Chinese archaeologists have discovered an unusual graveyard in the middle of a frightening desert north of Tibet. The dry air preserved the bodies of its residents who perished about 4,000 years ago.
Key Points
Despite the fact that the cemetery is located in what is now China’s northwest autonomous province of Xinjiang, the inhabitants had European traits, such as dark hair and long noses. Their bones are buried in upside-down boats in one of the world’s biggest deserts. Instead of tombstones professing religious yearning for some god’s benevolence in the hereafter, their graveyard is a thriving forest of phallic symbols, indicating a keen interest in the joys or utility of procreation.
Because their origin and identity are unknown, the long-vanished people have no names. However, numerous hints about their ancestors, manner of life, and even the language they used are now surfacing.
Small River Cemetery No. 5 is located in a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, an area surrounded by foreboding mountain ranges. The Taklimakan Desert covers the majority of the basin, a hostile environment that subsequent Silk Road travellers would skirt along its northern or southern boundaries.
In today’s world,
The region has been populated by Turkish-speaking Uighurs, who have been joined in the last 50 years by Chinese Han immigration. Ethnic tensions between the two groups have lately erupted, with rioting in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. Many old mummies, actually dried corpses, have resurfaced from the dunes, only to become pawns in the conflict between the Uighurs and the Han.
The 200 or so mummies have an uniquely Western aspect, and the Uighurs have used them to assert that the autonomous territory was always theirs, despite the fact that they did not arrive in the region until the 10th century. Some of the mummies, notably the well-preserved woman known as the Beauty of Loulan, were examined by Li Jin, a well-known geneticist at Fudan University, who stated in 2007 that their DNA had markers indicating East Asian and perhaps South Asian ancestry.
The Small River Cemetery Mummies
are the oldest discovered in the Tarim Basin so far. Carbon analyses performed at Beijing University reveal that the oldest portion goes back 3,980 years. A group of Chinese geneticists examined the mummies’ DNA.
Despite the political difficulties surrounding the mummies’ origins, the Chinese stated in a paper published last month in the journal BMC Biology that the people were of mixed ancestry, possessing both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and most likely originated outside of China. Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun headed the team, and Dr. Jin was a co-author.
All of the men studied possessed a Y chromosome, which is today primarily present in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia, but only rarely in China. The mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down through the female line, included a Siberian lineage as well as two European lineages. Because both the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA lineages are old, Dr. Zhou and his colleagues infer that European and Siberian populations intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin around 4,000 years ago.
The Small River Cemetery was discovered once more.
Folke Bergman, a Swedish archaeologist, discovered it in 1934 and then forgot about it for 66 years until it was discovered by a Chinese team using GPS navigation. From 2003 to 2005, archaeologists began excavating it. Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania and a specialist in Tarim Basin archaeology, translated and summarised their accounts.
Dr. Mair described how the Chinese archaeologists stumbled found about 200 13-foot-tall poles while digging through the five levels of tombs. Many had flat blades painted black and crimson, like the oars of a vast ship that had sunk beneath the sand waves.
There were boats, upside down and wrapped with cowhide, at the foot of each pole. The remains within the boats were still dressed in the clothing in which they had been buried. They wore felt caps with feathers inserted into the brims, which reminded me of Tyrolean mountain hats. They wore tasselled woollen capes and leather boots. The clothing beneath appear to have been supplied by a Bronze Age salesclerk from Victoria’s Secret – barely enough woollen loincloths for the men and skirts made of string strands for the ladies.
Each boat coffin included burial goods such as finely woven grass baskets, expertly carved masks, and bunches of ephedra, a plant that might have been utilised in rites or as medicinal.
In the coffins of the women,
The Chinese archaeologists discovered one or more life-size wooden phalluses lying on or near the body. The archaeologists deduced from the design of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman’s boat that the poles were massive phallic emblems.
The men’s boats, on the other hand, all had bladelike tops and lay beneath the poles. The Chinese archaeologists decided that they were not the oars at first glance, but rather symbolic vulvas that corresponded to the opposite sex emblems atop the women’s boats. “The entire cemetery was coated with explicit sexual connotations,” stated Dr. Mair. The “obsession with procreation,” in his opinion, represented the significance the community placed on fertility.
Mr. Arthur Wolf,
According to an anthropologist from Stanford University and an expert on fertility in East Asia, the poles may represent social position, which is a prevalent topic in tombs and burial goods. “It appears that most individuals want to carry their status with them, if it is anything to brag about,” he remarked.
Dr. Mair described the Chinese archaeologists’ interpretation of the poles as “a credible study.” Given that it is impossible to distinguish the two, the buried people’s obvious devotion of procreation might indicate that they were engaged in both the pleasure and function of sex. However, they appear to have had a special regard for fertility, according to Dr. Mair, because numerous women were buried in double-layered coffins with specific burial goods.
Living under severe conditions,
“Infant mortality must have been significant, thus the necessity for procreation, especially given their isolated circumstances,” Dr. Mair added. Another risk to fertility may have developed if the population become inbred. “Those women who were able to bear children and raise them to adulthood would have been especially admired,” Dr. Mair added.
Several objects in the Small River Cemetery interment mimic artefacts or practises from Europe, according to Dr. Mair. The Vikings used boat funerals. String skirts and phallic motifs have been discovered in Northern European Bronze Age tombs.
There are no recorded communities in the vicinity of the cemetery.
As a result, the individuals most likely resided elsewhere and travelled to the cemetery by boat. There were no woodworking tools discovered at the site, lending credence to the theory that the poles were carved elsewhere.
When the Small River people arrived in the Tarim Basin 4,000 years ago, it was already fairly dry. They most likely lived on the brink of extinction until the lakes and rivers on which they relied dried up about A.D. 400. Until around 2,000 years ago, burials with felt caps and handmade baskets were widespread in the region.
Dr. Mair believes the language used by the people of the Small River Cemetery might have been Tokharian, an ancient member of the Indo-European family of languages. Tokharian manuscripts have been unearthed in the Tarim Basin, where the language was spoken from roughly A.D. 500 to 900. Despite its eastern presence, Tokharian appears to be more closely connected to European “centum” languages than to Indian and Iranian “satem” languages. The divide is based on the Latin word for hundred (centum) and the Sanskrit word for hundred (satam).
The inhabitants of the Small River Cemetery lived more than 2,000 years before the earliest evidence of Tokharian, yet there is “obvious continuity of culture,” according to Dr. Mair, in the form of individuals being buried with felt hats, a custom that lasted until the first few decades A.D.
The Tarim Basin mummies will be on display for the first time outside of Asia at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, beginning March 27.
