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The Mummies of Ürümchi
In the museums of Ürümchi, the windswept regional capital of the Uyghur Autonomous Region (also known as Chinese Turkestan), a collection of ancient mummies lies at the center of an enormous mystery. Some of Ürümchi's mummies date back as far as 4,000 years―contemporary with the famous Egyptian mummies but even more beautifully preserved. Surprisingly, these prehistoric people are not Asian but Caucasoid―tall, large-nosed and blond with thick beards and round eyes. What were these blond Caucasians doing in the heart of Asia? What language did they speak? Might they be related to a "lost tribe" known from later inscriptions? Few clues are offered by their pottery or tools, but their clothes ―woolens that rarely survive more than a few centuries―have been preserved as brightly hued as the day they were woven. Elizabeth Wayland Barber describes these remarkable mummies and their clothing, and deduces their path to this remote, forbidding place. The result is a book like no other―a fascinating unveiling of an ancient, exotic, nearly forgotten world. A finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. Illustrated
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
12 people are currently reading
670 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Wayland Barber
10 books102 followersAmerican scholar and expert on archaeology, linguistics, textiles, and folk dance as well as Professor emerita of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College
Barber received her PhD university from Yale in 1968.
Barber received her PhD university from Yale in 1968.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
July 30, 2020
Packed with way more information than expected... awesome! And not just the famous Caucasoid burials of China, but a highly complete account of the Indo-European diaspora, including data on language roots and ancient technology. Exactly what I’d been searching for most my adult life all here in one neat book. Four stars for colloquial grammar and some repetitive info.
Notes :
--------
".. Most of the huge territory that China governs is not fit for agriculture, being either mountain or desert or both."
"According to Chinese historical documents, the Han Chinese themselves began to move into Central Asia only around 120 B.C., struggling to open up regular trade with the West."
"The famous mummies of Egypt appear dry and shriveled, blackened like discarded walnut husks, compared with these life-like remains."
"... Scholars had discovered in this same area a variety of documents dating from the first millenium AD, and written in a now-extinct language known as Tokharian... related to the Indo-European tongues..."
"Outside of Egypt, you find a presentable piece of cloth in a prehistoric dig about as often as you find a ruby in your oatmeal. Yet here, and for the same reason as in Egypt, ancient textiles come out of the ground by the armload."
"...Once cloth became common late in the New Stone Age, about 4000 BC, textile production soon swallowed more labor hours than even the production and processing of food, becoming the most important ancient industry. But whereas the sophisticated Egyptians labored to produce masses of plain white linen, the countryfolk of the Tarim Basin wove and bedecked themselves in garment of vivid color that has survived with astounding brightness."
"...The textiles from at least one of these Inner Asian sites look astonishingly like the peculiar plaid twill cloths found in the only place in Europe where ancient perishables have survived well, the Bronze Age salt mines... in the Alps above Salzburg... woven by ancestors of the Celts..."
"...The most famous is a 3000 year old man... He would have been an imposing figure in life, for he once stood 6 feet tall..."
"A few bodies - the ones best preserved - turned out to be covered with a strange yellow fuzz or dust that lay under the clothes, directly on the skin... Tests indicate it was some sort of animal protein... Mummies found in the high, dry Andes Mountains of Peru often had their skins painted with a thin fish paste..."
"The Cherchen people had such a fondness for clothes that they took piles of apparel with them to the next world. This single excavation, for example, produced 10 hats, each different."
"A horse skull from the Ukranian site of Dereivka, dated to about 4000 BC, shows characteristic tooth wear that suggests the horse had chomped on a bit for several hundred hours during its life; it was not only domesticated but closely controlled."
"Being merely matted sheep's wool. felt requires no loom."
"The whole process of raising the yurt takes about an hour."
"The Egyptians already had sleeved linen shirts in the First Dynasty, around 3000 BC... But sleeved clothing did not remain popular in Egypt... The people of Europe and the steppes seem not to have picked up the notion until the second millenium BC..."
"The Cherchen woman, as I shall call her, must also have been imposing in life, because she too stood well over 6 feet tall..."
"A pair of unusual gifts lay with the child : a small cow's horn cup, and what may be the world's earliest preserved nursing bottle, fashioned, nipple and all, from the udder of a sheep..."
"Although sheep had been among the first animals domesticated around 8000 BC in the Near East, it took 4000 years of inbreeding to come up with usably woolen ones."
"The only fibers that people had before that - namely, plant stem fibers like linen and hemp (used since 25,000 BC, at least) - don't stretch, whereas wool fibers can stretch tremendously..."
"...The makers had invented a weaver's equivalent of the old jeweler's trick of mounting tinfoil behind a gem to reflect a light through it more brightly. In this case, although the warp inside the main cloth was dark brown, within the collar it was peach pink... just enough to alter the hue."
"My favorite textile of all depicts a row of sassy-looking Angali sheep with big curving eyes and large brown or bright blue eyes... I wonder whether the weaver got that idea from the people of Cherchen. After all, someone had gone to the trouble of finding blue stones - something of a rarity - to place over the infant [mummy]'s eyes, and a remarkable number of the non-Chinese people in the Tarim Basin today have blue eyes."
"A small section... in the tapestry consisted of a slightly paler and much silkier fiber than the rest... it was cashmere, the fine hair of a type of goat named after its home in Kashmir, just north of India."
"... We visited a somewhat later cemetery site, dating to about 500 BC, where nearby villagers had looted many of the remaining graves the minute the Urumchi archaeologists left for the season.... All about lay finger and leg bones, a jaw here, a pate there - old bones had no value to the robbers, so they chucked them everywhere."
"...His team had found 1 gold earring and 2 gold beads in this cemetery, while excavating a dozen graves. On the strength of that, the locals had spaded up 20 or 30 more, and might have dug all the way to Urumchi if they had found local treasure."
"... All the Central Asia textiles at this early period are made of sheep's wool, for both sheep and wheat were domesticated in the Near East... Neither of these two cultigens could possibly have arrived from the east, from China, since neither of them existed there yet..."
"... Early folk all over the Loulan area marked the grave by erecting posts, so that their cemeteries came to look like small forests of poles.... The most remarkable of these... belong to a small series of strictly made graves... The posts sit so close together that one cannot walk between them; perhaps this ruse discouraged the local wolves and other carnivorous predators from disturbing the dead."
"Caravans coming from China passed westward ... to Dunhuang at the east edge of the Tarim and Turfan basins. There they passed into the desert through a part of the Chinese defense line called the Jade Gate, so named because most of the beautiful jade considered sacred in China since the Stone Age came from western provinces beyond this point."
"So here on the great wide flats the Chinese military test their A-bombs, assured of privacy..."
"The new loom that arrived in Egypt from Syria about 1500 BC however was vertical and it had the great advantage that... you could see better what you did it. That's why the Egyptians adopted it, sit came along with captive instructors in the art of making a new and intricately patterned cloth - namely , tapestry. (Before that the Egyptians wore plain white cloth and used their world-famous jewelry to dress up.)"
"Chinese thus ranks as the longest-running written tradition in the world, by far, even if not the earliest."
"When salt water freezes, the salt separates out and only the water freezes. So the Tarim explorers, like those in the Arctic zones, could use winter ice as a source of nonsalty water."
"Kharoshti script was used to write an Indic tongue called Prakrit, imported from India in the 3rd century AD and serving for a short time thereafter as a common language for government functionaries all across the southern Tarim Basin... the rules for acceptable word shapes in Indic are more widely accommodating than those of Chinese..."
"...The ancient Chinese viewed the natives of the Kingdom of Loulan as 'resembling birds and wild beasts.' Stein and Hedin too, traveling before cars and roads reached the area, frequently remark that the 'Lopliks' they encountered -- the non-Chinese inhabitants of the few miserable fishing villages in the Lop Nor and the Qara-Qoshun area -- had scarcely progressed beyond a late Stone Age economy even then."
"Until they became the passageway between East and West, the people of Lop had nothing they needed to defend with strong walls, nothing anybody else wanted... Unlettered and unvisited, they left almost no trace in written history."
"... Quite a few words attested in Old Chinese have turned out to have Indo-European etymologies. For example, a whole cluster of Chinese words to do with wheels, wheel spokes, axles, and chariots - all objects first invented in west-central Eurasia..."
"Nomadic herders in the steppe zone north of the Tarim Basin specialized in making felt, not in weaving..."
"... For all their skill at weaving wool, the prehistoric Loulan people made pretty indifferent felt - not at all like true nomads. So of the 2 ways of making cloth, weaving was apparently the older and more comfortable technology among these people when they entered Central Asia from the west."
"The Celts have been weaving plaid twills for 3,000 years at least."
"For nearly a millenium before their expansion, the early Celts had lived in present-day western Hungary, Austria, and southern Germany, an area from they had entered from the east apparently in search of metals to mine."
"During the first millenium BC, Celtic communities grew rich exporting salt and salted meat to the growing civilizations of Greece and Rome, just south of them, importing wine and other luxuries in return."
"A radical change about 4000 BC in the pattern if slaughtering domestic sheep (killing them old to maximize wool and milk harvested, instead of killing them as yearlings to minimize the care needed to reap one feast and one hide) signals the development of sheep with usable wool on their backs. By 3500 BC these woolly sheep had reached places as far away as the Balkans, a thousand miles from Mesopotamia."
"Our first evidence of horse taming comes from Ukraine around 4000 BC."
"The earliest wheel yet found in the steppes - in Ukraine - dates to about 3200 BC"
"Almost every known grave of the Loulan/Qawrighul culture has proved to contain carefully bundled twiglets of identified as ephedra."
"The everyday Greek garb, a mere wraparound, contained no pockets, so people habitually used their mouths for carrying coins."
"Inside the White Room vessels at early Gonur, Russian scientists found residues identifiable as ephedra and hemp, while at nearby Togolok, the White Room residues deposited a few centuries later proved to contain ephedra and poppy."
"...The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang... set out from China to travel the 2500 miles to India via the Tarm Basin in AD 628... The round trip took him 17 years..."
"Compared with the gentle curve of the chimp's air passage, adult humans have a sharp right angle bend, making strong breathing (as when running) much less efficient."
"...Indic names and vocabulary words turn up in written records of the Near East in the Bronze Age, starting soon after 2000 BC, words like ashva, the Indic word for 'horse'..."
.
Notes :
--------
".. Most of the huge territory that China governs is not fit for agriculture, being either mountain or desert or both."
"According to Chinese historical documents, the Han Chinese themselves began to move into Central Asia only around 120 B.C., struggling to open up regular trade with the West."
"The famous mummies of Egypt appear dry and shriveled, blackened like discarded walnut husks, compared with these life-like remains."
"... Scholars had discovered in this same area a variety of documents dating from the first millenium AD, and written in a now-extinct language known as Tokharian... related to the Indo-European tongues..."
"Outside of Egypt, you find a presentable piece of cloth in a prehistoric dig about as often as you find a ruby in your oatmeal. Yet here, and for the same reason as in Egypt, ancient textiles come out of the ground by the armload."
"...Once cloth became common late in the New Stone Age, about 4000 BC, textile production soon swallowed more labor hours than even the production and processing of food, becoming the most important ancient industry. But whereas the sophisticated Egyptians labored to produce masses of plain white linen, the countryfolk of the Tarim Basin wove and bedecked themselves in garment of vivid color that has survived with astounding brightness."
"...The textiles from at least one of these Inner Asian sites look astonishingly like the peculiar plaid twill cloths found in the only place in Europe where ancient perishables have survived well, the Bronze Age salt mines... in the Alps above Salzburg... woven by ancestors of the Celts..."
"...The most famous is a 3000 year old man... He would have been an imposing figure in life, for he once stood 6 feet tall..."
"A few bodies - the ones best preserved - turned out to be covered with a strange yellow fuzz or dust that lay under the clothes, directly on the skin... Tests indicate it was some sort of animal protein... Mummies found in the high, dry Andes Mountains of Peru often had their skins painted with a thin fish paste..."
"The Cherchen people had such a fondness for clothes that they took piles of apparel with them to the next world. This single excavation, for example, produced 10 hats, each different."
"A horse skull from the Ukranian site of Dereivka, dated to about 4000 BC, shows characteristic tooth wear that suggests the horse had chomped on a bit for several hundred hours during its life; it was not only domesticated but closely controlled."
"Being merely matted sheep's wool. felt requires no loom."
"The whole process of raising the yurt takes about an hour."
"The Egyptians already had sleeved linen shirts in the First Dynasty, around 3000 BC... But sleeved clothing did not remain popular in Egypt... The people of Europe and the steppes seem not to have picked up the notion until the second millenium BC..."
"The Cherchen woman, as I shall call her, must also have been imposing in life, because she too stood well over 6 feet tall..."
"A pair of unusual gifts lay with the child : a small cow's horn cup, and what may be the world's earliest preserved nursing bottle, fashioned, nipple and all, from the udder of a sheep..."
"Although sheep had been among the first animals domesticated around 8000 BC in the Near East, it took 4000 years of inbreeding to come up with usably woolen ones."
"The only fibers that people had before that - namely, plant stem fibers like linen and hemp (used since 25,000 BC, at least) - don't stretch, whereas wool fibers can stretch tremendously..."
"...The makers had invented a weaver's equivalent of the old jeweler's trick of mounting tinfoil behind a gem to reflect a light through it more brightly. In this case, although the warp inside the main cloth was dark brown, within the collar it was peach pink... just enough to alter the hue."
"My favorite textile of all depicts a row of sassy-looking Angali sheep with big curving eyes and large brown or bright blue eyes... I wonder whether the weaver got that idea from the people of Cherchen. After all, someone had gone to the trouble of finding blue stones - something of a rarity - to place over the infant [mummy]'s eyes, and a remarkable number of the non-Chinese people in the Tarim Basin today have blue eyes."
"A small section... in the tapestry consisted of a slightly paler and much silkier fiber than the rest... it was cashmere, the fine hair of a type of goat named after its home in Kashmir, just north of India."
"... We visited a somewhat later cemetery site, dating to about 500 BC, where nearby villagers had looted many of the remaining graves the minute the Urumchi archaeologists left for the season.... All about lay finger and leg bones, a jaw here, a pate there - old bones had no value to the robbers, so they chucked them everywhere."
"...His team had found 1 gold earring and 2 gold beads in this cemetery, while excavating a dozen graves. On the strength of that, the locals had spaded up 20 or 30 more, and might have dug all the way to Urumchi if they had found local treasure."
"... All the Central Asia textiles at this early period are made of sheep's wool, for both sheep and wheat were domesticated in the Near East... Neither of these two cultigens could possibly have arrived from the east, from China, since neither of them existed there yet..."
"... Early folk all over the Loulan area marked the grave by erecting posts, so that their cemeteries came to look like small forests of poles.... The most remarkable of these... belong to a small series of strictly made graves... The posts sit so close together that one cannot walk between them; perhaps this ruse discouraged the local wolves and other carnivorous predators from disturbing the dead."
"Caravans coming from China passed westward ... to Dunhuang at the east edge of the Tarim and Turfan basins. There they passed into the desert through a part of the Chinese defense line called the Jade Gate, so named because most of the beautiful jade considered sacred in China since the Stone Age came from western provinces beyond this point."
"So here on the great wide flats the Chinese military test their A-bombs, assured of privacy..."
"The new loom that arrived in Egypt from Syria about 1500 BC however was vertical and it had the great advantage that... you could see better what you did it. That's why the Egyptians adopted it, sit came along with captive instructors in the art of making a new and intricately patterned cloth - namely , tapestry. (Before that the Egyptians wore plain white cloth and used their world-famous jewelry to dress up.)"
"Chinese thus ranks as the longest-running written tradition in the world, by far, even if not the earliest."
"When salt water freezes, the salt separates out and only the water freezes. So the Tarim explorers, like those in the Arctic zones, could use winter ice as a source of nonsalty water."
"Kharoshti script was used to write an Indic tongue called Prakrit, imported from India in the 3rd century AD and serving for a short time thereafter as a common language for government functionaries all across the southern Tarim Basin... the rules for acceptable word shapes in Indic are more widely accommodating than those of Chinese..."
"...The ancient Chinese viewed the natives of the Kingdom of Loulan as 'resembling birds and wild beasts.' Stein and Hedin too, traveling before cars and roads reached the area, frequently remark that the 'Lopliks' they encountered -- the non-Chinese inhabitants of the few miserable fishing villages in the Lop Nor and the Qara-Qoshun area -- had scarcely progressed beyond a late Stone Age economy even then."
"Until they became the passageway between East and West, the people of Lop had nothing they needed to defend with strong walls, nothing anybody else wanted... Unlettered and unvisited, they left almost no trace in written history."
"... Quite a few words attested in Old Chinese have turned out to have Indo-European etymologies. For example, a whole cluster of Chinese words to do with wheels, wheel spokes, axles, and chariots - all objects first invented in west-central Eurasia..."
"Nomadic herders in the steppe zone north of the Tarim Basin specialized in making felt, not in weaving..."
"... For all their skill at weaving wool, the prehistoric Loulan people made pretty indifferent felt - not at all like true nomads. So of the 2 ways of making cloth, weaving was apparently the older and more comfortable technology among these people when they entered Central Asia from the west."
"The Celts have been weaving plaid twills for 3,000 years at least."
"For nearly a millenium before their expansion, the early Celts had lived in present-day western Hungary, Austria, and southern Germany, an area from they had entered from the east apparently in search of metals to mine."
"During the first millenium BC, Celtic communities grew rich exporting salt and salted meat to the growing civilizations of Greece and Rome, just south of them, importing wine and other luxuries in return."
"A radical change about 4000 BC in the pattern if slaughtering domestic sheep (killing them old to maximize wool and milk harvested, instead of killing them as yearlings to minimize the care needed to reap one feast and one hide) signals the development of sheep with usable wool on their backs. By 3500 BC these woolly sheep had reached places as far away as the Balkans, a thousand miles from Mesopotamia."
"Our first evidence of horse taming comes from Ukraine around 4000 BC."
"The earliest wheel yet found in the steppes - in Ukraine - dates to about 3200 BC"
"Almost every known grave of the Loulan/Qawrighul culture has proved to contain carefully bundled twiglets of identified as ephedra."
"The everyday Greek garb, a mere wraparound, contained no pockets, so people habitually used their mouths for carrying coins."
"Inside the White Room vessels at early Gonur, Russian scientists found residues identifiable as ephedra and hemp, while at nearby Togolok, the White Room residues deposited a few centuries later proved to contain ephedra and poppy."
"...The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang... set out from China to travel the 2500 miles to India via the Tarm Basin in AD 628... The round trip took him 17 years..."
"Compared with the gentle curve of the chimp's air passage, adult humans have a sharp right angle bend, making strong breathing (as when running) much less efficient."
"...Indic names and vocabulary words turn up in written records of the Near East in the Bronze Age, starting soon after 2000 BC, words like ashva, the Indic word for 'horse'..."
.
January 28, 2009
If you're an efficient-minded person, don't bother to read this review. Just go buy the book and read it immediately. I'd recommend you just get all of Barber's books. She is a rare talent--an amazing scholar who puts her learning to great practical use who can also write engaging, lovely prose.
Just get all of her books while you're at the store. It'll save you valuable time that could be spent pouring over Barber's writing.
This particular book explains the discovery of and research on some ancient mummified caucasoid bodies discovered in the Tarim Basin, which is north of Tibet and south of Mongolia. Barber, both a brilliant linguist and a fiber artist who has studied ancient techniques, was invited to the region, which is now part of China, to study the bodies and their clothing. Many archaeologists and linguists agree that the mummified folks were Tocharian speakers, thus Indo-Europeans. They seem to have been permanently settled in the area.
What is most interesting to most of us fiber heads is the clothing these people made. Even after about 3,000 years of burial, their clothes are bright red and yellow and blue. They wear twill plaids, woven in a structure that is otherwise particular to Celtic tribes in Europe in the Iron Age. They painted swirling designs on their faces, much like Celts did during their battles with Rome, much later.
Just read the book. I'm too excited to keep writing about it, because thinking of it makes me pick the book right back up. So just read the book. And stare at the gorgeous photos. And then learn to weave and dye--you'll be forced to, I tell ya.
Just get all of her books while you're at the store. It'll save you valuable time that could be spent pouring over Barber's writing.
This particular book explains the discovery of and research on some ancient mummified caucasoid bodies discovered in the Tarim Basin, which is north of Tibet and south of Mongolia. Barber, both a brilliant linguist and a fiber artist who has studied ancient techniques, was invited to the region, which is now part of China, to study the bodies and their clothing. Many archaeologists and linguists agree that the mummified folks were Tocharian speakers, thus Indo-Europeans. They seem to have been permanently settled in the area.
What is most interesting to most of us fiber heads is the clothing these people made. Even after about 3,000 years of burial, their clothes are bright red and yellow and blue. They wear twill plaids, woven in a structure that is otherwise particular to Celtic tribes in Europe in the Iron Age. They painted swirling designs on their faces, much like Celts did during their battles with Rome, much later.
Just read the book. I'm too excited to keep writing about it, because thinking of it makes me pick the book right back up. So just read the book. And stare at the gorgeous photos. And then learn to weave and dye--you'll be forced to, I tell ya.
August 30, 2009
The Mummies of Ürümchi is (a) an intricate discourse on textile production of the first few millennia b.c. (I will never take cloth for granted again!); (b) a compelling reassemblage of Central Asian linguistic history; (c) an expansive depiction of the effects of geography and ecology on lifestyle; and (d) very accessibly written - Elizabeth Wayland Barber chooses apt descriptive metaphors to illustrate her points and she keeps her analysis rolling like a good story. And these attributes all in the service of explicating the origins of some mystery mummies unearthed in the Tarim Basin desert of Central Asia. Barber demonstrates that a preponderance of evidence exists in favor of a western Indo-European provenance for these mummies. In doing so, she also draws attention to the great cultural commerce that has occurred on the Central Asian plain for millennia - a commerce that seldom moved in one direction but instead flowed from west to east and back again and was determined by the cleverness of the technology being shared (more sophisticated looms, woollier sheep, et al.), rather than by diplomatic relations or national philosophies. This focus, as well as her respect for scholars with different agendas, makes this an especially refreshing read, as the other main groups of researchers working on the mummies at the time were from China and the then Soviet Union, neither nation precisely renowned for a-political scholarship. One senses that Ms. Barber tried very assiduously to keep her analysis rooted in the past and away from modern concerns about national identity. (I think, for instance, of the ongoing Mongolian-Chinese contention over which nation can rightfully claim Genghis Khan. And Ms. Barber, after all, is not from Central Asia, so she has perhaps less stake in this sort of question. At any rate, Barber does not participate in nationalistic discourse and, thereby, her work serves only to highlight how very strange it is that modern scholars occasionally seek to make past facts conform to present political climates, rather than attend past facts on their own terms and for their own sakes. Barber does not require history to fit her pre-imagined conclusions. The truth is quite interesting enough as it is.
January 5, 2021
This is a fascinating book that ought to be more widely known. Not only is it in some respects an engrossing tale of the many paths that research opens for the curious, whether scientist or general reader, it gives glimpses of worlds of which I at least was completely ignorant. I read it when I was working on the chapter on Scotland and Ireland in my Frenemy Nations: Love and Hate Between Neighbo(u)ring States, looking for some backstory to the drama of the Celts. The conceit my book is built around is that many places have very much in common but have developed in very different ways. Catholic Ireland and Protestant Scotland seemed a brilliant example of the phenomena since both have their roots in Celtic culture, and for a long time spoke languages which were cousins.
Not much about the Irish and the Scots in this book, but it shows how the culture has it roots in Central Asia. The mummies in question are remarkably "Caucasian" looking, and the textiles some of them are dressed in are very like the plaids that were so proudly worn by Scots and Irish. The journey obviously was long, but it seems that people, ideas and techniques travelled long distances.
Definitely worth reading...
Not much about the Irish and the Scots in this book, but it shows how the culture has it roots in Central Asia. The mummies in question are remarkably "Caucasian" looking, and the textiles some of them are dressed in are very like the plaids that were so proudly worn by Scots and Irish. The journey obviously was long, but it seems that people, ideas and techniques travelled long distances.
Definitely worth reading...
June 16, 2008
This book is like a detective story in which the hero is an expert in ancient textiles, except that she's also the author.
The mystery is, why are 4000-year old blond Caucasian people buried in a desert in (what is now) western China?
The author employs linguistic and archaeological evidence, but what holds her analysis together and renders it fascinating is her dissection of the cloth these mummies were wearing. The cloth turns out to hold the key to the identity of these people - whose language, it also turns out, I had heard of, but no one knew who spoke it.
The writing is engaging and kept me interested all the way through. Now, granted, I love languages and archeology, and ancient central Asia captivates me, so of course this book was just my bag. Anyone who is interested in textiles and the history of cloth production would probably also enjoy it.
The mystery is, why are 4000-year old blond Caucasian people buried in a desert in (what is now) western China?
The author employs linguistic and archaeological evidence, but what holds her analysis together and renders it fascinating is her dissection of the cloth these mummies were wearing. The cloth turns out to hold the key to the identity of these people - whose language, it also turns out, I had heard of, but no one knew who spoke it.
The writing is engaging and kept me interested all the way through. Now, granted, I love languages and archeology, and ancient central Asia captivates me, so of course this book was just my bag. Anyone who is interested in textiles and the history of cloth production would probably also enjoy it.
August 1, 2012
I found this book in the library several years ago and was fascinated to learn of these well preserved mummies (some of them contemporary with the famous Egyptian mummies). In what is now a desert but was once an oasis of water and life in the Tarim basin north of the Himalayas these people were Caucasian-Asian. The most amazing thing was that there were textiles still intact and who better to write about them than Elizabeth Barber author of, among others, "Prehistoric textiles"? This book is the one that spurred me on to learn more about central Asia and the Eurasian Steppes and the people who have lived in this vast area.
August 29, 2007
Mummies found in the Northwestern region of China date back 4,000 years and are Caucasian. They are perfectly preserved (not shrunken like their contemporary Egyptian mummies) including their clothing. The book analyzes their textiles, the colors of their textiles and explores how these Caucasian people might have gotten there.
March 12, 2011
This is something of a re-read. I was so impressed by Elizabeth Wayland Barber's book that I made a trip to Urumchi to see the mummies. When Elizabeth wrote the book it was surmised that the mummies were of (pure) European ancestry. Recent DNA studies have shown that they were of mixed European-Asian ancestry - like most Central Asians today.
August 7, 2014
Loved this book and then went to visit Urumchi to see for myself. Indeed these mummies are everything Elizabeth had to say about them, but when you are really up close you can see a humanity to these folks that can't be captured even by excellent pictures and descriptions. The information in this well illustrated book is fascinating if people of the past interest you.
August 29, 2014
Far, far too much in-depth analysis of ancient wool & felt-making techniques & far, far too little focus upon the mummies themselves. Mallory & Mair's book,'The Tarim Mummies' is a much better, more comprehensive treatment of the world of these mummies.
June 4, 2013
There was actually very little in this book about the Caucasoid mummies found in western China. It should have been entitled "The Textiles Found on the Mummies of Urumchi". Fine for textile fans, but not for me.
March 28, 2021
Wonderful book, appropriate for most general readers, but engaging and expertly-researched enough that a well-educated, knowledgable reader could still enjoy. While much of the specific detail about which peoples went where when and why has likely been changed or rewritten in the 20 years since this book was published, I would still recommend it for the important ideas it presents about the movement of people both directions east and west across Asia and Europe, particularly central Asia.
February 17, 2020
Barber describes the mummies found at Urumchi, Loulan and Cherche, located in the Tarim Basin, Central Asia. She focuses on the textiles found on these mummies and compares them with the tartan found on mummies found in ancient salt mines near Salzburg, Austria. The types of materials, weaves, types of looms, as well as the origin and spread of weaving technology is examined, and compared with neighbouring cultures. The world these ancient people inhabited is examined in an attempt to piece together their history and peculiar Western connections, both from what Barber personally observed and from the testimony of others who explored the Silk Road centuries earlier. Linguistic clues are also examined, as well as (then) newly discovered scripts and thus languages dubbed Tokharian. The historical movement of various groups of people are examined, taking into account the physical geography and changing climate of the area. Barber provides a riveting historical adventure during which an exotic and relatively unknown world is gradually revealed. The book contains numerous maps and many colour photographs.
This is an informative and interesting book that examines where various people making their home in the Tarim Basin came from, how they lived, their movements, their associations to the East (China) and West (Europe, Near East), and what eventually happened to them. Barber has an easy-going writing style that manages to remain professional but not dull or boring.
This is an informative and interesting book that examines where various people making their home in the Tarim Basin came from, how they lived, their movements, their associations to the East (China) and West (Europe, Near East), and what eventually happened to them. Barber has an easy-going writing style that manages to remain professional but not dull or boring.
October 26, 2014
In "The Mummies of Urumchi", Elizabeth Barber writes about the mummies found in the Tarim Basin of Urumchi. The mummies were an enormous mystery - some of the mummies date back as far as 4000 years ago, beautifully preserved. Surprisingly, these prehistoric people don't look asian but caucasoid. They are tall, large-nosed, and blond with thick beards and round eyes.
The first chapters include detailed descriptions of mummies such as the man with then hats and the beauty of Loulan. The last few chapters focusses more about the linguistic research to distinguish the origins of the mummies.
This book is neither dry nor boring. Barber knows how to tell a good story, even if it is about ancient history about a region which tends to be forgotten. Also, Barber stays far away from political believes, and discusses other travel logs that were known before.
All and all, Barber has become one of my favourite authors, knowing how to write a well-researched yet easy-to read book.
The first chapters include detailed descriptions of mummies such as the man with then hats and the beauty of Loulan. The last few chapters focusses more about the linguistic research to distinguish the origins of the mummies.
This book is neither dry nor boring. Barber knows how to tell a good story, even if it is about ancient history about a region which tends to be forgotten. Also, Barber stays far away from political believes, and discusses other travel logs that were known before.
All and all, Barber has become one of my favourite authors, knowing how to write a well-researched yet easy-to read book.
June 7, 2011
Very interesting, mostly pretty accessible book about the archaeology and culture of prehistoric and some historic northwestern China. Centering mainly around the Tarim Basin near Urumchi, the current capital of Uyghur Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China. A fair number of connections to Altai, which is why I read it, but the author stays pretty heavily focused on the mummies, linguistics, and textiles of the region. The book has many photographs and drawings. The maps could use some serious help, relying on simple line drawings and almost entirely lacking contextual hints unless you really know your Central Asian montain ranges, but they are plentiful, if nothing else. Very interesting reading.
November 19, 2011
I would recommend reading the hardback version rather than the paperback..the maps and photos are reduced to the point of uselessness. And some of the maps weren't that great to begin with.
That said, this is a highly readable account. The detailed analysis is a visual one - based on close observation of how textiles were made and fashioned into garments. It does not contain a forensic analysis of the bodies themselves.
It is a shame the book is being sold as a 'mystery' with the (possible) blue -eyed, tartan- weaving folk presented (by the publisher, not the author)as some kind of lost tribe of Celts. It is an interesting account in its own right and the preservation of the textiles and the features of the mummies is amazing enough without a need to sensationalise.
That said, this is a highly readable account. The detailed analysis is a visual one - based on close observation of how textiles were made and fashioned into garments. It does not contain a forensic analysis of the bodies themselves.
It is a shame the book is being sold as a 'mystery' with the (possible) blue -eyed, tartan- weaving folk presented (by the publisher, not the author)as some kind of lost tribe of Celts. It is an interesting account in its own right and the preservation of the textiles and the features of the mummies is amazing enough without a need to sensationalise.
July 27, 2017
This is the second book by Elizabeth Wayland Barber that I've read in as many months and I'm off to start a third. Her writing is so accessible to a non-expert that it reads like a real life detective story, yet is so thorough and well-argued that it clearly is a professional monograph. She is trying to understand how 4,000-yr-old blond Caucasian mummies (even the women were over 6 feet tall!) came to be buried in a salty Central Asian desert. Exploring that question takes her deeply into linguistic, geographical, climatological and historical evidence, but the clothing - some of it much like modern Scottish tartans - is key. There are lots of photos, drawings and maps that greatly aid in understanding.
September 7, 2017
A decent book on a little-covered subject. The author is especially interested in the textiles (which, admittedly, are awfully fascinating given their age) which can be a bit dry if you aren't so enthused about the difference between a twill and a double-hop stitch or the different kinds of looms, but that is all explained in pretty good depth so she doesn't talk over your head.
The last few chapters summarize previous research on the Tarim/Taklamakan basins and the connections to both the middle-east civilizations and the Indo-European language family. I learned quite a bit from this tome, and it was worthwhile reading for someone interested in the earliest spread of domesticated animals, the development of textiles and the Silk Road.
The last few chapters summarize previous research on the Tarim/Taklamakan basins and the connections to both the middle-east civilizations and the Indo-European language family. I learned quite a bit from this tome, and it was worthwhile reading for someone interested in the earliest spread of domesticated animals, the development of textiles and the Silk Road.
April 18, 2012
Barber uses the Urumchi mummies to launch an investigation into the cultural pre-history of Central Asia. She analyzes the textiles worn by the mummies in detail, but not in such a way that a person with no knowledge of weaving is confused. The augments this with linguistic analyses (she has degrees in both textile arts and linguistics) and discussions of the few textual records from before 1000 CE that describe this region. She manages to take a specialized topic - mummies discovered around Urumchi - and use that as the basis of a thorough study of Central Asia, the Silk Road, and the "steppe hordes." Readable and fascinating.
March 21, 2014
this written by an alum of my school, who was the world expert on prehistoric textiles and worked with the identification of the mummies. She is an amazingly fascinating individual, and has shown us hand spinning on a spindle, weaving patterns, ancient and modern wooly sheep hair, loom whorls and weights, and ancient tartan plaids.
Read this for the Westridge alum book club; author coming to meeting with slides and show & tell.
book is fascinating, well written, complex, intelligent, and easy to read about the discovery of the blond round eyed mummies of the steppes of china, before the chinese lived there, wearing plaid tartans.
Read this for the Westridge alum book club; author coming to meeting with slides and show & tell.
book is fascinating, well written, complex, intelligent, and easy to read about the discovery of the blond round eyed mummies of the steppes of china, before the chinese lived there, wearing plaid tartans.
May 12, 2014
A delightful and completely insane book, should be read with caution. I learned a lot about textiles in prehistoric cultures, which is what I hoped I would learn, as I had the presence of mind to check what the book is really about earlier - and I'm grateful I did, I could have been greatly disappointed otherwise.
Viktor Sarianidi, who supposedly discovered traces of poppy, hemp and ephedra in the temples he excavated in Central Asia most likely commited scientific fraud or simply was wrong (teams that tried to verify his finds in 2003 completely failed, Barber couldn't have known about it, when she wrote the book several years earlier).
Viktor Sarianidi, who supposedly discovered traces of poppy, hemp and ephedra in the temples he excavated in Central Asia most likely commited scientific fraud or simply was wrong (teams that tried to verify his finds in 2003 completely failed, Barber couldn't have known about it, when she wrote the book several years earlier).
February 4, 2008
I was lucky enough to find a used copy in Seattle, en route to Beijing and then to Urumqi itself! Tells an amazing story about Caucasian mummies from 4,000 years ago unearthed from the desert in far-western China: who they were, how they got there, what language they may have spoken, and what kind of clothes they wore (which give clues to the other questions). Even more amazing was to get to see them for myself, which gives a whole other meaning to "shock and awe."
July 3, 2014
Amazing. This is a factual, non-fiction book, yet it explores physical evidence, linguistic and historical evidence for societies in and around the Tarim Basin in Western China, in something akin to a plot line. Every chapter is fascinating. There's beautiful glimpses of contemporary characters (the author, the bearded Urumchi archaeologist she works with) and amazing warm insights into human pre-history.
July 14, 2008
A surprisingly interesting read, if one enjoys discussions of textiles and pre-history. The author looks at textile patterns and compares it to textiles from known cultures in an attempt to decipher who the mummies really were. As 6-foot, blue-eyed, red-haired humans living in modern-day western China, many have raised questions about their origins and descendants.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 4, 2015
It's been several years since I saw the mummies in the museum at Urumchi and I'm finally getting around to reading this fine archeological history. She builds the case for the origin of the peoples of the Tarim Basim like a detective, adding up clues from linguistics, weather, crafts, plants, and so on. An amazing synthesis of scholarship.
October 3, 2011
Textiles and what they can tell us about the movements and lives of ancient peoples. Barber does a great job here, but my favorite of hers still is "Women's Work", perhaps because of the nature of the comparative discussion.
November 26, 2013
This book is more about the textiles found with the mummies. Then on to deducing where and when the weavers came from in their migrations across mountains of ancient asia.
It is most facinating, but I had to read it in bits to allow the ideas and theories to settle into my brain.
It is most facinating, but I had to read it in bits to allow the ideas and theories to settle into my brain.
January 22, 2014
Perfect if you're into textile history - it is quite a lot of that to begin with, but it is soon complemented with more general archaeology, geology and linguistics. It all adds up to an interesting study of the early people in a back-water part of today's China with a more Western origin.
November 7, 2015
A really well written scholarly book conveying the excitement of finding mummies in deep Central Asia with Caucasian features, coloring, and highly sophisticated woven, felted and ornamented clothing. The author's discoveries turn our view on our ancient past on their side.
November 21, 2008
Great book. Interesting material and well written. I've read this book a few times.
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