China has always been a country isolated from the outside world. From time immemorial, the rulers of the Celestial Empire believed that the creation of a highly developed Chinese civilization was solely the merit of the Chinese themselves. However, archaeological finds of the last century cast doubt on whether this is actually the case.
Sven Gedin was a Swedish scientist and fearless traveler. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he made an unprecedentedly difficult expedition along the ancient Silk Road. Part of the route passed through the deserted and inhospitable Taklamakan desert. It was there, in the vicinity of the dried up Lake Lop Nor and on the ruins of Loulan, that he managed to find burials dating back to ancient times.
Sven Gedin's discovery
Having opened the burial grounds, Gedin immediately understood the significance of his find. The well-preserved remains were not Mongoloid. With great difficulty, the scientist delivered the artifacts to Europe, where they settled in museums. Europe was then not up to the study of mummies, a big war began. Gedin went to the front as a war correspondent and wrote reports glorifying the valor of the Germans. After the First World War, he painfully suffered the defeat of the Germans and in the early 1920s willingly sided with the Nazis.
Of course, European archaeologists had no desire to investigate the finds of "Hitler's pet". However, very few people were interested in mummies brought from the same region by other scientists - Albert von Lecock and Mark Aurel Stein. The scientific community was a little stirred up after the excavations of the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman, who discovered in Xinjiang 200 perfectly preserved mummies of tall and fair-haired Caucasian people. You yourself understand what thoughts this discovery in 1934 led to!
But neither Gedin, nor Lecoq, nor Stein, nor Bergman ever found out the significance of the discovery they made.
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Conspiracy of silence
The Chinese authorities, pursuing the doctrine of the uniqueness of domestic civilization, did not like the archaeological finds at all. They did not like it so much that for many years they forbade foreigners to meddle in Xinjiang. If they were just mummies of nomads, albeit not Mongoloid, the Chinese authorities would have endured it. But in the burials there were artifacts testifying to the high culture of an unknown people. And this was already completely unacceptable.
Who was the first to learn to cultivate the land? Of course, the Chinese! Who was the first to invent weaving, the spoked wheel, the carriage? They are! And here, in the burials, an order of magnitude older than the Chinese ones, traces of material culture were discovered, which, from the point of view of the officials of the country - the heirs of the former Celestial Empire, some barbarians could not create in any way! Ban immediately!
So the serious study of Tarim artifacts was returned only in 1978, and then only because the Chinese archaeologist Weng Binghua took up the excavation. He investigated the Kizilchok burial ground and opened 113 ancient burials that could not belong to the Chinese in any way. It is clear that there was no big hype about this in China. The finds were sent to the provincial museum of the city of Urumqi and tried to shut up. Maybe it would have ended this way if it had not been for the American archaeologist Victor Mayr, who in 1987 brought a group of scientists and students from the University of Pennsylvania on an excursion to Urumqi. One glance at the mummies exhibited in the museum was enough for him to realize that these corpses, dressed in purple woolen clothes and felt shoes, have nothing to do with the ancient Chinese. The perfectly preserved hair of the mummies was red or blond,the eyes were large and not slanted in any way, and their skulls were elongated, as were the protruding, often hooked, noses.
Mayr began to seek permission from the Chinese government to study the mummies. It took about five years. During this time, the mummies were again buried out of harm's way in Kizilchok, motivating the decision by the fact that the museum is not suitable for storing fragile artifacts. Meir and the archaeological team he assembled had to re-extract the bodies from the ground. The conclusion of geneticists who studied the DNA of the dead was unpleasant for Chinese officials. Mayr's report stated that the mummies belong to the people of the white race.
Unknown people
The Tarim Basin has a harsh climate. But it was thanks to him and the well-salted soils that the bodies of the deceased, despite the age of the burials, were remarkably preserved. In addition to those laid to rest in Kizilchok, Chinese archaeologists have found about 300 more mummies in 25 years of work. The most famous are the "Loulan beauty" and "Cherchen man".
Loulan Beauty was found in 1980 near the ancient city of Loulan discovered by Gedin. She was dressed in expensive clothes, leather boots and a felt hat. Judging by the fact that the clothes were very warm, they buried them in winter. Age - about 40 years old, during her lifetime she was a very beautiful woman with wavy brown hair, big blue eyes - and a completely European nose. Before burial, her body was carefully wrapped in a woolen shroud. An elegant bone comb and a wicker basket with wheat grains were placed next to it.
The burial dates back to the 3rd millennium BC. Later, in 2003, another mummy of a woman was found not far from the burial place of the "Loulan beauty". She was buried in a hollowed out coffin, and jade jewelry, a red burial mask, a leather bag and a bunch of ephedra incense sticks accompanied her to the afterlife. This allowed scientists to conclude that the woman took part in Zoroastrian rituals and was probably a priestess.
The "Cherchen man" comes from a family burial of the 1st millennium BC near Cherchen. This is a man of about 50 years of age, with gray hair in braided brown hair and a small beard, his height is about two meters, a European type face - with a straight nose and large eyes. The man's skin is covered with tattoos. He was dressed in a purple robe, felted gaiters and the world's oldest trousers, made from three pieces of woolen fabric. Next to him lay a whole set of hats - 10 pieces, as well as a saddle, a horse's head and horse hooves. Besides him, there were three more bodies in the burial - women, also in bright clothes, with a blue cord passed along the edging. And the most touching thing is the little body of a three-month-old baby, wrapped in purple cloth. On the last journey, the child was supplied with a bottle made of horn and a teat made from a sheep's udder. Under the head is a pillow made of sheep's wool, and two blue stones are placed over the eyes. Scientists believe that the family died during some kind of epidemic. The fact that diseases often mowed people down in these places is not surprising. Loulan Beauty's entire skin was covered in lice bites.
The Chinese authorities failed to "cover up" these discoveries. However, access to the artifacts was made as difficult for foreign archaeologists as possible.
Who are they and where are they from?
The conclusions of geneticists are by no means unambiguous. When studying mummies, it turned out that many of them are of mixed origin. The Tarims are not purebred Aryans, as the experts assumed. Some DNA traces the impurities of Turkic blood, some are unambiguously attributed to Siberian tribes. There were common features with the mummies of the Pazyryk culture, and to see this, one does not even need to do a genetic analysis. There is something in common with Chinese mummies. The study of tissues found in burials turned out to be very interesting. These fabrics have a clear reference to the Celtic tribes, who used the characteristic weave and plaid pattern. This pattern was in ancient times widespread throughout Europe, but now it is found in Asia. And this suggests the migration routes of the ancient population of Eurasia. Obviously she was going in two directions - and to the west,and east. And the epicenter of migration was the area in the Caucasus region. Interestingly, the earliest mummies belong to "pure" Europeans, while the later ones have the most mixed blood.
But although the nomads of that era moved on horseback and had carts, this great movement of peoples still took centuries. It is not known for certain what kind of people, mixing with others, settled in the Tarim Basin. Obviously, their descendants were the Tochars, who lived there from the 1st millennium BC to the 9th century. The Tocharian language existed between the 3rd and 9th centuries, and then disappeared. The Uighurs settled in the territory where the Tochars lived. But even in later times, the Chinese described entire settlements, whose inhabitants differed from their neighbors in tall stature, blond hair and large European-type eyes.
Elena FILIMONOVA