Chinese colleagues about Cherchen
Man. He learned that European scholars had unearthed several similar bodies
in the Tarim Basin almost a century before but had regarded them as little
more than oddities. In 1895, for example, the British-Hungarian scholar
Marc Aurel Stein exhumed a few Caucasian bodies while searching for antiquities
and old Central Asian texts in the Tarim Basin. "It was a strange
sensation," noted Stein in his later writings, "to look down
on figures which but for the parched skin seemed like those of men asleep."
However, Stein and the Europeans who followed him were far more interested
in classical-era ruins than in mummified bodies, and failed to investigate
further.
-
- Early Chinese archaeologists in the region also came
across some of the bodies, but they were no more interested than the Europeans.
They thought it likely that a few ancient foreigners had strayed into
this outlying territory of ancient China by chance. But in the 1970s,
while surveying along proposed routes for pipelines and rail lines in
Xinjiang, Chinese archaeologists happened upon scores of the parched cadavers,
so many that they couldn't excavate them all. Most of the bodies were
very Caucasian-looking -- a major discovery that went unreported outside
a small circle of archaeologists in China. The mummies had blond, red,
or auburn hair. They had deep-set eyes, long noses, thick beards, and
tall, often gangly, frames. Some wore woollens of what looked like Celtic
plaid and sported strangely familiar forms of Western haberdashery: conical
black witches' hats, tam-o'-shanters, and Robin Hood caps. Others were
dressed only in fur moccasins, woollen wraps, and feathered caps, and
buried with small baskets of grain. This last group, it transpired, contained
the oldest of the Caucasians. According to radiocarbon-dating tests, they
roamed the northwestern corner of China in the twenty-first century bc,
the height of the Bronze Age, just as Mair had long been suggesting.
-
- Not only had they wandered the Tarim Basin, they had
also settled there for a very long time. Cherchen Man had walked the Tarim
deserts in the eleventh century bc, a millennium after the earliest Caucasians.
Moreover, murals from the region depict people with fair hair and long
noses in the seventh century ad, while some local texts of the same era
are inscribed in a lost European language known as Tocharian. If the writers
were descendants of the Caucasian-looking people who arrived in Xinjiang
nearly 2,800 years earlier, one can only conclude that this was a very
successful colony.
-
- Convinced now of the authenticity of the mummies, Mair
began puzzling over their meaning. Who were these ancient invaders, he
wondered, and where exactly had they come from?
-
- Victor Mair is a big, rugged- looking man in his mid-fifties,
a shade over six foot one, with size-fourteen feet and the clean-cut good
looks that one often sees in former pro-football players. The American-born
son of an Austrian immigrant, he stands nearly a head taller than most
of his colleagues in China, a physical advantage that he often tries to
minimize in group photographs by stepping down off a curb or onto a lower
step. He has short, neatly combed grey hair, a large aquiline nose, observant
blue eyes, and a jesting wit he uses to particularly good effect, laughter
being the best way of bridging any awkward cultural gap. He neither smokes
nor drinks, and never did, and is, by his own admission, a born leader.
Possessed of an uncommon self-confidence, which sometimes comes across
as arrogance, he is also a man of many surprising quirks.
-
- I got my first glimpse of this quirkiness in a downpour
in Shanghai, in June of 1999. I had arranged to meet Mair in the Chinese
city, where, eleven years after first seeing the mummies, he was hoping
to begin a new round of dna testing on them. In our early phone conversations,
Mair had told me that he would be travelling with a geneticist who hoped
to take tissue samples from the Tarim Basin mummies stored at the Natural
History Museum in Shanghai.
-
- It sounded as if everything had been arranged. But as
I quickly discovered upon my arrival in Shanghai, Mair was still a long
way from gathering the samples. Housed in a small guest house for foreign
lecturers at Fudan University, he strode the hallways like a weary giant.
He had just spent two full days in meetings with his Chinese colleagues,
trying to hammer out a deal. But the talks were stalling. To clear his
head, Mair invited me to join him for a walk. In the downpour, I struggled
to keep up with him, dodging flocks of cyclists in their shiny yellow
rain slickers, and black pools of nearly invisible potholes. Mair wove
around them absently. Instead of a raincoat, he wore two long-sleeved plaid
shirts, one inside the other. He didn't seem to care that he was getting
soaked.
-
- Nothing, he explained as we walked in the rain, was
ever simple when it came to the Xinjiang mummies. Dead as they had been
for thousands of years, they still managed to stir strong feelings among
the living. In China, a restive ethnic minority known as the Uyghurs had
stepped forward to claim the mummies as their own. Numbering nearly seven
million, the Uyghurs viewed the Tarim Basin as their homeland. Largely
Muslim, they had become a subjugated people in the late nineteenth century.
During the 1930s and 1940s, their leaders managed to found two brief republics
that later fell under Chinese control. But Uyghur guerillas continued
fighting stubbornly, until their last leader was executed in 1961. Since
then, the Chinese government has dealt harshly with any sign of separatist
sentiment. Amnesty International's 1999 report for Xinjiang made grim
reading. "Scores of Uyghurs, many of them political prisoners, have
been sentenced to death and executed in the past two years," it noted.
"Others, including women, are alleged to have been killed by the
security forces in circumstances which appear to constitute extra-judicial
executions."
-
- Still the Uyghurs refused to give up, and when they
caught wind of mummies being excavated in the Tarim Basin, they were keenly
interested. Historians had long suggested that the Uyghurs were relative
latecomers to the region, migrating from the plains of Mongolia less than
two thousand years ago. But Uyghur leaders were skeptical. They believed
that their farmer ancestors had always lived along the thin but fertile
river valleys of the Tarim, and as such they embraced the mummies as their
kin -- even though many scholars, Mair included, suspected that Uyghur
invaders had slaughtered or driven out most of the mummies' true descendants
and assimilated the few that remained. Still, in Xinjiang, Uyghur leaders
picked one of the oldest mummies as an emblem of their cause. They named
her, with some poetic licence, the Beauty of Loulan and began printing
posters with her picture. That she was so Caucasian-looking was not a
problem in Uyghur eyes: some Uyghurs had Caucasian features. People in
Ürümchi, the province's capital, were captivated. Musicians
began writing songs about her that subtly alluded to the separatist cause.
-
- This sudden outburst of mummy nationalism alarmed the
Chinese government. Before long, everything related to the Xinjiang mummies
was considered a matter of state security. No one in government was in
any hurry to authorize a genetic test on them. If the mummies' dna revealed
even a partial link to the Uyghurs -- a not unlikely prospect, given the
Uyghurs' mixed heritage -- it would further strengthen the separatists'
claims to the region in the eyes of the world. This was something the
Chinese wished to avoid, especially after the international condemnation
of their treatment of another ethnic minority, in Tibet. Adding to the
problem was the Chinese sensitivity to any matter touching on the Tarim
Basin. Beyond the wispy river valleys and beneath the Tarim's bleak desert
plains lay immense oil fields. According to Chinese geologists, they contained
nearly 18 billion tons of crude, six times more than the known reserves
of the United States.
-
- Chinese officials were not the only ones worried about
genetic testing. Western scholars fretted, too. Some hated the thought
that Europeans could have succeeded in planting settlements so far into
Asia thousands of years ago. Not only did such a migration threaten the
Chinese version of history; it seemed vaguely to smack of ancient colonialism,
a notion that many historians abhor. "There's a lot of Western guilt
about imperialism and sensitivity about dominating other people,"
said Mair. "It's a really deep subconscious thing, and there are
a lot of people in the West who are hypersensitive about saying our culture
is superior in any way, or that our culture gets around or extends itself.
So there are people who want to make sure that we don't make mistakes
in our interpretation of the past."
-
- Certainly, the presence of ancient Europeans in China
-- even in its outer reaches -- could be twisted and distorted to political
ends: people with racial agendas had long been searching for just such
evidence. During the 1930s, for example, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler
had taken an unhealthy interest in Genghis Khan, the most famous leader
of the Mongols, who in the thirteenth century had conquered vast stretches
of Central Asia, from southern Siberia to Tibet, and from Korea to the
Aral Sea. "Our strength," observed Hitler in a thundering speech
to the commanders of Germany's armed forces in 1939, "is in our quickness
and brutality. Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by
his own will and with a gay heart. History sees in him only a great state
builder. . . ."
-
- But Hitler's admiration of the ancient Mongol presented
a serious problem for a party that placed great stock in racial purity.
Genghis Khan, after all, was not Caucasian. He belonged to an Asian race
that the Nazis heartily despised as inferior. Himmler, who fancied himself
a historian, finally came up with a solution based on pure whimsy. He
told one anthropologist that Genghis Khan and his elite Mongol followers
were actually Caucasians, descended from the citizens of Atlantis who
had decamped from their mythical island home before it sank, cataclysmically,
beneath the waves. These Mongol Caucasians, Himmler claimed, were a special
kind of Caucasian: German blood flowed through their veins.
-
- One recent book suggests that Himmler went so far as
to request a collection of mummies from Central Asia. But Mair doubted
it. "In all of my reading of works emanating from these expeditions,"
he said, "I have never come across any indication that they brought
such corpses back to Europe."
-
- Even so, the bizarre racial ideas of the Nazis troubled
Western scholars. They worried about where genetic testing of the Xinjiang
mummies might lead, and worse still, about who might ultimately try to
profit from the research. Testing the mummies was like taking a stroll
through a minefield: there was no telling what might explode in the traveller's
face.
-
- "It would be especially bad news if any of the
mummies were German," observed Mair later, in the guest house where
he was staying. "They've had two world wars in which they were the
perpetrators and if any of these mummies were even remotely Germanic,
forget it. People just wouldn't want to talk about it."
-
- As amazed as Mair had been by the mummies back in 1988,
he hadn't had the time to study them. In September, 1991, however, he
picked up a newspaper and read about the discovery of a frozen, partially
preserved corpse of a 5,300-year-old man in a glacier along the Austrian-Italian
border. This became Europe's famous iceman, known as Ötzi.
-
- The news startled Mair. His own father had grown up
in Pfaffenhoffen, a small Austrian village just a short distance away
from where scientists had dug the iceman from a glacier. His father's
family had grazed their herds in the same alpine meadows where Ötzi
had probably wandered. The iceman, he realized, might well be a distant
relative. Might he also have had some connection to the ancestors of Cherchen
Man, who looked so much like Mair's own brother? "I saw the headlines
and I jerked," Mair recalls. "I looked at that iceman and I
said, 'These guys out in the Tarim are just like him.' One's in ice and
the others are in sand. It didn't take half a second."
-
- Austrian scientists planned on performing sophisticated
scientific tests, including dna analysis, on the iceman. It occurred to
Mair that similar tests on Cherchen Man and his kin could do much to trace
the ancestry of the mummies. He immediately wrote to Wang Binghua, one
of the foremost archaeologists in Xinjiang, outlining the project that
was forming in his mind. He also called Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, a distinguished
geneticist at Stanford University who was an expert on ancient dna. Cavalli-Sforza
instantly saw the possibilities. He recommended that Mair contact one
of his former students, Paolo Francalacci, at the University of Sassari,
in Italy. Mair did just that, and working closely with Wang over the next
months he managed to hammer out a deal with the Chinese goverment. Beijing
finally gave the team a green light in 1993.
-
- Francalacci thought it best to collect samples from
mummies left in the ground, as opposed to bodies already stored in museums.
This would reduce the possibility of contamination with modern dna. So
in Ürümchi, he set off, along with Mair and Wang Binghua, for
the well-documented grave sites found during the Chinese pipeline and
railway surveys of the 1970s and in archaeological studies since. Dozens
of these mummies, many lying in relatively shallow underground tombs, had
been left alone because of the enormous cost of curating them.
-
- At each chosen grave, the young geneticist donned a
face mask and a pair of latex gloves, and docked tiny pieces of muscle,
skin, and bone from the mummies, often choosing tissue along the inside
of the thighs or under the armpits because these regions had been less
exposed to the excavators. He sealed each sample in a plastic vial. After
several days, he had collected twenty-five specimens from eleven individuals,
enough for a modest study. But there was little time for celebration.
In a stunning about-face, Chinese authorities suddenly demanded Francalacci's
samples, refusing to allow them out of the country.
-
- Then a mysterious thing happened. Just shortly before
Mair departed for home, a Chinese colleague turned up with a surreptitious
gift. He slipped five of the confiscated, sealed samples into Mair's pocket.
These had come from two mummies. The grateful Mair passed the samples
on to Francalacci, who began toiling in Italy to amplify the dna.
-
- For months, the Italian geneticist laboured on the mummy
samples, trying to extract enough dna for sequencing. The nucleic acids
had badly degraded, but still, Francalacci kept trying various methods,
and in 1995 he called Mair with a piece of good news. He had finally retrieved
enough dna to sequence, and his preliminary results were intriguing. The
two Xinjiang mummies belonged to the same genetic lineage as most modern-day
Swedes, Finns, Tuscans, Corsicans, and Sardinians.
-
- the genetic studies were promising, but they only whetted
Mair's curiosity. It was not just that Cherchen Man bore an uncanny resemblance
to his own brother Dave (whom he had taken to calling Ur-David), it also
had to do with Mair's own deeply rooted beliefs. "Everything that
I've done," he explained, "even though it's been running all
over the map, it's all been tied into making things accessible to the
everyday guy, the worker. That's what it's all about and that's why I looked
at these mummies. They were just everyday guys, not famous people."
-
- Mair had acquired this outlook at an early age. His
immigrant father, whom he adored and deeply admired, was a lathe operator
for a ball-bearing company in Canton, Ohio. His mother was a poet and
songwriter. Growing up in a working-class family, Mair was continually
reminded of the importance of ordinary people, who sweated on the assembly
lines or who bent over mops and brooms at night. These were the kinds of
people history tended to ignore.
-
- Now, with this same instinct for the common man, Mair
redoubled his efforts to trace the mummies' ancestry. In Xinjiang, a Chinese
colleague had slipped him another parting gift: a swatch of blue, brown,
and white cloth taken from a twelfth-century-bc mummy. The fabric looked
like a piece of Celtic plaid. Mair passed it over to Irene Good, a textile
expert at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Good examined it under
an electron microscope. The style of weave, known as a "two over
two" diagonal twill, bore little resemblance to anything woven by
Asian weavers of the day. (Indeed, it would be almost another two millennia
before women in central China turned out twill cloth on their looms.) But
the weave exactly matched cloth found with the bodies of thirteenth-century-bc
salt miners in Austria. Like the dna samples, the mysterious plaid pointed
straight towards a European homeland.
-
- Excited by the textile connection, Mair organized a
new expedition to Xinjiang with Good, her fellow textile expert Elizabeth
Barber, and her cultural anthropologist husband, Paul Barber. As the two
women pored over the mummies' clothing, Barber examined the bodies themselves,
studying their mummification. Mair hoped this might offer clues to the
origins of the people themselves. But the ancient desert dwellers, he
discovered, had not taken any of the elaborate measures favoured by the
Egyptians or other skilled morticians. Instead, they had relied on nature
for a few simple tricks. In some cases, family members had buried their
dead in salt fields, whose chemistry preserved human flesh like a salted
ham. Often, they had arranged the cadaver so that dry air flowed around
the extremities, swiftly desiccating the flesh. Cherchen Man, for example,
had benefited from both techniques.
-
- Mair, too, assisted in the work. In his spare time,
he translated key Chinese reports on the mummies and published them in
his own journal, The Sino-Platonic Papers. This gave Western archaeologists
access to the scientific findings for the first time. He wanted to make
the mummies the focus of a lively scientific and scholarly investigation.
So he set about organizing a major international scientific conference
on the mummies, bringing leading archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists,
geneticists, geographers, sinologists, historians, ethnologists, climatologists,
and metallurgists to the University of Pennsylvania to discuss their ideas.
After everyone left, Mair dutifully edited and translated two large volumes
of their papers, clarifying their arcane prose until everyone interested
in the field could understand it. "If I have grey hair," he
joked, "it was because I was sitting there slaving over this stuff."
-
- When he had finally finished, he sat down in his office
with a pad of paper and a pen. He sifted through hundreds of studies on
matters as diverse as linguistics, pottery styles, methods of tomb construction,
and metallurgy across Eurasia over the past seven thousand years, searching
for cultures whose core technologies and languages bore clear similarities
to those of the ancient Caucasian cultures of Xinjiang. These he recognized
as ancestral societies. Slowly, patiently, he worked his way back through
time and space, tracing the territories of these ancestral groups. Eventually,
after months of work, he sketched a map of what he concluded was their
homeland. The territory stretched in a wide swath across central Europe,
from northern Denmark to the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. But
its heart, some six thousand years ago, lay in what is now southern Germany,
northeastern Austria, and a portion of the Czech Republic. "I really
felt that that fit the archaeological evidence best," Mair later
told me.
-
- When he finally showed his map to some of his colleagues,
though, they were deeply dismayed. Elizabeth Barber, one of his closest
collaborators, angrily demanded that he redraw it, insisting that linguistic
evidence, particularly the ancestry of ancient words for looms, pointed
to a homeland much farther east. Realizing that he had gone too far for
the comfort of his colleagues, and that he had yet to find the proof he
needed, he bowed to their pressure. He redrew the map, placing the homeland
in a broad arc stretching from eastern Ukraine and southern Russia to western
Kazakhstan. Then he published it in the conference proceedings. "I
thought, for this book, it wouldn't be too bad," he confessed, shaking
his head. "I decided I wouldn't go against the flow that much, because
that is a big flow with some really smart people." Then he looked
down at the map in front of him. "But in my own integrity and honesty,
I'd want to put it in here." He sketched a narrow oval. Its centre
fell near the Austrian city of Salzburg.
-
- All of which brought us to Shanghai, and the rain, and
the final arbiter, hopefully, of more dna testing. Convinced he was right,
and desperately wanting to find the proof that would dispel all doubt,
Mair believed genetics still offered the best hope of vindication. If
dna testing was sufficient to convict or exonerate men in a court of law,
it would surely be strong enough to persuade even the most skeptical of
his colleagues. He needed samples for another, more powerful type of dna
testing, but as he had just discovered, the Chinese officials had upped
the ante again. Japanese researchers had recently paid $100,000 to acquire
samples of the ancient matter for dna testing, and officials at Shanghai's
Museum of Natural History now wanted a similar sum from Mair.
-
- Mair didn't have it, and he was running out of time.
Still, he remained surprisingly upbeat. During a break in the negotiations
one afternoon, he invited me to follow Xu Yongqing, the head of the Shanghai
Museum of Natural History's anthropology department, down the stairs to
a basement room in the museum. Unlocking the door to a small room behind
the employees' bicycle racks, Xu led the way inside. Along three of the
walls, mummies in glass cases reclined luxuriously on red velvet cloth.
Stacked three high in spots, they looked much like train passengers bedded
down for the night in their berths. Mair stood quietly, scanning the room.
Then he saw what he wanted to show me. In one of the lower glass cases,
a young woman lay stretched out on her back, stripped of her fine woollens.
Her knees were pressed demurely together, her arms rested comfortably
at her sides, and her breasts lay round and full, as if she had perished
in the midst of nursing a child.
-
- But it was the hair that caught my attention. A long
wavy golden-brown mane twisted down her back. Standing in that room, I
felt an unexpected sense of kinship with her, surrounded as she was by
strangers. And I wondered just what had prodded her ancestors to exchange
the cool greenness of Europe for the scorching barrens of the Tarim Basin.
-
- as always, mair had some ideas. He believed a new invention
had spurred this woman's forebears to embark on this eastern exodus: horseback
riding. Some 5,700 years ago, he explained, Eurasians had begun rounding
up wild horses, and sometime later they started sliding bits into their
mouths and swinging their bodies onto their backs. These seemingly simple
acts led them to conquer terrestrial space. For the first time ever, human
beings were able to travel swiftly over immense distances, an accomplishment
so exhilarating and adrenalin-charged that they suddenly gave full rein
to their wanderlust.
-
- So equipped, Mair went on with growing enthusiasm, early
Europeans had easily spread out across Eurasia, their brisk progress recorded
in the ancient campsites they left behind. Some of the invaders swept
northward, becoming the Germanic tribes; others journeyed west to become
the Celts of the British Isles. But the ancestors of the Xinjiang people
had headed east across the grassy steppes of Asia, repelling any who tried
to bar their path, and four thousand years ago, a small group of latecomers
rode into the vacant river valleys of the Tarim Basin. Finding sufficient
land to make a life there, they stayed, passing on their love and knowledge
of fine horses to their descendants. When mourners buried Cherchen Man,
they arranged a dead horse and a saddle atop his grave, two essential
things he would need in the next life.
-
- In all likelihood, observed Mair, some of these European
invaders rode even further to the east and north, beyond the reach of
desiccating deserts. And there they brought with them such new Western
inventions as the chariot, a high-performance vehicle designed for warfare
and sport, and bronze metallurgy, which made strong weapons that retained
their killing edge. Very possibly, a few of these invaders carried with
them the secret of writing. While examining the hand of an ancient woman
exhumed near Cherchen Man, Mair had noticed row upon row of a strange tattoo
along her hand. Shaped like a backward S, it clearly resembled the early
Phoenician consonant that gave us our modern S. Mair has also found the
identical form of S -- which resembles an ancient Chinese character --
along with other alphabetiform signs, on artifacts of this era from western
China.
-
- Chinese scholars, it occurred to me, were unlikely to
take much comfort in the thought of these invaders. And they were unlikely
to be pleased by the pivotal role these intruders may have played in ancient
Chinese life. Western inventions, after all, shaped the course of history.
Fleet chariots enabled Chinese armies to vanquish their enemies, and sturdy
bronze swords reinforced dreams of empire. And a secret system of writing
bequeathed Chinese officials the means to govern the conquered lands effortlessly.
-
- But invention is only one small part of the story. What
societies make of technological leaps forward is as important as the act
of creation itself. It was the genius of others, after all, who unwittingly
made the West strong. It gave Europeans the compasses that guided mariners
overseas to Asia and America. It provided the printing presses that disseminated
knowledge of these new lands to the masses. It bestowed the gunpowder
that fuelled conquest. Indeed, all these came from Chinese inventors.
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- There are many ironies joining East and West in the
inseparable embrace of history. Mair savours them. His trip to Shanghai
in the rain ended in disappointment. He left China empty-handed. But he
is now raising funds and fervently seeking permission to conduct further
dna tests on the mummies of Xinjiang. Until that day, Ur-David waits in
a museum storage room in China, unclaimed as a long- lost brother.
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-
-
- From the Mummy Congress by Heather Pringle to be published
this month by Penguin Canada All photographs on these pages provided by
Discover Magazine
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