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Aryan Mummies of China, bringers of Buddhism to Asia?
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In the late 1980′s, perfectly preserved 4,000-year-old mummies began appearing in a remote Chinese desert. They had long reddish-blond hair, European features and didn’t appear to be the ancestors of modern-day Chinese people. Archaeologists now think they may have been the citizens of an ancient civilization of Aryans that existed in the east.
The mummies had long noses and skulls, blond or red hair, thin lips, deepset eyes, and other unmistakably Caucasian features. Dr. Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania said, “The Tarim Basin Caucasoid corpses are almost certainly representatives of the Indo-European family”.
Ancient Greek and Chinese historians had long referenced a unique cultural and ethnic group on its western frontier with red hair and blue eyes, a group that settled ancient Afghanistan and forged a vibrant Buddhist empire that spread Buddhism to much of the the world through China and India. But when 4,000-year-old mummies were unearthed in the early 20th century in the Tarim Basin of the western Chinese desert with blatant “white” physiognomy and clothing of apparently European origin, historians, anthropologists, and archeologists were awestruck. The tenuous ethnocultural issue made this a serious issue:
Europeans emphasized the role of “Europeans” in creating an ancient frontier civilization that brought a world religion to Asia; Chinese scholars refused to believe that significant foundations of their history were “imported,” and the modern residents of the Tarim region (Xinjiang) — the Muslim Uyghurs — insist that they were the original natives of the region.
The Europoid Tarim mummies are some of the oldest and best preserved corpses in the world, protected by the extremely dry climate of East Turkestan. Blatantly related to one of the races of European origin, they give us one of the earliest looks yet at the migratory movement, culture, and civilization of early European peoples.
A number of cultural or ethnic groups lived in the same area as the ancient Caucasian mummies and may have moved southward to Afghanistan. Some had red hair and blue eyes as shown on Chinese artwork. The Tocharians are identified as this European-featured bringer of Buddhism. But are they related to the blatantly genetically European mummies, or did the Chinese merely see another racial group like the Iranians with recessive features? Tracing these peoples’ history allows us to better determine whether or not it was this ancient white European culture of mummies that forever shaped the evolution of Asia or not.
Some major physical evidence we have to determine whether these Buddhist missionaries were related to the mummies is from Chinese frescoes, imagery, and literature depicting their strange western neighbors bringing them a new religion. Chinese sources depict what they call the Yuezhi and what Greeks called Tocharians as quite foreign in their dress, culture, and appearance. Chinese art shows pale-skinned, red-headed, blue-eyed monks with beards obviously from a race and culture very different from the Han Chinese. Sporting partially-shaved heads, dangling earlobes, and the lotus-shaped hand posture, these white Europoids are obviously Buddhist monks bringing the new faith to the Chinese along commercial and migratory routes that they had followed when they left the Tarim Basin for Afghanistan. The entire facial appearance of the white Buddhist missionaries is different: the original artists did not simply depict humanoids in general or Chinese men with red hair. They were portraying a very foreign racial group.
Their graveyard, known as Small River Cemetery No. 5, lies near a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, a region encircled by forbidding mountain ranges. Most of the basin is occupied by the Taklimakan Desert, a wilderness so inhospitable that later travelers along the Silk Road would edge along its northern or southern borders.
In modern times the region has been occupied by Turkish-speaking Uighurs, joined in the last 50 years by Han settlers from China. Ethnic tensions have recently arisen between the two groups, with riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. A large number of ancient mummies, really desiccated corpses, have emerged from the sands, only to become pawns between the Uighurs and the Han.
The mummies in the Small River Cemetery are, so far, the oldest discovered in the Tarim Basin. Carbon tests done at Beijing University show that the oldest part dates to 3,980 years ago. A team of Chinese geneticists has analyzed the mummies’ DNA.
Despite the political tensions over the mummies’ origin, the Chinese said in a report published last month in the journal BMC Biology that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers. The team was led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun, with Dr. Jin as a co-author.
As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, Dr. Mair recounted, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand.
At the foot of each pole there were indeed boats, laid upside down and covered with cowhide. The bodies inside the boats were still wearing the clothes they had been buried in. They had felt caps with feathers tucked in the brim, uncannily resembling Tyrolean mountain hats. They wore large woolen capes with tassels and leather boots. A Bronze Age salesclerk from Victoria’s Secret seems to have supplied the clothes beneath — barely adequate woolen loin cloths for the men, and skirts made of string strands for the women.
Within each boat coffin were grave goods, including beautifully woven grass baskets, skillfully carved masks and bundles of ephedra, an herb that may have been used in rituals or as a medicine.
In the women’s coffins, the Chinese archaeologists encountered one or more life-size wooden phalluses laid on the body or by its side. Looking again at the shaping of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman’s boat, the archaeologists concluded that the poles were in fact gigantic phallic symbols. Arthur Wolf, an anthropologist at Stanford University and an expert on fertility in East Asia, said that the poles perhaps mark social status, a common theme of tombs and grave goods.
Dr. Mair said the Chinese archaeologists’ interpretation of the poles as phallic symbols was “a believable analysis.” The buried people’s evident veneration of procreation could mean they were interested in both the pleasure of sex and its utility, given that it is difficult to separate the two. But they seem to have had particular respect for fertility, Dr. Mair said, because several women were buried in double-layered coffins with special grave goods.
The language spoken by the people of the Small River Cemetery is unknown, but Dr. Mair believes it could have been Tokharian, an ancient member of the Indo-European family of languages. Manuscripts written in Tokharian have been discovered in the Tarim Basin.
The Small River Cemetery people lived more than 2,000 years before the earliest evidence for Tokharian, but there is “a clear continuity of culture,” Dr. Mair said, in the form of people being buried with felt hats, a tradition that continued until the first few centuries A.D
[link to www.articlesafari.com]
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