Volume 58 / Number 2 Ancient Mummies of the Tarim Basin Discovering Early Inhabitants of Eastern Central Asia By: Victor H. Mair Originally Published in 2016 View PDF The mummies of Eastern Central Asia (hereafter ECA) first entered my consciousness in the summer of 1988. I had heard about them in the 1970s, but until I came face to face with them, I did not have a sense of their enormous importance for the study of Eurasian prehistory and history. I had been to the regional museum in Ürümchi many times before, but a visit in 1988 left me stunned by the newly opened exhibition of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age mummies. The Witches of Subeshi were buried wearing striking hats. Photograph by Jeffery Newbury Were the Mummies Real? Having passed through the black curtains that hung from the top of the door, I was somewhat suspicious, because the mummies looked too good to be true. The fact that they had light hair, fair skin, long noses, deepset eyes, and thin lips was also cause for pause. I thought that the mummies were part of an elaborate hoax perpetrated to drum up tourism. Yet the labels claimed the mummies dated to the 1st and 2nd millennia BCE. The artifacts accompanying them were also remarkably well preserved and, in many instances, technologically and culturally advanced. For example, the mummies had bronze, wheat, and the wheel before these appeared in the Central Plains of China, and their woolen textiles were of extraordinarily fine quality. The longer I stayed in that room full of mummies and carefully observed them and their associated artifacts, my doubts gradually dissipated. This mummy from Niya cemetery 95 (M5) has well-preserved blonde braids. Notice also the blue glass beads draped over her face. Returning to Penn to resume my teaching duties, I set aside thoughts of the mummies until the September 1991 discovery of Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old, perfectly preserved Iceman (see article in this issue). Spurred by this discovery, I began to organize an international investigation to carry out research on the mummies of ECA. In the summer of 1993, I led my first expedition to the Tarim Basin. That initial expedition was focused on ancient DNA studies, but later expeditions would delve into textiles, bronze and iron metallurgy, agriculture, and other aspects of the existence of the earliest inhabitants of the region. Nearly three decades after that fateful encounter in the summer of 1988, I am still actively engaged in investigations on the Tarim mummies. To use a Chinese expression, the mummies of ECA and I “youyuan” (have an affinity). Bodies Preserved in Dry, Cold Conditions The human remains that I discuss here are not actually mummies, but rather desiccated corpses. Their uncanny state of preservation is not due to any artificial means—such as we find with the mummies of Egypt—but to the extreme aridity and saline soils of the environment. Severely cold winters also played a significant role in arresting the processes of putrefaction and decomposition of the human remains. The mummies are found in cemeteries located along the southern and eastern edges of the Taklamakan (one of the world’s largest and driest deserts), which sits in the center of the Tarim Basin. The Tarim Basin is one of the most remote (far from oceans and seas along whose littorals early humans travelled) and last populated places on Earth. During the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods in ECA (before 2000 BCE), there is no evidence of permanent settlement in the Tarim Basin. From the Bronze Age (in ECA, starting around 2000 BCE) onward, however, the region was a key locus of interaction between western and eastern Eurasia. Hundreds of mummies have been recovered from the Tarim Basin, some of which I describe here. Eastern Central Asia has an extremely dry environment, leading to the preservation of bodies in cemeteries such as Ördek’s Necropolis, not far from Loulan. The Beauty of Loulan Loulan is the fabled city near the vanished Lop Nor (“Lop Lake”) that lay in the northeastern corner of the Tarim Basin. The Beauty of Loulan is a comely woman who was among the first mummies to be discovered in the region. She has been dated to about 1800 BCE. Shortly after she was found in the late 1970s, she became a cause célèbre among the local Turkic-speaking Uyghur people who considered her their ancestor, which they believed gave them a prior claim to the region over the Han Chinese, who arrived about 2,000 years later. Unfortunately, the Uyghurs themselves did not arrive in the Tarim Basin until nearly a millennium after the Han Chinese. Thus, the Beauty of Loulan embodies one of the many mysteries about the mummies, namely, if she were neither a Sinitic-speaking Chinese nor a Turkic-speaking Uyghur, what language did she speak? Evidence exists indicating she may well have spoken Tocharian, the second oldest (after Hittite) Indo-European language. The Beauty of Loulan was buried wearing a warm cloak or shroud, a hat, and boots. Other...