The History of the Tarim Mummies

Mummification is a process which is usually associated with ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica; in Egypt it was a procedure that was thousands of years old and in Mesoamerica, it seems it was a natural occurrence when bodies were left at high altitudes. Mummification is not something that the general public associates with ancient China. However, some of the world’s most famous mummies were found in Asia – the Tarim mummies.

In 1978, the Chinese archaeologist Wang Binghua unearthed a mass of graves at Hami, in the deserts of eastern Xingjiang Province. The discovery was more surprising at first due to its location – scholars did not believe that they would find an ancient culture of any relevance in this area. However, it should be stated at around the turn of the century, other mummies had been found.

These graves contained several mummified bodies and were dated to around 1200 BCE. Despite this, the bodies provoked little attention to the Chinese government until around 10 years after Wang first discovered them. In 1988, an American scholar, Victor Mair, was taking a guided tour in the museum at Urumqi when he came upon them.

“The room was full of mummies! Life-like mummies! These were not the wizened and eviscerated pharaohs wrapped in yards of dusty gauze that one normally pictures when mummies are mentioned. Instead they were everyday people dressed in their everyday clothes. Each one of the half dozen bodies in the room, whether man, woman or child, looked as if it had merely gone to sleep for a while and might sit up at any moment and begin to talk to whomever happened to be standing next to its glass case”.

The Chinese government named them ‘The Tarim Mummies’ – Tarim being the name of the river that once drained the Tarim basin. However, the government were uneasy about calling them Chinese due to the fairness of their skin. The mummies are notable for their European features – reddish or blonde hair, straight noses and one mummy was measured at 6.5 feet tall.

DNA testing has now proven that the Tarim mummies are of Caucasoid or Europoid descent, not of Mongoloid race. Scholars now believe that they were somewhat similar to the Cro-Magnon people of Eastern Europe. Although not know for sure, their language is thought to be ‘proto-Tocharian’, an early branch of the Indo-European language family that includes Latin, Sanskrit, early Iranian, Greek, Germanic and Celtic.

After the Tarim mummies were unearthed, more mummies were discovered. The dates of the graves span from c.2000 BCE – 300 CE. Experts believe that they probably migrated from “the Altai region to the north, where they flourished around 2000 BCE another Europoid culture, that if Afanasevo”. This migration would have consisted of several waves and would have involved contact with the Indo-European-speaking Iranian people as well as the Altaic people. Since both these people had knowledge of basic metallurgy and domesticated animals, scholars believe that they passed it on to the mummy people who in turn, may have passed it on to the other cultures of eastern China.

The Chinese government have had difficulty in accepting the European background of the mummies. This is due to the fact that the Europeans who came to China in the 17th to 19th centuries with their superior technology were not the first – this, for the Chinese government, would be somewhat embarrassing.

However, one of the ethnic minorities in China, the Uighur, heartily adopted Mair’s findings. This is because, according to them, that the Uighurs was historically part of China and so “bolster their own claim to autonomy”. The Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking group that migrated and settled in Xinjiang around 600 CE. Scholars say that although the Uighurs could have inter-married with them, they could have easily as obliterated them. In other words, scholars cannot say with any certainty whether the Tarim mummies were either Uighurs or their ancestors.

Bibliography:

Keay, John (2008) China A History, HarperPress, London.

Lalueza-Fox, C. (2004) Unravelling Migrations in the Steppe: Mitochondrial DNA Sequences from Ancient Central Asians, Proceedings: Biological Sciences, The Royal Society.