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A centuries-old tomb uncovered in China reveals a stunning discovery that challenges everything we know about the Tang dynasty. Among the vibrant murals, a mysterious foreign figure stands out. A Panoramic View Of The Tomb. Photo courtesy of Jinyang Ancient City Research Institute | The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel ========================================================================= In 2018, construction work on a road in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province in northern China, led to an unexpected archaeological discovery. Researchers uncovered a tomb from the Tang dynasty, dated to the year 736 AD, that contained detailed murals illustrating everyday life during that period. The tomb...

The Sogdians were an Eastern Iranian-speaking people originally from Sogdiana, or modern-day Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Traders, artisans, and cultural brokers, their influence peaked during the Tang Dynasty, or roughly from 618 to 907 CE, described as the "Golden Age" of the Silk Road. But until recently, very little has been known about their origins and interaction with other populations.A breakthrough in understanding the Sogdians came from the analysis of two skeletons excavated from a Tang Dynasty tomb, M1401, in Guyuan, northwest China. The tomb was excavated by the Ningxia Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in 2014 to prevent...

Herodotus tells us of the Scythians, who ravaged the Middle East and Europe. The Romans later defeated Sarmatians on the plains of Pannonia. Even further back in history we know of the Indo-Aryan Mittani in Syria, while there are hints of a relationship between nomadic societies on the steppe of Eurasia and later settled populations in Eastern Europe, Iran & India. Because of the lack of literacy in most of the world before 500 B.C. we must rely on archaeology to connect the vaguest of these dots... Standard physical anthropological methods did yield results which suggested that populations of European...