- Note - Lee Dye's column appears Wednesdays
on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, he now
lives in Juneau, Alaska.
-
- This Cherchen woman lived around 1000
B.C. and stood more than 6 feet tall. She was buried in a red dress and
white deerskin boots. Though found in China, evidence suggests she came
from Europe. (Elizabeth Wayland Barber/Norton)
-
- Special to ABCNEWS.com
-
- "His face is at rest, eyes closed
and sunken, lips slightly parted; his hands lie in his lap, while his knees
and head are tilted up - like a man who has just drifted off to sleep in
his hammock. Visitors tend to tiptoe and lower their voices. Mummies
found around Ürümchi knock the idea that ancient China was free
of any Western influence.
-
- "A two-inch beard covers his face.
Here and there white hairs glint among the yellow-brown, betraying his
age - somewhere past 50. He would have been an imposing figure in life,
for he once stood six feet six inches tall." So writes Elizabeth
Barber of the one known as Cherchen Man.
-
- Clad in finely woven woolens, he almost
looks as if he could rise out of bed and begin another day in what must
have been a difficult life.
-
- Cherchen Man has been dead for about
3,000 years.
-
- Though his lips no longer move, he speaks
volumes about the first settlers in a bleak desert along China's fabled
Silk Road. Until a few years ago, he was the last man scholars would have
expected to find there.
-
- Uncovering an Unexpected Past
-
- Cherchen Man, along with dozens of other
perfectly preserved mummies found in Turkestan, in western China, has stood
archaeology on its ears.
-
- Although the mummies have been known
to exist for decades, no one paid them much attention until 1987 when Victor
Mair, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Pennsylvania, came
across them while leading a group of tourists through an obscure museum
in the town of Ürümchi (also spelled Ürümqi).
-
- Mair was stunned, and not just because
their clothing was perfectly preserved. The mummies, he believed, were
Caucasian, with high-bridged noses, deep, round eye sockets, and fair hair.
-
- How had they come to be there, so long
before any Westerners were thought to have crossed the Ural Mountains into
Asia? The implications are profound, suggesting that Westerners may have
influenced Chinese culture, which had been thought to arise independently
of the West.
-
- Cherchen Man was found in a tomb with
three women and a baby. How had they died? Why did they settle in a desert
so severe that many have died traveling from one oasis to the next? Were
they really from the West?
-
- Unraveling Threads
-
- Mair assembled a team of experts to see
what the mummies could tell us. Among them was Elizabeth Barber, professor
of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
-
- For Barber, author of a recently released
book, The Mummies of Ürümchi, it was an opportunity she had been
preparing for ever since she learned to weave at her mother's knee. Barber
and Irene Good, another team member, are among the world's leading experts
on prehistoric textiles.
-
- The stacks of clothing buried with the
mummies were unlike anything seen before. "It just blew me away,"
Barber says.
-
- For 13 years, Barber had rummaged through
Europe from England to Iran, examining the oldest textiles she could find.
Outside of Egypt, that consisted of just thumbnail-size fragments.
-
- Even those tiny samples yielded clues
about the laborious chore of creating clothing. She learned what kinds
of looms they used to weave which patterns, and what raw materials they
used.
-
- So when she arrived in Ürümqi,
she came with a wealth of understanding, but nothing had prepared her for
what she saw. "It was like handling 19th century fabric," she
says. The mummies had been buried in a salt basin, and the salt kept the
material dry.
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- Clothing Was Non-Native Wool
-
- "The first thing that struck me
was that it was all sheep's wool, and that really surprised me. I had expected
most of it to be plant fiber," she says.
-
- Sheep aren't indigenous to that part
of the world, so those early travelers must have brought sheep with them
from the west. The fabric patterns must have been woven on looms similar
to those used to create the scraps she found in eastern Europe.
-
- That, along with other clues - grains
of wheat were found in some tombs, and wheat is not indigenous to the region
- was clear evidence that Cherchen Man was a product of Europe. So, too,
were less well-preserved mummies of others found throughout the area, some
of whom had died 1,000 years earlier.
-
- Why had they gone to that area, which
even today is so desolate that few live there? How had they died?
-
- A Late Addition to a Sealed Tomb
-
- Unlike other tombs in the area, Cherchen
Man's final resting place was not designed to be reopened, Barber says.
He was buried with the three women, one of whom is presumed to be his wife,
and the tomb was sealed.
-
- A few weeks later, the baby's body, also
well preserved, was placed above the main burial chamber. The baby, about
3 months old, was wrapped in a bright red shroud. Alongside was a sheep
udder fashioned into a nursing bottle.
-
- "It is clear that they (other members
of the community) tried to keep the baby alive after the mother and father
had died," Barber says, so this wasn't a case of killing the entire
family so all could accompany the man into the next life.
-
- None of the mummies show any sign of
violence. They apparently died, Barber surmises, from an epidemic.
-
- Still unknown, however, is why they were
there in the first place.
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- Civilization in Cherchen Man's Day
-
- "When the earliest of these Central
Asian corpses, nestled into the sands of Tarim Basin, about 2000 B.C. or
a little after, the pyramids of Egypt had already stood for half a millennium,
but the best-known pharaohs, Ramesses II and King Tut were rather more
than five hundred years into the future.
-
- "Next door in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians
- first inventors of the art of writing - were already dying out and Hammurabi
was soon to set up his famous law code; the Greeks and Romans had not yet
even arrived in Greece and Italy from the northeast. On the other hand,
'Ice Man,' the Late Stone Age body found in 1991 by hikers in the Alps,
had died well over a thousand years before."
-
- "Europe and the Near East were living
in the Bronze Age, a period characterized by the use of soft metals. To
the east the Chinese had not yet learned to use metal but were already
busy domesticating the precious silkworm that would one day lend its name
to the famous caravan route of Inner Asia, the Silk Road, along whose stretches
the mummies have been found."
-
- - From The Mummies of Ürümchi,
by Elizabeth Barber
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