On The Presence Of Non-Chinese At Anyang

Sino-Platonic Papers ^ | 4-2004 | Kim Haynes

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On the Presence of Non-Chinese at Anyang

by Kim Hayes

It has now become clear that finds of chariot remains, metal knives and axes of northern provenance, and bronze mirrors of western provenance in the tombs of Anyang indicate that the Shang had at least indirect contact with people who were familiar with these things. Who were these people? Where did they live? When did they arrive?

Following the discovery of the Tarim Mummies, we now know that the population of the earliest attested cultures of what is present-day Xinjiang were of northwestern or western derivation. According to the craniometric studies of Ran Kangxin, these people can be divided into three distinct types.

The first group to arrive are held to have come from the north because the cranial measurements of the surviving skulls of this type are affinial with the skulls of the Afanasevo culture in particular, which was located in the Sayan-Altai/North Mongolia area, and with the skull types of steppe people living much further to the west. This group is called "Proto-European" by Mair and Mallory, and it can be dated to have arrived in Xinjiang about 1800 B.C.E. or somewhat earlier.

It has been suggested that this group may have been a relatively small group of Afanasevo/Tocharian refugees fleeing to the south, away from Indo-Iranian expansion arriving from regions west and southwest of the Sayan-Altai.

If we accept the refugee classification of these people, it helps us explain the geographical position in the southeast Tarim of the Qawrighul and Yanbulaq Proto-Europeans. It was as far away from everywhere as you could get-it was a safe place. This is important and may help us to understand much else that happened to these people prior to their arrival in Xinjiang, as well as what happened to them after this time.

For the period c. 2000-c. 1000 B.C.E.-which saw the emergence, development, expansion, and culmination of early Chinese civilization in the Erlitou, Erligang and related cultures, Anyang cultural continuum-there is no extant evidence of contact between the people of the eastern Tarim and the people of the emerging Chinese polity.

It is only from around c. 1000 B.C.E. that we have evidence for the arrival in Xinjiang of the two remaining types of caucasoid, the Pamir Ferghana and Indo-Afghan types. It is thought that the Pamir Ferghana type entered northwestern Xinjiang from contiguous regions to the west of the Tian Shan c. 1000 B.C.E. The Indo-Afghans are thought to have entered southwestern Xinjiang from Bactria somewhat later.

A clear illustration of "the three types of human cranial variation according to Han Kang xin," is provided on p. 238 of The Tarim Mummies and on p. 566 of The Bronze Age.

Given that there is no evidence to indicate interaction between the caucasoids of Xinjiang and their Han neighbors to the east, it is very unlikely that remains of any non-Chinese found at Anyang would have come from Xinjiang. This proposition is strengthened by the fact that the Pamir Ferghana and Indo-Afghan types are held to have entered Western Xinjiang around the time of the demise of the Shang, or after.

Heretofore, many scholars have suspected that there might have been a foreign contribution involved in the formative processes of the emerging Chinese polity, but beyond inferences and possibilities, no scholar has felt confident enough, or has been able to say, that there is material proof that this is possible.

This is an excerpt from an issue of Sino-Platonic Papers. (For the issue number and date, see the top of this page.) For the complete text, along with all notes and bibliographic citations, order the printed edition of this issue. For pricing information, see the SPP catalog.

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Afanasevo culture, 3500—2500 BC, an archaeological culture of the late copper and early bronze age.

It became known from excavations in the Minusinsk area of the Krasnoyarsk Krai, southern Siberia, but the culture was also widespread in western Mongolia, northern Xinjiang, and eastern and central Kazakhstan, with connections or extensions in Tajikistan and the Aral area.

The economy seems to have been semi-nomadic pastoralism, with cattle, ovicaprids and horse remains being documented, along with those of wild game.

The culture is mainly known from its inhumations, with the deceased buried in conic or rectangular enclosures, often in a supine position, reminiscent of the Yamna burials, but there are a number of settlements as well. Metal objects and the presence of wheeled vehicles are documented.

The burials bear a remarkable resemblance to those much further west in the Yamna culture, the Sredny Stog culture, the Catacomb culture and the Poltavka culture, all of which are believed to be Indo-European in nature, particularly within the context of the Kurgan hypothesis as put forward by Marija Gimbutas and her followers. Kozshin (1970) has identified perforated horn pieces as riding bits, but this claim has been disputed.

Its relationship to the later, more westerly Andronovo culture is difficult to characterize.

This early extreme outlier of presumably Indo-European culture makes it an automatic candidate for being the earliest attested representative for speakers of the Tocharian stock.

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Indo-European Origin

In 4000 BC, Indo-European was spoken somewhere, but its location is very controversial.

Central Europe at the beginning of the 4th Millenium BC Broadly speaking, three major economic lifestyles were in competition in Central Europe during the 5th Millenium BC.

These were Cereal farmers (called Linear Ware or Long House after its pottery and architectural styles) who had inhabited the Danube and Rhine basins since the late 6th millenium, using slash/burn techniques to replace forest with farmland. (Linear Ware is considered sibling to the earlier Impresso culture in the Mediterranean area. Linear Ware farmers apparently practiced crop rotation and animal herding for manure fertilization, but use of the plow probably came 2500 years later.)

Stockbreeders of the east European steppes. These people are called Kurgans, after the Russian name for their burial mounds. In various theories this culture may be derived from pig farmers to the West (Bug-Dniester ca 6000 BC) sibling to the Danubian farmers, hunters from the Baltic area to the North, or ancient farmers and goat herders from across the Caucasus Mountains to the South. Pre-neolithic people who engaged in hunting, gathering and fishing. These were called the ``Megalithic'' (Big Stone) people because they were entering an advanced phase with spectacular artifacts leading eventually, for example, to Stonehenge. Though shown in the North on the map, these people were also present in forests throughout Europe (and obviously in hostile competition with the forest-clearing farmers).

This was the era of the ``Secondary Products Revolution'' with inventions like cheese, leather, beer, and, most notably, the wheeled wagon. (Cast copper axles have been discovered near the Cucuteni dominion dated to the 5th millenium BC; and Kurgans are known to have bridled horses for riding by 4000 BC.)

By 4000 BC, three mixed-farming (dairy) cultures were in competition in East Central Europe; these were Tripolye (and Cucuteni), a branch of the Danubian Linear-Ware farmers who, however, did not practice cereal farming, but rather had an economy based on orchards, cows, sheep, and pigs.

Sredny Stog (and Kemi-Oba), branches of the Kurgan breeders whose economy featured horses, cows, goats, barley, and animal byproducts like leather. TRB/Funnel Beaker, believed to be a branch of the Erteboelle Hunters, who began to build primitive villages and adopt some of the economic ideas of their neighbors, including barley and dairy farming.

There is no universal agreement on which of these three groups provided the proto-Indo-European language, and you can find sober scientists guessing that Indo-European was spoken by any combination of these groups, including none or all three!

Although all three of these groups -- Tripolye, Sredny Stog, and Funnel Beaker -- could be described as ``early dairy farmers;'' in fact the cultures were quite distinct: Tripolye was an organized village society with egalitarian matriarchal customs; Sredny Stog was a semi-nomadic patriarchal society which stressed individualistm; the haphazard lifestyle of Funnel Beaker villagers betrays their recent development from unsettled foragers.

(Cereal farming stresses patience, while stockbreeding requires physical strength -- this may explain why domesticating large animals changes a matriarchal society to patriarchal. Furthermore, the contrast between land-fixed self-growing crops and mobile animals needing to be tended, may help predict whether ancient economics will be based on communal or individual property rights.)

The geographical placements on the map are only approximate. Moreover there was overlap: Kurgan tombs from this era are found as far West as Czechoslovakia, while Tripolye had settlements in central Ukraine. Finally, the indicated cultures are only roughly contemporaneous: Lengyel was 5th millenium, and TRB/Funnel Beaker mainly 4th millenium.

With sophisticated mining, smelting and casting, this era might be called the ``Advanced Copper Age.'' There were metallurgical centers in the Karanovo area in the Balkans, as well as in West-Central Asian areas accessible to Kurgan traders, and the Carpathian Mountains, situated roughly at the central point between the three competing dairy cultural styles, was a rich source of copper ore.

But, although the Bronze Age would begin to emerge 1000 years later, archaeological evidence suggests that by 4000 BC the Balkan metal industry was entering a ``Dark Age'' lasting several centuries. Was this apparent conflict related to competition by the competing dairy cultures being played out in the fertile Danube Basin just to the North of the Balkans?

A thousand years later, new cultures have emerged, and the locations of Indo-European branches can be inferred. (It is good to remember that there was rapid change even in prehistoric times -- Europe's population may have tripled between 4000 and 3000 BC, although both dates fall in the ``Late Neolithic.'')

Central Europe at the beginning of the 3rd Millenium BC

Again dates and places are approximate: The Bell Beaker culture emerged about 900 years after Globular Amphora.

Although Indo-European languages do not enter the historical record until the 2nd millenium BC, there is wide agreement about Indo-European geography in 3000 BC. Most supporters of both the Gimbutas Kurgan Theory and Danubist or Anatolian hypotheses would agree that Usatovo culture can be tentatively identified with the first speakers of proto-Greek, and both theories usually identify Tocharian with the Afanasievo culture far to the East in Asia. Similarly the identifications of Indo-Iranian with Yamnaya, Balto-Slavic with Battle Axe, and Germanic with Corded Ware (see below) are not controversial. Most of the other identifications shown in the map might also be tentatively accepted by theorists on both sides of the Kurgan-Danubian debate.

In other words, many would agree that the Balkan-Pontic area of the 5th or 4th millenium BC was a locus for early Indo-European expansion; the debate is whether Tripolye ``converted'' the Kurgans to speak I-E, or vice versa! For most experts, the signs of Kurgan culture among the early Indo-European speakers are unmistakable. As just one example, the warrior heroes in Homer's Iliad are buried in Kurgans (though of course Homer doesn't use that Russian word).

In the map above, it should not be inferred that the Battle-Axe people spoke ``proto-Balto-Slavic,'' nor that the Yamnaya people spoke ``proto-Indo-Iranian.'' The languages had diverged too recently for that. Instead both groups spoke the same language, called ``Late Indo-European'' or ``proto-Satem,'' but were developing divergent dialects which after a few more centuries would become the familiar distinct proto-languages of the Indo-European group. Only proto-Anatolian (and probably a few other Centum branches) existed as distinct Indo-European languages in 3000 BC.

Did Indo-European Language Originate with the Kurgan People?

Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed and shown to contain many words related to horses and stockbreeding. The word kwe-kwlo (cognate of wheel and cyclos) is reconstructed for the wheel, but in all theories besides Gimbutas', proto-Indo-European had already separated into its branches before the wheel was invented.

Opponents of Gimbutas' theory of Indo-European origin base their case on five assumptions:

The Kurgan culture is not the sort of giant advance needed to explain language replacement.
The language of the Danubian Linear-Ware culture and related cultures like Tripolye dominated Europe for about two millenia, and couldn't have disappeared without a trace.

Expansion circa 4000 BC is too late to explain the diversity among Indo-European branches. The similarities among Indo-European cultures are the result of coincidental, parallel developments. kwe-kwlo meant ``rotate'' and different peoples independently adapted their versions of the word to denote ``wheel.''

Let me answer these ``charges'' one by one:

The language of the Kurgan horse-riders did expand. All scholars (except the so-called Indocentric crackpots) admit that Indo-Iranian was a Kurgan language, and that the languages of northern India have been replaced by Indo-Aryan, even though there is no evidence of a major invasion. And it does seem suggestive that Middle-Easterners were using Indo-Aryan words to describe horse-riding, even before Indic makes any other historical appearance.

Language replacement is common. The pre-Roman languages of Spain and France quickly disappeared (except for Basque); the Negrito languages of the Philippines have disappeared; Pictish was dominant in northern Britain during Roman times but hardly a word of it is known today.

To the contrary, similarities among the earliest recorded Indo-European languages (Hittite, Homeric Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, Old Irish) are about what one would expect if they had diverged just a few millenia earlier. Today's Lithuanians can make some sense of Sanskrit, which would probably be impossible if these languages had diverged before 5000 BC. Anyway, don't overlook that liturgies and written records serve as a brake on language change, so languages evolved much more rapidly in pre-literate cultures.

Archaeologoists gasped in surprise when they unearthed Tocharian clothing that looked just like Old Irish clothing thousands of miles to the west. The ancient Indic horse-sacrificing ritual of asvamedha has detailed similarities to the horse-sacrificing rituals of the ancient Romans and Irish; even the compound word asvamedha appears to be directly inherited from a proto-Indo-European word meaning ``horse-drunk.''
kwe-kwlo survives in many branches of Indo-European so must have been a basic vocabulary item, a common word used everyday. Primitive peoples didn't speak of ``rotation'' much before they invented the wheel.
Finally, the genetic language tree of Indo-European would have a different structure if Celtic and Italic were spoken in Central Europe before the Kurgan intrusions. I try to explain that on a separate page, but briefly:

All sensible theories agree that Indo-Iranian was a Kurgan language, i.e. the Andronovo descendants of Yamnaya/Pit-Grave. If this were an adopted language, one would expect major changes; instead phonology and grammar of this branch closely follows proto-Indo-European.

West European languages like Italic and Celtic are non-Kurgan in any anti-Gimbutas theory. Thus the I-E tree would involve two major branches: Western and Kurgan. The Afanasievo culture (sibling to Yamnaya) is the only logical candidate for proto-Tocharian. A Balkan or Danubian (non-Kurgan) origin of Afanasievo is farfetched. Were the (controversially lumped) Greek-Phrygo-Armenian languages derived from Kurgan or not? In either case, these languages (and Tocharian) would be either in the Western branch or the Kurgan branch of I-E. Instead they form co-equal branches, with micro-tree structure best modeled (cf. Ringe) as westward Kurgan migrations (with the Centum-Satem shift in Yamnaya occurring after Greek separated).

Balto-Slavic/Germanic Equals Battle-Axe/Corded-Ware

Battle Axe and Corded Ware were sibling cultures, and some scientists do not distinguish the two. Yet, Baltic seems to be the Indo-European branch which most closely preserves the prehistoric proto-Indo-European language, while Germanic has undergone major changes in grammar, phonology, and lexicon. Do the prehistories of Battle-Axe/Corded-Ware culture and the early Germano-Balto-Slavic language shed light on each other?

The reason Baltic preserves ancient Indo-European most closely is that before the Battle-Axe culture emerged, the only non-Kurgan people in the Baltic area was a small population of hunter/fishers: there was no need for proto-Balto-Slavic to absorb an indigeneous language. The Corded-Ware invaders into present-day Germany, however, encountered the entrenched Funnel-Beaker Folk, who resisted Corded-Ware culture for several centuries.

Germanic evolved as a hybrid language, with elements of proto-Balto-Slavic, the language of the Baltic Battle-Axe invaders, an Indo-European dialect, probably sibling to proto-Italic, derived from an earlier Kurgan-derived intrusion (e.g. Globular Amphora or Baden culture), an adstratum of the non-Indo-European languages of the indigenous Funnel-Beaker (and Erteboelle?) culture. The term ``language hybrid'' may offend professional linguists, since independent languages don't ``interbreed.'' But mutually intelligible dialects of the same language do interbreed and during the Corded-Ware expansion Baltic and Italic speakers could probably make sense of each other, as the common ancestor was only a few centuries in the past. (Similarly, Saxon and Viking languages were probably mutually intelligible at the time of Alfred the Great: hence the many Viking words in English.)

The very name ``Corded-Ware'' provides a strong affirmation of the Gimbutas Theory. This refers to leather cords which were added to pottery as ornaments. (Anti-Gimbutists don't like to admit it but before the advent of Corded-Ware, the Kurgan people were applying cord ornaments to pottery.) The relationship between cord and ornament is preserved in Germanic languages! Consider two cognates in Dutch:

touw -- cord tooi -- ornament

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Srubna culture

The Srubna culture (Зрубнá культ́ура, also Timber-grave culture), was a Late Bronze Age (16th-12th centuries BC) culture. It is a successor to the Yamna culture, the Catacomb culture and the Abashevo culture.

It occupied the area along and above the north shore of the Black Sea from the Dnieper eastwards along the northern base of the Caucasus to the area abutting the north shore of the Caspian Sea, across the Volga to come up against the domain of the approximately contemporaneous and somewhat related Andronovo culture.

The name comes from Ukrainian зруб zrub, "timber framework", from the way graves were constructed. Animal parts were buried with the body.

The economy was mixed agriculture and livestock breeding. The historical Cimmerians have been suggested as descended from this culture.

The Srubna culture is succeeded by Scythians and Sarmatians in the 1st millennium BC, and by Khazars and Kipchaks in the first millennium AD.

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Tracking The Tarim Mummies

by David W. Anthony

Archaeological and linguistic evidence places the Indo-European homeland in the North Pontic region. Members of one Indo-European group (the Yamnaya culture) that migrated to the western Altai Mountains, where they are identifiable as the Afanasievo culture, may have later moved into the Tarim Basin of what is now western China. (Map by Lynda D'Amico)

A solution to the puzzle of Indo-European origins?

The Indo-European problem is one of archaeology's oldest, most contentious questions. More than 200 years ago, in 1786, English jurist and scholar Sir William Jones realized that Latin and Greek shared a common origin with Sanskrit, the ancient language of Hindu law and religion. These three languages, he proposed, had developed from a single ultimate parent language, now called Proto-Indo-European. Linguists soon added most of the languages of Europe (including English), Iran, and northern India-Pakistan to the family, and eventually discovered several extinct cousins, including Hittite, spoken in Anatolia about 2000-1000 B.C., and Tocharian, a group of two (or possibly three) languages spoken about A.D. 500-800 in the Buddhist monasteries and caravan cities of the Tarim Basin in what is now western China. All of these languages still display telltale traces of the same Proto-Indo-European grammar and vocabulary. But where and when was the elusive mother tongue spoken? And by what historical circumstances did it generate daughter tongues that became scattered from Scotland to China?

In 1995, media reports brought to the public's attention astonishingly well-preserved remains of European-looking people, dressed in European-looking clothes, buried in the Tarim Basin between about 1800 B.C. and A.D. 500. This came about through the persistent efforts of Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese and Indo-Iranian literature and religion at the University of Pennsylvania. Long known to specialists but poorly understood and little studied, the Tarim mummies (not really mummies, but bodies preserved by dry conditions) quickly became the focus of intense interest and debate. Riveting photographs appeared in ARCHAEOLOGY (March/April 1995, pp. 28-35) and Discover. Academic papers on the mummies were edited by Mair for the 1995 Journal of Indo-European Studies. Film crews working for Nova and the Discovery channel soon followed Mair to the deserts of northwestern China; the Discovery show ("The Riddle of the Desert Mummies") was nominated for an Emmy. In 1996, Mair hosted a conference of 50 international experts on the archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthropology of the Central Eurasian societies related to the mummies; the proceedings were published in two dense and informative volumes in 1998, and textile specialist Elizabeth Barber issued a book on the Tarim textiles.

Now Mair has teamed with James Mallory, a distinguished Indo-European linguist and archaeologist at Queen's University in Belfast, to write The Tarim Mummies, which explores the difficult and controversial questions about the languages, identities, technologies, migrations, and physical traits of the mummies. It is a fascinating and readable account and presents a valuable compendium of recent research on a little-known region that has long been the focus of romantic speculation by travelers and explorers from Marco Polo to Aurel Stein. To determine the ethnic and linguistic identity of the Tarim mummies requires, as they say, "a feat of archaeological and linguistic legerdemain," but it is an intriguing game to follow, for it sheds light on the documentary, linguistic, archaeological, and skeletal evidence that must be used to attempt a linguistic and ethnic prehistory of eastern Central Asia.

In the end, their "working hypothesis" is that the earliest Bronze Age colonists of the Tarim Basin were people of Caucasoid physical type who entered probably from the north and west, and probably spoke languages that could be classified as Pre- or Proto-Tocharian, ancestral to the Indo-European Tocharian languages documented later in the Tarim Basin. These early settlers occupied the northern and eastern parts of the Tarim Basin, where their graves have yielded mummies dated about 1800 B.C. They did not arrive from Europe, but probably had lived earlier near the Altai Mountains, where their ancestors had participated in a cultural world centered on the eastern steppes of central Eurasia, including modern northeastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tadjikistan. At the eastern end of the Tarim Basin, people of Mongoloid physical type began to be buried in cemeteries such as Yanbulaq some centuries later, during the later second or early first millennium B.C. About the same time, Iranian-speaking people moved into the Tarim Basin from the steppes to the west. Their linguistic heritage and perhaps their physical remains are found in the southern and western portions of the Tarim. These three populations interacted, as the linguistic and archaeological evidence reviewed by Mallory and Mair makes clear, and then Turkic peoples arrived and were added to the mix.

David W. Anthony is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and codirector of excavations for the Samara Valley Project in Russia.

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"Nice to talk to a fellow Celt, you might also be interested to know that the majority of us have Type O blood, not exclusively but it is one of the Celtic markers."

I checked on this 'indicator', here's what is said on page 245 of the book, Tarim Mummies.

"...although our data is extremely restricted, so far it suggests that prehistoric Xinjiang was a good area for transfusions: all the mummies so far examined have been revealed as universal donors ,i.e. type O. Blood typing has been carried out on the 'Beauty Of Kroran' from the cemetery on the Towan River and three of the female mummies from Qizilchoqa also possessed blood type O."

[Salamander]

Dad's O but I'm A+.

[but I love the band 'Type O Negative'...does that count?]....;D


'Alpine Salamander'.....has a nice ring to it.

All the Welsh ones in my family are short, wiry and slender.

[which was convenient because they were all coal miners]....LOL!

[happygrl]

I heard that too.

I'm not sure what to make of Glenn Kimball, but will keep an open mind.

[RightWhale]

Glenn Kimball is excellent at two things: digging up documentation and doing it in actual fieldwork, and verbal presentation. He also writes, but his gift is not there. I put him in the category of Velikovsky and Sitchin, i.e., digging up many facts of interest, but also making an exciting story out of as much of the fact as possible; he sounds excited, amazed, and astounded by his own findings, which is not a bad way to be.

[Candor7]

all the mummies so far examined have been revealed as universal donors ,i.e. type O. Blood typing has been carried out on the 'Beauty Of Kroran' from the cemetery on the Towan River and three of the female mummies from Qizilchoqa also possessed blood type O.">>>>>>>>>>>>

Like I said, they were Celts, but science doesn't get it and are not likely to any time soon, but generally Celts the world over get it.And in time one of us will write the truth.

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Glenn Kimball_Dr. Who?

" 'The Glenn Kimball Gang' is comprised with his colorful co-horts, Wayne May who puts out the spurious publication 'Ancient American 'and other fictitious historical accounts along who is co-edited by his sidekick Neo- Nazi Frank Collin (Joseph), and their favorite 'Weasel' the so called FOX Television" Producer" Ralph J. Wolack Can always be counted on to get caught red handed like Brer Fox and Brer Bear with their hands in the chicken coop."

I cancelled my subscription to "Ancient American" magazine when it became obvious that they were making up things.

Frank Collin

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Blond Headed Mongoloid

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This thread may interest you.

[Ptarmigan]

I remember that one from PBS. Her gene was similar to the Amazons.

[SunkenCiv]

Ping!

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

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 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.

His discovery provides an unexpected connection between east and west and some valuable clues to early European history.

One of the women who shared a tomb with Cherchen Man has light brown hair which looks as if it was brushed and braided for her funeral only yesterday. Her face is painted with curling designs, and her striking red burial gown has lost none of its lustre during the three millenniums that this tall, fine-featured woman has been lying beneath the sand of the Northern Silk Road.

The bodies are far better preserved than the Egyptian mummies, and it is sad to see the infants on display; to see how the baby was wrapped in a beautiful brown cloth tied with red and blue cord, then a blue stone placed on each eye. Beside it was a baby's milk bottle with a teat, made from a sheep's udder.

Based on the mummy, the museum has reconstructed what Cherchen Man would have looked like and how he lived. The similarities to the traditional Bronze Age Celts are uncanny, and analysis has shown that the weave of the cloth is the same as that of those found on the bodies of salt miners in Austria from 1300BC.

The burial sites of Cherchen Man and his fellow people were marked with stone structures that look like dolmens from Britain, ringed by round-faced, Celtic figures, or standing stones. Among their icons were figures reminiscent of the sheela-na-gigs, wild females who flaunted their bodies and can still be found in mediaeval churches in Britain. A female mummy wears a long, conical hat which has to be a witch or a wizard's hat. Or a druid's, perhaps? The wooden combs they used to fan their tresses are familiar to students of ancient Celtic art.

At their peak, around 300BC, the influence of the Celts stretched from Ireland in the west to the south of Spain and across to Italy's Po Valley, and probably extended to parts of Poland and Ukraine and the central plain of Turkey in the east. These mummies seem to suggest, however, that the Celts penetrated well into central Asia, nearly making it as far as Tibet.

The Celts gradually infiltrated Britain between about 500 and 100BC. There was probably never anything like an organised Celtic invasion: they arrived at different times, and are considered a group of peoples loosely connected by similar language, religion, and cultural expression.

The eastern Celts spoke a now-dead language called Tocharian, which is related to Celtic languages and part of the Indo-European group. They seem to have been a peaceful folk, as there are few weapons among the Cherchen find and there is little evidence of a caste system.

Even older than the Cherchen find is that of the 4,000-year-old Loulan Beauty, who has long flowing fair hair and is one of a number of mummies discovered near the town of Loulan. One of these mummies was an eight-year-old child wrapped in a piece of patterned wool cloth, closed with bone pegs.

The Loulan Beauty's features are Nordic. She was 45 when she died, and was buried with a basket of food for the next life, including domesticated wheat, combs and a feather.

The Taklamakan desert has given up hundreds of desiccated corpses in the past 25 years, and archaeologists say the discoveries in the Tarim Basin are some of the most significant finds in the past quarter of a century.

"From around 1800BC, the earliest mummies in the Tarim Basin were exclusively Caucausoid, or Europoid," says Professor Victor Mair of Pennsylvania University, who has been captivated by the mummies since he spotted them partially obscured in a back room in the old museum in 1988. "He looked like my brother Dave sleeping there, and that's what really got me. Lying there with his eyes closed," Professor Mair said.

It's a subject that exercises him and he has gone to extraordinary lengths, dodging difficult political issues, to gain further knowledge of these remarkable people.

East Asian migrants arrived in the eastern portions of the Tarim Basin about 3,000 years ago, Professor Mair says, while the Uighur peoples arrived after the collapse of the Orkon Uighur Kingdom, based in modern-day Mongolia, around the year 842.

A believer in the "inter-relatedness of all human communities", Professor Mair resists attempts to impose a theory of a single people arriving in Xinjiang, and believes rather that the early Europeans headed in different directions, some travelling west to become the Celts in Britain and Ireland, others taking a northern route to become the Germanic tribes, and then another offshoot heading east and ending up in Xinjiang.

This section of the ancient Silk Road is one of the world's most barren precincts. You are further away from the sea here than at any other place, and you can feel it. This where China tests its nuclear weapons. Labour camps are scattered all around - who would try to escape? But the remoteness has worked to the archaeologists' advantage.
The ancient corpses have avoided decay because the Tarim Basin is so dry, with alkaline soils. Scientists have been able to glean information about many aspects of our Bronze Age forebears from the mummies, from their physical make-up to information about how they buried their dead, what tools they used and what clothes they wore.

In her book The Mummies of Urumchi, the textile expert Elizabeth Wayland Barber examines the tartan-style cloth, and reckons it can be traced back to Anatolia and the Caucasus, the steppe area north of the Black Sea. Her theory is that this group divided, starting in the Caucasus and then splitting, one group going west and another east.

Even though they have been dead for thousands of years, every perfectly preserved fibre of the mummies' make-up has been relentlessly politicised.

The received wisdom in China says that two hundred years before the birth of Christ, China's emperor Wu Di sent an ambassador to the west to establish an alliance against the marauding Huns, then based in Mongolia. The route across Asia that the emissary, Zhang Qian, took eventually became the Silk Road to Europe. Hundreds of years later Marco Polo came, and the opening up of China began.

The very thought that Caucasians were settled in a part of China thousands of years before Wu Di's early contacts with the west and Marco Polo's travels has enormous political ramifications. And that these Europeans should have been in restive Xinjiang hundreds of years before East Asians is explosive.

The Chinese historian Ji Xianlin, writing a preface to Ancient Corpses of Xinjiang by the Chinese archaeologist Wang Binghua, translated by Professor Mair, says China "supported and admired" research by foreign experts into the mummies. "However, within China a small group of ethnic separatists have taken advantage of this opportunity to stir up trouble and are acting like buffoons. Some of them have even styled themselves the descendants of these ancient 'white people' with the aim of dividing the motherland. But these perverse acts will not succeed," Ji wrote.

Many Uighurs consider the Han Chinese as invaders.(I do too)
The territory was annexed by China in 1955, and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region established, and there have been numerous incidents of unrest over the years. In 1997 in the northern city of Yining there were riots by Muslim separatists and Chinese security forces cracked down, with nine deaths. There are occasional outbursts, and the region remains very heavily policed.

Not surprisingly, the government has been slow to publicise these valuable historical finds for fear of fuelling separatist currents in Xinjiang.

The Loulan Beauty, for example, was claimed by the Uighurs as their symbol in song and image, although genetic testing now shows that she was in fact European.

Professor Mair acknowledges that the political dimension to all this has made his work difficult, but says that the research shows that the people of Xinjiang are a dizzying mixture. "They tend to mix as you enter the Han Dynasty. By that time the East Asian component is very noticeable," he says. "Modern DNA and ancient DNA show that Uighurs, Kazaks, Kyrgyzs, the peoples of central Asia are all mixed Caucasian and East Asian. The modern and ancient DNA tell the same story," he says.

Altogether there are 400 mummies in various degrees of desiccation and decomposition, including the prominent Han Chinese warrior Zhang Xiong and other Uighur mummies, and thousands of skulls. The mummies will keep the scientists busy for a long time. Only a handful of the better-preserved ones are on display in the impressive new Xinjiang museum. Work began in 1999, but was stopped in 2002 after a corruption scandal and the jailing of a former director for involvement in the theft of antiques.

The museum finally opened on the 50th anniversary of China's annexation of the restive region, and the mummies are housed in glass display cases (which were sealed with what looked like Sellotape) in a multi-media wing.

In the same room are the much more recent Han mummies - equally interesting, but rendering the display confusing, as it groups all the mummies closely together. Which makes sound political sense.

This political correctness continues in another section of the museum dedicated to the achievements of the Chinese revolution, and boasts artefacts from the Anti-Japanese War (1931-1945).

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. The hemp mask is painted with a soft smile and the thin moustache of a dandy. Currently on display at a museum in Tokyo, the handsome Yingpan man was two metres tall (six feet six inches), and pushing 30 when he died. His head rests on a pillow in the shape of a crowing cockerel.

[Bon mots]

Linguists have always asserted that the Hungarian language came out of Western China. Could it have been a two-way flow?

[RightWhale]

Don't know if you are into reading ancient histories, but Shahnameh is a history of sorts of the Persians. In it it would appear that they had a wide-ranging territory now and then, and ran into China at some point. They knew the Chinese well.

[colorado tanker]

So, they weren't Celts, but they liked to wear the latest fashions from Milan?

[RightWhale]

They say that Basque, Finnish, and Hungarian are of uncertain origin. Not Indo-European anyway. That might put them in a non-Celtic category.

[blam]

"Linguists have always asserted that the Hungarian language came out of Western China. "

Yup. Probably came with the Huns which is where Hungary got it's name.