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Surprising Discoveries in Silla's Royal Tomb No. 98 (including Greco-Roman artifacts) King Nae-Mool(birth/death: unknown/402 AD) and his queen's royal tomb in Dae-Roong-Won, Kyong-ju, S. Korea was excavated in 1973-75 to yield some truly unexpected findings later. Many artifacts were quite different from those known to be produced in Korea or China. Exotic designs and materials abound. Further research established that these artifacts originated from Central Asia, Black Sea, Caucasus, Persia and Eastern Mediterranean. This is quite far away from the South Eastern tip of Korean Peninsula, where this ancient Kingdom, Silla, located. The last of 5 short videos below shows...

Bricks with molded designs unearthed in Chongqingwww.chinaview.cn 2004-01-12 20:52:43 CHONGQING, Jan. 12 (Xinhuanet) -- Archaeologists in southwest China's Chongqing municipality have unearthed more than 20 pieces of brick reliefs from a tomb of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25 A.D.-220 A.D.). Lin Bizhong, a noted archaeologist with the Chongqing MunicipalArchaeological Team, said this was the first time that bricks withmolded designs had been unearthed in Chongqing. Previously, such tomb bricks had been excavated from Sichuan province, southwest China, and have been included as relics under state key protection. Lin acknowledged that the brick-and-stone-structured tomb, fromwhich brick reliefs were unearthed, had been...

Sand-covered Huns city unearthed 10/08/2002 XI'AN: Chinese archaeologists recently discovered a unique, ancient city which has lain covered by desert sands for more than 1,000 years. It is the first ruined city of the Xiongnu (Huns) ever found, said Dai Yingxin, a well-known Chinese archaeologist. The Xiongnu was a nomadic ethnic group, who for 10 centuries were tremendously influential in northern China. The unearthed city occupies 1 square kilometre in Jingbian County, in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, adjacent to the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the north of the country. It is believed that the city was built by more...

Chinese archaeologists have discovered an unidentified cluster of tombs on the Pamirs Plateau, unveiling a new mystery on the crossroads of the ancient Silk Road. Eights tombs, each two meters in diameter, were arranged on a 100-meter-long and 50-meter-wide terrace, with lines of black stones and lines of white stones stretching alongside like rays, according to the archaeology team with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that found the tombs in Xinjiang's Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County, a border region neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan, in October. "The tombs are peculiar. No similar ones had been detected before on the Pamirs Plateau,...

Photo taken on Aug 10, 2015 shows the excavation site of Jiren Taigoukou Ruins in Qialege'e village in Nilka county in Ili Valley, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Archaeologists here found the earliest site where coal was used as fuel by human beings. The discovery, which indicates human beings had been using coal as fuel 3,500 years ago, is 1,000 years earlier than previous finds. [Photo/Xinhua]

An ancient town that was discovered 6.3 kilometers west of the Lop Nor Creek Tomb in Xinjiang is most likely the mysterious town of Zhubin, according to a report from Chongqing Evening News. After more than one year of investigation and study, Lu Houyuan and others recently released the important research results in China's authoritative magazine, the Chinese Science Bulletin. According to sources, the ancient town is one of the three archaeological discoveries made between November and December in 2008 by the Lop Nor Scientific Exploration Team, led by Xia Xuncheng, researcher at the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography...

Monday February 10, 12:10 AM Large Underground Lake Said Found in China Scientists have discovered a massive underground lake in China's arid northwest, giving hope for the reduction of poverty in one of the country's most remote and sparsely populated regions, state media reported Sunday. The lake beneath the Taklamakan desert has a capacity about the same as the 244-square-mile reservoir being filled behind China's massive Three Gorges Dam, newspapers and the official Xinhua News Agency said. The find resulted from a comprehensive survey of water resources in the Xinjiang region, Xinhua said. That study found about 35 billion cubic...

Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road... "Ancient wheat and broomcorn millet, recovered in nomadic campsites in Kazakhstan, show that prehistoric herders in Central Eurasia had incorporated both regional crops into their economy and rituals nearly 5,000 years ago, pushing back the chronology of interaction along the territory of the 'Silk Road' more than 2,000 years," Frachetti said... ...several strains of...

Under the rule of the Kushans, northwest India and adjoining regions participated both in seagoing trade and in commerce along the Silk Road to China. The name Kushan derives from the Chinese term Guishang, used in historical writings to describe one branch of the Yuezhi—a loose confederation of Indo-European people who had been living in northwestern China until they were driven west by another group, the Xiongnu, in 176–160 B.C. The Yuezhi reached Bactria (northwest Afghanistan and Tajikistan) around 135 B.C. Kujula Kadphises united the disparate tribes in the first century B.C. Gradually wresting control of the area from the...

A linguistics researcher at the Macquarie University in Australia has discovered that the language, known as Burushaski, which is spoken by about 90,000 people who reside in a remote area of Pakistan, is Indo-European in origin. Prof Ilija Casule’s discovery, which has now been verified by a number of the world’s top linguists, has excited linguistics experts around the world. An entire issue of the eminent international linguistics journal the Journal of Indo-European Studies is devoted to a discussion of his findings later this month. More than fifty eminent linguists have tried over many years to determine the genetic relationship...

A visit to Takht Bhai offers the chance to explore ruins dating back to the time of Kanishka, a Kushan emperor, famous for his military, political and spiritual feats.Buddhists offered prayers at the site and left statues to mark their gratitude once their wishes had been fulfilled, said Dr Shah Nazar Khan, from the Directorate of Archeology and Museums, K-P, while speaking to The Express Tribune. People visited the place in the final stages of life to meditate.Since the site is situated on top of a hill, it escaped the devastation wrought by successive invasions and is still well preserved,...

A new study has suggested that recently unearthed cities in Southern Siberia could rewrite Aryan history-as they are believed to be the original home of the Aryans. Twenty of the spiral-shaped settlements, believed to be the original home of the Aryan people, have been identified, and there are about 50 more suspected sites. They all lie buried in a region more than 640km long near Russia's border with Kazakhstan. The cities are apparently 3500-4000 years ago and are about the same size as several of the city-states of ancient Greece. If archaeologists confirm the cities as Aryan, they could be...

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...

Fragments of the Tocharian Between 1902 and 1914 the German Ethnological Institute sent repeated expeditions into the great Taklamakan desert of Central Asia, in search of ancient manuscripts that had survived destruction due to the arid climate of the Tarim Basin. One expedition brought back fragments of a manuscript written in a hitherto unknown language but employing a familiar North Indian script. Later dubbed Tocharian A, the language was deciphered by two linguists at Germany's Gottingen University, Emil Siel and Wilhem Siegling. The parchment turned out to be part of the Maitreyasamiti-Nataka, a Sanskrit Buddhist work in the Mahayana canon...

Tocharians The Tocharians were the easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language in antiquity, inhabiting the Tarim basin in what is now Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwestern People's Republic of China. Their unique culture spanned from the 1st millennium BCE to the end of the 1st millennium CE. Their language is called Tocharian. Archaeology The Tarim mummies suggest that precursors of these easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language may have lived in the region of the Tarim Basin from around 1800 BCE until finally they were assimilated by Uyghur Turks in the 9th century CE. "Tocharian donors", possibly the "Knights with...

Burushaski is a language spoken in northern Pakistan and Kashmir. It is spoken by 40,000 to 50,000 people. It has no known relatives and some believe it maybe a remnant of a prehistoric language. Burushaski is like Ainu and Basque, language isolate with no known relatives. Language Museum Burushaski: An Extraordinary Language in the Karakoram MountainsWikipedia-Burushaski

Ever since British jurist Sir William Jones noted in 1786 that there are marked similarities between diverse languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, and Celtic, linguists have assumed that most of the languages of Europe and the Indian subcontinent derive from a single ancient tongue. But researchers have fiercely debated just when and where this mother tongue was first spoken. Now a bold new study asserts that the common root of the 144 so-called Indo-European languages, which also include English and all the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, is very ancient indeed. In this week's issue of Nature, evolutionary biologist Russell...

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers working in the ancient Yanghai graveyard in China's Tarim Basin has uncovered what appears to be the earliest example of trouser wearing. The research team has published a paper in the journal Quaternary International describing the pants and why they were likely developed to assist with riding horses. The Tarim Basin in western China is host to the famous Yanghai tombs, a large ancient burial ground that dates back thousands of years—thus far over 500 individual gravesites have been excavated. In this latest find, two adult males (believed to be herders and warriors) both approximately...

Bruce BowerMay 31, 2014, 7:14 AM The oldest known trousers, including this roughly 3,000-year-old pair with woven leg decorations, belonged to nomadic horsemen in Central Asia. Two men whose remains were recently excavated from tombs in western China put their pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. But these nomadic herders did so between 3,300 and 3,000 years ago, making their trousers the oldest known examples of this innovative apparel, a new study finds. With straight-fitting legs and a wide crotch, the ancient wool trousers resemble modern riding pants, says a team led by...

~~~snip~~~ hey did a DNA test on the Cherchen man (the 3800 year old 6'6 tall dark blonde mummy and the oldest mummy found), and the beauty of Loulan (the red hair mummy), and both of these mummies contained East Asian Mongoloid DNA. Even the Chinese scientist were astonished. The Mongoloid component of the Tocharians are not from Han Chinese or pre Han Chinese, but most likely from Altaic types of Mongoloids such as Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Mongolians. This obviously indicates that the Tocharians were already mixed for quite a few generations, since they looked mostly Caucasian. Very interesting....