The Mummies of Urumchi - Review

Magazine Antiques, August, 1999 by Alfred Mayor

The mystery of the mummies

The Mummies of Urumchi could be the title of a macabre whodunit, and indeed this is a whodunit, albeit far from macabre despite its starting point: mummies exquisitely dessicated by the salt flats in which they were buried several thousand years ago.

Of the many mysteries to be solved was the fact that these mummies in Chinese Turkistan had the fair hair, round eyes, and aquiline noses of Caucasians. Another was their woven woolen clothes in colors as well preserved as their bodies. As the author comments, "Outside of Egypt, you find a presentable piece of cloth in a prehistoric dig about as often as you find a ruby in your oatmeal."

The author is a professor of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College in Los Angeles who has a profound knowledge of ancient textiles. She also draws on geology, meteorology, animal husbandry, and rich reserves of graceful writing to weave her complex tapestry of explanations for the presence of these ancient Caucasians in a salty desert north of Tibet.

Her argument proceeds where it leads, which on occasion might be graphically represented by a drawing of the Meander River in Turkey. The eddies and still pools along the way are as seductive as the channel. Tracing the advance of languages, for example, she travels from place names in Chinese Turkistan to the borrowings of American settlers from the Indians, as in Allegheny, Adirondack, and many others. "When wave after wave of new people passes through," she writes, "each group speaking a different language, the layers of old language accumulate like lines of seaweed on the sand behind the tide." Thus, while Athenai has been the Greeks' name for their principal city for 3,500 years, it belongs to earlier non-Greek inhabitants, as do the names of the local mountains Hymettus and Lycabetus, which can be traced to the Minoans. Then it's back to Turkistan, where most of the place names are Turkic, not Chinese.

Among the oldest mummies, dating to about 2000 B.C., is a woman whom the author describes as follows: "Framed by auburn hair, her face looks so peaceful and hauntingly beautiful that she has captured the imagination of the Turkic population of the whole province, who nicknamed her the Beauty of Loulan. A painting by a local artist of how she probably looked when alive now adorns wall posters and the CD covers of recordings by local Turkic musicians."

A mention of the great wall of China leads to a footnote about a recently rediscovered section two hundred miles long and the commentary, "How can you lose something two hundred miles long? (Contrary to popular legend, the Great Wall is not visible from space.) The fact that such a thing could happen bears witness to the desolation of this countryside in western China." The note goes on about the Qin dynasty (pronounced "chin," which apparently gave us our name for China), during which many pieces of the wall were joined, and of the Qin emperor Shi Huangdi, whose tomb is guarded by the thousands of life-sized terracotta warriors unearthed not too long ago. The tomb itself is "still unopened because of its enormous size and the number of booby traps built into it." End, finally, of note, but would you cut a word?

The author sets up three categories of objects buried with the dead worldwide: favorite belongings, things thought necessary for life in the next world, and things to keep the spirit from disturbing the living. In the first category are the small cow's horn cup buried with a mummified infant along with "what may be the world's earliest preserved nursing bottle, fashioned, nipple and all, from the udder of a sheep." The last two categories of keepsakes often merge, because "keeping the dead there keeps them away from here." Her example is the coin in the mouth of the dead in classical Greece to pay Charon to ferry the soul across the Styx to the land of the dead from which they could not return. This leads to the following parenthetical addition: "(The everyday Greek garb, a mere wraparound, had no pockets, so people habitually used their mouths for carrying coins. The comic playwright Aristophanes portrayed one of his stooges looking up in surprise and accidentally swallowing his small change.)"

As to the mysteries initially posed by Caucasian mummies, the author deduces from a wonderful cat's cradle of evidence that in the steppes north of the Black Sea two groups of the Indo-European population split off, one going west and the other east. This took place not earlier than 4000 B.C., by which time the wild, but edible, hairy sheep had been inbred to become the doubly useful woolly sheep. Because of this dual diaspora the plaid twill clothing on some of the Caucasian mummies bears an uncanny resemblance to its contemporary central European counterpart, which was later carried west to the British Isles.

In keeping with the vast scope of these migrations there are many maps as well as a portfolio of color photographs of the extraordinary mummies and their clothes. In addition to footnotes at the bottom of the page, there are excellent "Notes on Sources" for each chapter, as well as an extensive bibliography.