The Tarim Mummies:
Ancient China
and the Mystery of the
Earliest Peoples from the West
by J. P. Mallory and Victor H. MairThe Mummies of Urumchi
by Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Posted on 01/08/2004 9:41:32 AM PST by blam
Siberian Graveyard's Secrets
YEKATERINBURG, Russia In a medieval Siberian graveyard a few miles south of the Arctic Circle, Russian scientists have unearthed mummies roughly 1,000 years old, clad in copper masks, hoops and plates - burial rites that archaeologists say they have never seen before. .
Among 34 shallow graves were five mummies shrouded in copper and blankets of reindeer, beaver, wolverine or bear fur. Unlike the remains of Egyptian pharaohs, the scientists say, the Siberian bodies were mummified by accident. The cold, dry permafrost preserved the remains, and the copper may have helped prevent oxidation. .
The discovery adds to the evidence that Siberia was not an isolated wasteland but a crossroads of international trade and cultural diversity, Natalia Fedorova of the Ural branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences said in an interview in her office in this central Russian city. Among the artifacts discovered at the site were bronze bowls from Persia, dated by style from the 10th or 11th century. .
William Fitzhugh, chairman of the department of anthropology and director of the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian, who in 1997 took part in the first expedition to the site, said the findings filled "a gap we really need to know a lot about." .
The medieval cemetery, named Zeleniy Yar after a nearby village, is at the base of a peninsula called "the end of the earth" by the native Nenets people.
Archaeological surveys in 1976 uncovered ceramic remains suggesting an ancient settlement. On the 1997
expedition, Fedorova, Fitzhugh and their colleagues dug up a male in a wooden coffin with an iron combat knife, a silver medallion and a bronze bird figurine, from the seventh to ninth century. .
Later digs turned up still more graves. Eleven of the 34 remains had shattered or missing skulls and chopped skeletons. This may have been done right after death, "to render protection from mysterious spells believed to emanate from the deceased," Fedorova said in a report, or it may have been a result of ancient grave robbing. .
Another researcher, Dmitri Razhev, said that added evidence of what contemporary societies of the area consider "protective magic" include leather straps wrapped tightly around the bodies, as well as beads or chains and humanoid or birdlike bronze figures broken into pieces at the time of burial. .
The legs of the dead all point toward the nearby Gorny Poluy River, a position that Fedorova said might have had religious significance. Nearly all the graves have traces of coffins made of logs or boat parts. Several were apparently warriors buried with iron knives; others apparently died in battle, as suggested by arrowheads lodged in eye sockets and stab wounds in their backs. .
In 2000, the archaeologists found their first copper-shrouded mummy, a child with a face masked by copper plates. Three more copper-masked infant mummies were found in 2001, each bound with four or five copper hoops two inches wide. In the remains of a metalworking shop, the researchers excavated a wooden sarcophagus with the best-preserved mummy of all, a red-haired man covered chest to foot in copper plate and laid out with an iron hatchet, well-preserved furs and a bronze bear's head buckle. .
The researchers are continuing digs on another Siberian settlement south and west of Zeleniy Yar. .
Niels Lynnerup, director of the Laboratory of Biological Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, who is not connected with the research, said in a telephone interview that the findings were remarkable.
"Archaeology is most important in those places where you don't have good written records," Lynnerup said. "So here, archaeology is terribly important." .
He added: "Often we find skeletons and nothing else. Here we have not only very detailed human remains, but excellent preservation of all their materials." .
There are views that hte Picts were black (hence the reason for the name the colored people -- viz. the Romans named them Pict for Pictured people (well that's close enuff to the Latin, I suppose!))
I picked that up from FReeper 'LostTribe', remember him?
Okay. It is very close though.
Don't worry. Can't be done.
Yers, he got banned for some reason, wonder why -- he was pretty strange but he was funny.
You are correct -- Mosul would be near Nineveh. However, I did pooh-pooh the idea that they would be one and the same city because Nineveh, like Carthage in a way, was destroyed by its enemies and forgotten. The longest, continuously lived in city in the world, is, however, near that place -- Damascus.
One day we were playing spades and began to discuss people with red hair. The The Jewish guy said King David had red hair.
Well I looked it up and there are several references on the internet that state he had red hair. In the Bible it simply says he had a ruddy complexion.
Yes, I've read it three times. It is an excellent book.
Victor Mair recruited a number of experts to go examine the Caucasian mummies he discovered in the back-room of the Urumchi museum. Barber was one of those (textile) experts.
J. P. Malloy and Victor Mair wrote a book, The Tarim Mummies, about the same subject and is even better than Barber's book. As FReeper JimSEA said, "I couldn't put it down." I've read it 2-3 times too.
Someone posted articles and pictures the other day on one of these threads that showed and said that a number of the Egyptian pharohs(sp)were red-headed too.
Makes sense to me as I'm beginning to think they (people with the red-headed gene) dispersed from Sundaland (or that region) in southeast Asia at the end of the Ice Age.
Stephen Oppenheimer (Eden In The East) believes the original Sumerians and Egyptians were refugees from the sunken Sundaland.
The Tarim Mummies:
Ancient China
and the Mystery of the
Earliest Peoples from the West
by J. P. Mallory and Victor H. MairThe Mummies of Urumchi
by Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
Regarding the initial story here Siberia is a really big place!
No doubt red heads made it into the Scanderhoovian woodpile at an early date and would undoubtedly have accompanied any push to the Far East.
Hate to put a jab in here but Byblos (5000 BC) can be dated to just before Damascus (4500 BC) as far as a continuously inhabited city. There is an ongoing dispute on this. Damascus dates older by artifact but does not clearly show continuous habitation.
hmm.... isn’t Byblos in Lebanon? Is it still being lived in? hmm... I ought to read up more on that. thanks!
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