-Caveat Lector-
Tracking The Tarim Mummies
A solution to the puzzle of Indo-European origins?
Archaeological and linguistic evidence places the Indo-European homeland in
the North Pontic region. Members of one Indo-European group (the Yamnaya culture) that
migrated to the western Altai Mountains, where they are identifiable as the Afanasievo
culture, may have later moved into the Tarim Basin of what is now western China.
The Indo-European problem is one of archaeology's oldest, most contentious
questions. More than 200 years ago, in 1786, English jurist and scholar Sir William
Jones realized that Latin and Greek shared a common origin with Sanskrit, the ancient
language of Hindu law and religion. These three languages, he proposed, had developed
from a single ultimate parent language, now called Proto-Indo-European.
Linguists soon added most of the languages of Europe (including English),
Iran, and northern India- Pakistan to the family, and eventually discovered several
extinct cousins, including Hittite, spoken in Anatolia about 2000-1000 B.C., and
Tocharian, a group of two (or possibly three) languages spoken about A.D. 500-800 in
the Buddhist monasteries and caravan cities of the Tarim Basin in what is now western
China.
All of these languages still display telltale traces of the same
Proto-Indo-European grammar and vocabulary. But where and when was the elusive mother
tongue spoken? And by what historical circumstances did it generate daughter tongues
that became scattered from Scotland to China?
In 1995, media reports brought to the public's attention astonishingly
well-preserved remains of European-looking people, dressed in European- looking
clothes, buried in the Tarim Basin between about 1800 B.C. and A.D. 500. This came
about through the persistent efforts of Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese and
Indo-Iranian literature and religion at the University of Pennsylvania.
Long known to specialists but poorly understood and little studied, the Tarim
mummies (not really mummies, but bodies preserved by dry conditions) quickly became
the focus of intense interest and debate. Riveting photographs appeared in Archaeology
(March/April 1995, pp. 28-35) and Discover.
Academic papers on the mummies were edited by Mair for the 1995 Journal of
Indo-European Studies. Film crews working for Nova and the Discovery channel soon
followed Mair to the deserts of northwestern China; the Discovery show ("The Riddle of
the Desert Mummies") was nominated for an Emmy. In 1996, Mair hosted a conference of
50 international experts on the archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthropology of
the Central Eurasian societies related to the mummies; the proceedings were published
in two dense and informative volumes in 1998, and textile specialist Elizabeth Barber
issued a book on the Tarim textiles.
Now Mair has teamed with James Mallory, a distinguished Indo-European linguist
and archaeologist at Queen's University in Belfast, to write The Tarim Mummies, which
explores the difficult and controversial questions about the languages, identities,
technologies, migrations, and physical traits of the mummies.
It is a fascinating and readable account and presents a valuable compendium of
recent research on a little-known region that has long been the focus of romantic
speculation by travelers and explorers from Marco Polo to Aurel Stein. To determine
the ethnic and linguistic identity of the Tarim mummies requires, as they say, "a feat
of archaeological and linguistic legerdemain," but it is an intriguing game to follow,
for it sheds light on the documentary, linguistic, archaeological, and skeletal
evidence that must be used to attempt a linguistic and ethnic prehistory of eastern
Central Asia.
In the end, their "working hypothesis" is that the earliest Bronze Age
colonists of the Tarim Basin were people of Caucasoid physical type who entered
probably from the north and west, and probably spoke languages that could be
classified as Pre- or Proto-Tocharian, ancestral to the Indo-European Tocharian
languages documented later in the Tarim Basin.
These early settlers occupied the northern and eastern parts of the Tarim
Basin, where their graves have yielded mummies dated about 1800 B.C. They did not
arrive from Europe, but probably had lived earlier near the Altai Mountains, where
their ancestors had participated in a cultural world centered on the eastern steppes
of central Eurasia, including modern northeastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and
Tadjikistan.
At the eastern end of the Tarim Basin, people of Mongoloid physical type began
to be buried in cemeteries such as Yanbulaq some centuries later, during the later
second or early first millennium B.C.
About the same time, Iranian-speaking people moved into the Tarim Basin from
the steppes to the west. Their linguistic heritage and perhaps their physical remains
are found in the southern and western portions of the Tarim. These three populations
interacted, as the linguistic and archaeological evidence reviewed by Mallory and Mair
makes clear, and then Turkic peoples arrived and were added to the mix. (The Tarim
Mummies, by J.P. Mallory and Victor Mair; New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000, $50.00
(cloth); 352 pages, ISBN 0-500-05101-1; David W. Anthony is a professor of
anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and co-director of excavations
for the Samara Valley Project in Russia.
People used to think that Hebrew was the origin of all other tongues (because
the Hebrew alphabet represents the foundation of all things, each letter being at the
same time a number). What "is" probably is that, in Hebrew, we have a comparatively
unchanged development of the one tongue of the early ages.
"Some people, once they adopt an idea, bury it in the ground
and go on the rest of their lives defending it, without ever
re-examining it to see whether time and the elements have
caused it to decay into a worthless handful of dust. In that
way you can be always consisten; and often wrong." (Raymond
Clapper)
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