The Silk Road Exhibit is ON in Philadelphia!

Sorry for not having reported on this sooner.  The article is from February 20th.  I am pleased and happy to report that the Chinese government decided, at the last moment, to allow the mummies from Urumchi and elsewhere to go on exhibit, after all, in Philadelphia.  You will recall that the exhibit of the mummies and many other artifacts was cancelled/prohibited by the Chinese government after months of preparation went into the event and after having been exhibited elsewhere in the United States!  No explanation was every given for this unbelievable act.  Perhaps they expected no one would notice or complain?  But unlike in China, where there is censorship and Big Brother spies everywhere, people in this country and our press are still free (although at times it doesn't seem like it, heh?)  Perhaps all the outrage poured forth on hundreds of blogs and in newspaper articles in all of the major papers changed someone's mind?  Who knows.  The artifacts are on view through March 28 at the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia; (215) 898-4000, penn.museum.

Exhibition Review
Another Stop on a Long, Improbable Journey
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: February 20, 2011

PHILADELPHIA — There are times, at the Penn Museum here, when you are almost hesitant to breathe. And it has nothing to do with the recent flurry of events in which Chinese officials suddenly forbid the display of the remarkable objects in the exhibition “Secrets of the Silk Road,” ultimately relenting and allowing them to be shown for just a short time. These doings (about which more later) are scarcely blinks in the history of these objects.

Most of these astonishing artifacts should have ceased to exist long ago. Exposed to breath and light, you can imagine them disintegrating into powdery mist: silk pillows and robes, thin brocades of cloth with floral patterns and rich colors, woven baskets, felt hats, a braided fried dough twist, feathers from caps and arrows. Ephemera, surely: these are not lasting things of stone, bone and gold, and the newest are at least 1,000 years old.

And speaking of ephemera, what of the bundled infant, whose light-brown hair can be seen peeking out of a blue cashmere cap? It is wrapped in a wool cloth tied with thick cords of red and blue. Two rectangular blue stones rest over its eyes, and at its side is a prehistoric nursing bottle made from a goat’s bladder. The baby’s age? Less than 10 months, or, reckoning from its death, 28 centuries.

In another part of this 6,000-square-foot exhibition lies the body of a woman wrapped in a wool cloak, her lavish brown hair draped to the side of her face, long lashes still framing her sunken eyes. Her skin, tinged with a white coating is eerily sensuous. That must have been a cold winter: she is still wearing fur-lined leather boots. She is in her early 40s, we are told, though that was at least 3,500 years ago. The Beauty of Xiaohe she’s called, and we forgive the poetic liberty, because in her death, against all the cautionary chastisements of later centuries, even that ephemeral aesthetic property remains intact.

These artifacts and bodies have all been uncovered from under the inhospitable sands of the Tarim Basin in the far western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, where the seasonal temperatures range from 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit to 104 degrees above. Bodies seem to have been preserved not by design — the way the ancient Egyptians prepared for the afterlife — but accidentally. When buried during the winters, in tightly sealed coffins, many corpses were preserved from the indignities of decay by mineral salts and dry weather. The harshness of that environment is in sharp contrast to the almost genteel delicacy of the objects discovered there in recent decades in ancient cemeteries.

But the extremes may be in keeping with the political environment that led to recent controversies. The two mummies (on view until March 15) and the artifacts on loan from China (on view until March 28), are part of an exhibition organized by the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., that opened there a year ago; it also traveled to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Victor Mair, a leading scholar of these artifacts and a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, is editor of the informative exhibition catalog and has served as a consultant, shaping the show for the Penn Museum (formally known as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology).

This, the show’s final stop, was to last from Feb. 5 through June 5. Special timed tickets were sold, events and lectures planned. The exhibition was expected to elevate the income and stature of this already distinguished museum.

Just days before the opening, though, the Chinese government announced that no objects could be shown at all, even though they had already been displayed in Santa Ana and Houston. No explanations were offered, and no museum official would comment. Photographs were substituted for the missing items and admission prices eliminated. One museum spokesman attributed the problem to a “miscommunication” and would not elaborate. Then, last week, negotiations led to the abbreviated schedule.

Look around and you can begin to see why these artifacts might have more than a purely anthropological or aesthetic importance. It would be foolhardy to think that they reflect a single culture. The Tarim Basin is a sixth the size of China and nearly the size of Western Europe; artifacts here range over thousands of years from multiple sites.

Moreover the exhibition’s title is too narrow. The Silk Road, a network of trading routes that crossed the Basin region, was in its prime during the first millennium. These artifacts reach back to the Bronze Age. Sometime between 1800 B.C. and 1500 B.C., the Beauty of Xiahoe was buried. Would she have had any familiarity with the uncannily well-preserved pastries shown here that have a freshness date of sometime in the ninth century? A lot happens in 2,500 years.

In addition the exhibition text points out that even before the height of the Silk Road the basin was a multicultural area. Records of 28 different languages have been found there, including Tocharian, unique to the region. Buddhism was practiced (as several artifacts show); so were Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Judaism. Conquests by Islam and by Genghis Khan’s armies led to still other transformations.

Exhibition Review
Another Stop on a Long, Improbable JourneyPublished: February 20, 2011
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In addition the exhibition text points out that even before the height of the Silk Road the basin was a multicultural area. Records of 28 different languages have been found there, including Tocharian, unique to the region. Buddhism was practiced (as several artifacts show); so were Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Judaism. Conquests by Islam and by Genghis Khan’s armies led to still other transformations.

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Slide Show ‘Secrets of the Silk Road’.Blog
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.One of the most remarkable sets of artifacts are the trappings of a man found at Yingpan, dating from the third to the fifth century. His mummy was too fragile to travel, but his clothes are arrayed in a coffinlike space and reflected in a tilted mirror. He was 6 feet 6 inches tall and buried with a Roman glass bowl that might have come from Syria. The pillow he rests on, we are told, shows the influence of Han Chinese culture, but his elaborately decorated clothes include images from Greek and Roman mythology. The hypothesis is that he was a Sogdian trader from the eastern region of Iran. His features do not have any affinity to those of Eastern Asia.

This is the crux of the matter, for most bodies found in this region have what are called Caucasoid features. And though many objects here are clearly associated with later Chinese traditions — like the delicate figurines of women making pottery (from the seventh to ninth centuries) — others come from cultural worlds that can still not be clearly identified.

A felt hat from the fifth to third centuries B.C. could easily be imagined atop the head of a Tarim leprechaun. (The exhibition notes that some textile patterns seem related to Celtic styles.)

The Beauty of Xiaohe mummy not only has features that seem alien to the region, but she was also buried in a style that has little connection with local traditions of later millenniums. The wooden coffins in her cemetery are shaped like overturned boats and sealed with clay and mud; women seem to have been buried with icons representing the phallus, men with icons of the vulva. (That cemetery is near a dried up riverbed, which may help account for the boatlike coffins and the ready use of wood in burial artifacts.)

As Mr. Mair points out, the basin, because of its geographic isolation and brutal climate, was one of the last areas on the planet settled by humans. It also proved, he says in the catalog, to be an “unparalleled storehouse of genetic, anthropological and cultural material of peoples who entered it from all directions at different times during the last four millenniums.” Recent genetic research on DNA samples also suggests that there was far more migration of populations than was once thought in the era before the Silk Road.

The problem is that right now this is the worst possible news, given the political climate. There are hints in the catalog of problems Western scholars have confronted: incomplete skeletal remains, unreleased photographs, difficulty in conducting genetic analysis. The unexpected appearance of non-Chinese-seeming cultures and bodies in this region is being treated a bit like the way some American Indian tribes treated the 1996 discovery of Kennewick Man in Washington State, his prehistoric remains showing Caucasoid or Asian features; the tribes asserted ownership over the remains and wanted to prevent scientific analysis.

In this case the issues have ramifications in territorial claims on this oil-rich region. One museum in Xinjiang insists that the territory “has been an inalienable part of the territory of China.” But in 1993 the Chinese government was concerned enough to prevent Mr. Mair from leaving China with 52 tissue samples after having authorized him to go to Xinjiang and collect them. And the region’s Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, have hailed the discovery of these non-East Asian mummies as proof of their own historical claims. There is a separatist movement of Uighurs; there are also Chinese attempts to rein in Islam in the region.

But the DNA and cultural analysis support neither opposing claim. (Nor would it matter if they did.) In a helpful essay in the current issue of the Penn Museum’s magazine Mr. Mair points out that xinjiang means “new borders.” That’s what were established in the region when it was conquered by the Chinese in the 19th century and what were created again, when, after an era of independence, Chinese control was reasserted in the 20th century, turning it into an “autonomous region.”

In the catalog Lothar von Falkenhausen, an art historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests, “The present exhibition, for reasons connected with the historical situation of Xinjiang today, particularly emphasizes the Chinese cultural impact on the ‘Western Regions.’ ” Maybe Mr. Mair’s particular emphasis on cosmopolitan themes made the Chinese particularly nervous, but other visitors, can only react with something like awe at how much there is still to learn from what is buried in the sands, and what an enduring impact ephemera can have.

China Demands Removal of Artifacts from Silk Road Exhibit...

The "Beauty of Xiaohe". Image from Penn Current.
Buried circa 1800 BCE, one of approximately
500 mummies excavated in the Tarim Basin
over the past 40 years.

...that it had agreed to be exhibited in the ground-breaking exhibition.  No explanation was given for their demands.  The host museum (the Penn, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) complied with the demands and have withdrawn two Tarim Basin mummies from the exhibit (they would have been a HUGE draw), along with some 100 rare artifacts never before seen outside of China.  Evidently China has thrown another hissy fit for reasons that only it knows (but we can make some educated surmises).  The Penn people aren't talking.  What was to be a block-buster exhibit that presold thousands of tickets will now have that money refunded and a much reduced exhibit, with photos of the missing mummies and artifacts, offered instead.  The reduced exhibit will be open to all visitors ot the museum who pay its general admission.  The exhibit - with mummies and artifacts - has already been viewed at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California and the Houston Museum of Natural Science before the final exhibit at the Penn Museum. 

Story at Pasthorizons.com
China demands removal of mummies and artifacts from Silk Road exhibition
February 3, 2011

Some possible hints about why the artifacts and mummies were pulled at the last second by the Chinese government (who conveniently turn blind eyes to the concepts of  "contract" and "rule of law") may be found in this article at the Los Angeles Times:

China thwarts 'Silk Road' exhibition in Philly -- and Bowers Museum could be out $27,500
February 3, 2011 | 10:38 am

February 2, 2011, 2:54 pm
China Asks Penn to Remove All Artifacts From ‘Silk Road’ Exhibition
By RANDY KENNEDY

A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets

There is a reason The New York Times is one of the best newspapers in the world.  This article proves it for me - what a great article!  Bringing the mummies of the Tarim Basin out of PBS land (which, unfortunately, most Americans do not watch) into the popular press - and what a story they tell.  Best of all, an exhibition of the Tarim Basin mummies opens March 27 at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif. — the first time that the mummies will be seen outside Asia, as part of a larger exhibit "Secres of the Silk Road."  Running through July 25, 2010.  Wow. 

The NYT article has an interactive feature over 17 minutes long and photographs, too.  Check it out!  Text is  below. 

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: March 15, 2010
In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.

The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation.

The long-vanished people have no name, because their origin and identity are still unknown. But many clues are now emerging about their ancestry, their way of life and even the language they spoke.

Their graveyard, known as Small River Cemetery No. 5, lies near a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, a region encircled by forbidding mountain ranges. Most of the basin is occupied by the Taklimakan Desert, a wilderness so inhospitable that later travelers along the Silk Road would edge along its northern or southern borders.

In modern times the region has been occupied by Turkish-speaking Uighurs, joined in the last 50 years by Han settlers from China. Ethnic tensions have recently arisen between the two groups, with riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. A large number of ancient mummies, really desiccated corpses, have emerged from the sands, only to become pawns between the Uighurs and the Han.

The 200 or so mummies have a distinctively Western appearance, and the Uighurs, even though they did not arrive in the region until the 10th century, have cited them to claim that the autonomous region was always theirs. Some of the mummies, including a well-preserved woman known as the Beauty of Loulan, were analyzed by Li Jin, a well-known geneticist at Fudan University, who said in 2007 that their DNA contained markers indicating an East Asian and even South Asian origin.

The mummies in the Small River Cemetery are, so far, the oldest discovered in the Tarim Basin. Carbon tests done at Beijing University show that the oldest part dates to 3,980 years ago. A team of Chinese geneticists has analyzed the mummies’ DNA.

Despite the political tensions over the mummies’ origin, the Chinese said in a report published last month in the journal BMC Biology that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China. The team was led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun, with Dr. Jin as a co-author.

All the men who were analyzed had a Y chromosome that is now mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, but rarely in China. The mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, consisted of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe. Since both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA lineages are ancient, Dr. Zhou and his team conclude the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin some 4,000 years ago.

The Small River Cemetery was rediscovered in 1934 by the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman and then forgotten for 66 years until relocated through GPS navigation by a Chinese expedition. Archaeologists began excavating it from 2003 to 2005. Their reports have been translated and summarized by Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in the prehistory of the Tarim Basin.

As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, Dr. Mair recounted, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand.

At the foot of each pole there were indeed boats, laid upside down and covered with cowhide. The bodies inside the boats were still wearing the clothes they had been buried in. They had felt caps with feathers tucked in the brim, uncannily resembling Tyrolean mountain hats. They wore large woolen capes with tassels and leather boots. A Bronze Age salesclerk from Victoria’s Secret seems to have supplied the clothes beneath — barely adequate woolen loin cloths for the men, and skirts made of string strands for the women.

Within each boat coffin were grave goods, including beautifully woven grass baskets, skillfully carved masks and bundles of ephedra, an herb that may have been used in rituals or as a medicine.

In the women’s coffins, the Chinese archaeologists encountered one or more life-size wooden phalluses laid on the body or by its side. Looking again at the shaping of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman’s boat, the archaeologists concluded that the poles were in fact gigantic phallic symbols.

The men’s boats, on the other hand, all lay beneath the poles with bladelike tops. These were not the oars they had seemed at first sight, the Chinese archaeologists concluded, but rather symbolic vulvas that matched the opposite sex symbols above the women’s boats. “The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism,” Dr. Mair wrote. In his view, the “obsession with procreation” reflected the importance the community attached to fertility.

Arthur Wolf, an anthropologist at Stanford University and an expert on fertility in East Asia, said that the poles perhaps mark social status, a common theme of tombs and grave goods. “It seems that what most people want to take with them is their status, if it is anything to brag about,” he said.

Dr. Mair said the Chinese archaeologists’ interpretation of the poles as phallic symbols was “a believable analysis.” The buried people’s evident veneration of procreation could mean they were interested in both the pleasure of sex and its utility, given that it is difficult to separate the two. But they seem to have had particular respect for fertility, Dr. Mair said, because several women were buried in double-layered coffins with special grave goods.

Living in harsh surroundings, “infant mortality must have been high, so the need for procreation, particularly in light of their isolated situation, would have been great,” Dr. Mair said. Another possible risk to fertility could have arisen if the population had become in-bred. “Those women who were able to produce and rear children to adulthood would have been particularly revered,” Dr. Mair said.

Several items in the Small River Cemetery burials resemble artifacts or customs familiar in Europe, Dr. Mair noted. Boat burials were common among the Vikings. String skirts and phallic symbols have been found in Bronze Age burials of Northern Europe.

There are no known settlements near the cemetery, so the people probably lived elsewhere and reached the cemetery by boat. No woodworking tools have been found at the site, supporting the idea that the poles were carved off site.

The Tarim Basin was already quite dry when the Small River people entered it 4,000 years ago. They probably lived at the edge of survival until the lakes and rivers on which they depended finally dried up around A.D. 400. Burials with felt hats and woven baskets were common in the region until some 2,000 years ago.

The language spoken by the people of the Small River Cemetery is unknown, but Dr. Mair believes it could have been Tokharian, an ancient member of the Indo-European family of languages. Manuscripts written in Tokharian have been discovered in the Tarim Basin, where the language was spoken from about A.D. 500 to 900. Despite its presence in the east, Tokharian seems more closely related to the “centum” languages of Europe than to the “satem” languages of India and Iran. The division is based on the words for hundred in Latin (centum) and in Sanskrit (satam).

The Small River Cemetery people lived more than 2,000 years before the earliest evidence for Tokharian, but there is “a clear continuity of culture,” Dr. Mair said, in the form of people being buried with felt hats, a tradition that continued until the first few centuries A.D.

Northwest China Had Bronze Production Early On

We know the area around the Tarim Basin where the world-famous Urumchi mummies and others were discovered might not always have been a desert, because some of the grave yards were surrounded with wooden stockades, and many of the discovered graves were covered with wood. (See book cover, below, showing one such location).

In a desert, there would have been no wood. The most obvious answer seems to be that the people who became the mummies were there and were buried before the area became a desert. But then, how did they become mummies? As I understand it, the current theory says that the mummies were naturally dessicated by the sere surroundings. It would have been a process akin to what happened to bodies buried in the sand in pre-dynastic Egypt, before elaborate embalming and mummification rituals were created.


But, a climate that would have supported enough trees to supply the wood necessary to construct the graveyards would imply a climate that was not conducive to the formation of dessicated mummies. So, I am at a loss.

You can trace out the ancient northern route of the Silk Road by following the towns: Turpan, Korla, Urumchi, Kuqa, Aksa, Kashgar. Between the northern route and the southern route (which was a killer, with water stops few and far between, but the shorter route), a vast nothingness, quite visible even today on the modern maps.

This article, which presents important information about the early history of bronze smelting in Gansu Province in northwest of China, also indicates that research reveals that the climate once supported trees and farming, and that the people only left after the destruction of all of the trees, when the land turned to desert (I envision a process akin to what caused the Dust Bowl in the 1930's in the USA).

The ancient gateway city of Dunhuang, on the famed Silk Road (c. 200 BCE - 220 CE), which was travelled some 2000 years after the mummies of Urumchi were buried and 3000 years after the Beauty of Loulan was buried, was the last stop for travelers westward to stock up on supplies before venturing forth across the vast horrible stretch of the Taklamakan Desert. It is located on the western border of Ganshu Province.

China had bronze early on
Thursday, 03 December 2009
Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation

ANSTO research has shown that an area of desert in north-western China was once a thriving Bronze Age manufacturing and agricultural site. The new findings may help shed light on the origins and development of the earliest applications of Bronze Age technology.

Dating, using ANSTO’s precision techniques, was used to identify the age of seeds, slag, copper ore and charcoal at two sites. The findings show the material is up to 3700 years old, but that smelting was still being carried out as recently as 1300 years ago.

The research indicates bronze production may have begun as early as 2135 BC and that the modern mine location - Baishantang at Dingxin - was possibly the historical source of copper ore for manufacturing. ANSTO’s Professor John Dodson conducted the research in conjunction with scientists from the State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology in China. A photo of the study site is on the November issue of the journal “Quaternary Research”.

“This research takes us a step closer to discovering the origins and development of bronze manufacturing in China,” said Professor Dodson. “Further research will look at whether bronze technology was invented in several places around the world independently, or whether the technology was transferred from a single centre of origin.”

“The aim of the study was to determine possible sources of ore and evidence of bronze production through analysis of artefacts (with copper and arsenic content) including analysing samples of slag and copper ore from two archaeological sites known as Ganggangwa and Huoshiliang in northwestern Gansu Province,“ he said.

The research used lead and strontium isotopic analysis to identify and age ornaments, knives, rings, hemispherical objects and spearheads.

The team discovered substantial areas of woody vegetation around the sites which is now dominated by sand dunes. The Bronze Age people of the Gansu area were farmers who planted cereals such as wheat and practiced animal husbandry. Horse and sheep bones are common. It is believed they may have abandoned the region when wood was exhausted and desertification took over.

Blue Eyed Mummy and Cannabis in Ancient Chinese Grave

I had no idea that most strains of cannabis today originated in China! Fascinating article - and more of those troublesome blue-eyed certainly Caucasian mummies (this one was most likely a shaman) showing up in the far northwest region of China. [Map - shows how close Turpan a/k/a Turfan is to Urumchi a/k/a Urumqi - see prior posts under Mummies of Urumchi: (1) (2)]. Story from The Canadia Press.com Researchers find oldest-ever stash of marijuana 1 day ago OTTAWA — Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China. The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly "cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany. The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China. The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour. "To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent," says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo. Remnants of cannabis have been found in ancient Egypt and other sites, and the substance has been referred to by authors such as the Greek historian Herodotus. But the tomb stash is the oldest so far that could be thoroughly tested for its properties. The 18 researchers, most of them based in China, subjected the cannabis to a battery of tests, including carbon dating and genetic analysis. Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache, without success. The marijuana was found to have a relatively high content of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, but the sample was too old to determine a precise percentage. Researchers also could not determine whether the cannabis was smoked or ingested, as there were no pipes or other clues in the tomb of the shaman, who was about 45 years old. The large cache was contained in a leather basket and in a wooden bowl, and was likely meant to be used by the shaman in the afterlife. "This materially is unequivocally cannabis, and no material has previously had this degree of analysis possible," Russo said in an interview from Missoula, Mont. "It was common practice in burials to provide materials needed for the afterlife. No hemp or seeds were provided for fabric or food. Rather, cannabis as medicine or for visionary purposes was supplied." The tomb also contained bridles, archery equipment and a harp, confirming the man's high social standing. Russo is a full-time consultant with GW Pharmaceuticals, which makes Sativex, a cannabis-based medicine approved in Canada for pain linked to multiple sclerosis and cancer. The company operates a cannabis-testing laboratory at a secret location in southern England to monitor crop quality for producing Sativex, and allowed Russo use of the facility for tests on 11 grams of the tomb cannabis. Researchers needed about 10 months to cut red tape barring the transfer of the cannabis to England from China, Russo said. The inter-disciplinary study was published this week by the British-based botany journal, which uses independent reviewers to ensure the accuracy and objectivity of all submitted papers. The substance has been found in two of the 500 Gushi tombs excavated so far in northwestern China, indicating that cannabis was either restricted for use by a few individuals or was administered as a medicine to others through shamans, Russo said. "It certainly does indicate that cannabis has been used by man for a variety of purposes for thousands of years." Russo, who had a neurology practice for 20 years, has previously published studies examining the history of cannabis. "I hope we can avoid some of the political liabilities of the issue," he said, referring to his latest paper. The region of China where the tomb is located, Xinjiang, is considered an original source of many cannabis strains worldwide. Copyright © 2008 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

The Mummies of Urumchi Make the New York Times!

Great story on one of my favorite subjects: the mummies of Urumchi in the Tarim Basin. The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To By EDWARD WONG Published: November 18, 2008 URUMQI, China — An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government’s unambiguous take on the history of this border region: “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” says one prominent sign. But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story. One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese. The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in the western deserts here over the last few decades. The ancient bodies have become protagonists in a very contemporary political dispute over who should control the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The Chinese authorities here face an intermittent separatist movement of nationalist Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who number nine million in Xinjiang. At the heart of the matter lie these questions: Who first settled this inhospitable part of western China? And for how long has the oil-rich region been part of the Chinese empire? Uighur nationalists have gleaned evidence from the mummies, whose corpses span thousands of years, to support historical claims to the region. Foreign scholars say that at the very least, the Tarim mummies — named after the vast Tarim Basin where they were found — show that Xinjiang has always been a melting pot, a place where people from various corners of Eurasia founded societies and where cultures overlapped. Contact between peoples was particularly frequent in the heyday of the Silk Road, when camel caravans transported goods that flowed from as far away as the Mediterranean. “It’s historically been a place where cultures have mixed together,” said Yidilisi Abuduresula, 58, a Uighur archaeologist in Xinjiang working on the mummies. The Tarim mummies seem to indicate that the very first people to settle the area came from the west — down from the steppes of Central Asia and even farther afield — and not from the fertile plains and river valleys of the Chinese interior. The oldest, like the Loulan Beauty, date back 3,800 years. Some Uighurs have latched on to the fact that the oldest mummies are most likely from the west as evidence that Xinjiang has belonged to the Uighurs throughout history. A modern, nationalistic pop song praising the Loulan Beauty has even become popular. “The people found in Loulan were Uighur people, according to the materials,” said a Uighur tour guide in the city of Kashgar who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of running afoul of the Chinese authorities. “The nationalities of Xinjiang are very complicated. There have been many since ancient times.” Scholars generally agree that Uighurs did not migrate to what is now Xinjiang from Central Asia until the 10th century. But, uncomfortably for the Chinese authorities, evidence from the mummies also offers a far more nuanced history of settlement than the official Chinese version. By that official account, Zhang Qian, a general of the Han dynasty, led a military expedition to Xinjiang in the second century B.C. His presence is often cited by the ethnic Han Chinese when making historical claims to the region. The mummies show, though, that humans entered the region thousands of years earlier, and almost certainly from the west. What is indisputable is that the Tarim mummies are among the greatest recent archaeological finds in China, perhaps the world. Four are in glass display cases in the main museum here in Urumqi, the regional capital. Their skin is parched and blackened from the wear and tear of thousands of years, but their bodies are strikingly intact, preserved by the dry climate of the western desert. Some foreign scholars say the Chinese government, eager to assert a narrative of longtime Chinese dominance of Xinjiang, is unwilling to face the fact that the mummies provide evidence of heterogeneity throughout the region’s history of human settlement. As a result, they say, the government has been unwilling to give broad access to foreign scientists to conduct genetic tests on the mummies. “In terms of advanced scientific research on the mummies, it’s just not happening,” said Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania who has been at the forefront of foreign scholarship of the mummies. Mr. Mair first spotted one of the mummies, a red-haired corpse called the Cherchen Man, in the back room of a museum in Urumqi while leading a tour of Americans there in 1988, the first year the mummies were put on display. Since then, he says that he has been obsessed with pinpointing the origins of the mummies, intent on proving a theory dear to him: that the movement of peoples throughout history is far more common than previously thought. Mr. Mair has assembled various groups of scholars to do research on the mummies. In 1993, the Chinese government tried to prevent Mr. Mair from leaving China with 52 tissue samples after having authorized him to go to Xinjiang and to collect them. But a Chinese researcher managed to slip a half-dozen vials to Mr. Mair. From those samples, an Italian geneticist concluded in 1995 that at least two of the mummies had a European genetic marker. The Chinese government in recent years has allowed genetic research on the mummies to be conducted only by Chinese scientists. Jin Li, a well-known geneticist at Fudan University in Shanghai, tested the mummies in conjunction with a 2007 National Geographic documentary. He concluded that some of the oldest mummies had East Asian and even South Asian markers, though the documentary said further testing needed to be done. Mr. Mair has disputed any suggestion that the mummies were from East Asia. He believes that East Asian migrants did not appear in the Tarim Basin until much later than the Loulan Beauty and her people. The oldest mummies, he says, were probably Tocharians, herders who traveled eastward across the Central Asian steppes and whose language belonged to the Indo-European family. A second wave of migrants came from what is now Iran. The theory that the earliest mummies came from the west of what is now modern China is supported by other scholars as well. A textile expert, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, in a book called “The Mummies of Urumchi,” wrote that the kind of cloth discovered in the oldest grave sites can be traced to the Caucasus. Han Kangxin, a physical anthropologist, has also concluded that the earliest settlers were not Asians. He has studied the skulls of the mummies, and says that genetic tests can be unreliable. “It’s very clear that these are of Europoid or Caucasoid origins,” Mr. Han, now retired, said in an interview in his apartment in Beijing. Of the hundreds of mummies discovered, there are some that are East Asian, but they are not as ancient as the Loulan Beauty or the Cherchen Man. The most prominent Chinese grave sites were discovered at a place called Astana, believed to be a former military outpost. The findings at the site span the Jin to the Han dynasties, from the third to the 10th centuries. Further clouding the picture, a mummy from the Lop Nur area, the 2,000-year-old Yingpan Man, was unearthed with artifacts associated with an entirely different part of the globe. He was wearing a hemp death mask with gold foil and a red robe decorated with naked angelic figures and antelopes — all hallmarks of a Hellenistic civilization. Despite the political issues, excavations of the grave sites are continuing. Mr. Abuduresula, the Uighur archaeologist, made a trip in late September to the desert site at Xiaohe, where 350 graves have been discovered. The bottom layer of graves dates back nearly 4,000 years. More recent graves point to a matriarchal herding society that worshiped cows, Mr. Abuduresula said. Somewhere in those sands, he said, archaeologists have discovered a woman as striking as the Loulan Beauty. She is called the Xiaohe Princess, and even her eyelashes are intact.

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The Xiaohe Princess? When was she discovered? I don't recall reading about her!

Urumchi Back in the News in a Bad Way

From The New York Times: China Reports Suspected Terrorist Activity By JIM YARDLEY and JAKE HOOKER Published: March 10, 2008 BEIJING — A Chinese passenger jet that departed Friday morning from the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang was forced to make an emergency landing after the flight crew apprehended at least two passengers who authorities say intended to sabotage the airplane, state media reported Sunday. A senior Chinese official also said Sunday that a police raid last January against a group in Xinjiang suspected of planning terrorist acts uncovered proof that the group was plotting an attack on the coming Beijing Olympics. Terrorism is usually not a significant threat in China, where the authoritarian government takes an unflinching approach toward maintaining social stability. But Chinese security officials are very concerned that terrorism poses a serious risk as Beijing prepares to be the host for the Olympic Games in August. The airplane incident came in the same week that a man armed with dynamite hijacked a private bus filled with Australian tour operators who were sightseeing in the city of Xian. A police sniper later killed the man, and few details have been released about him or his motives. None of the hostages were wounded. On Sunday, Wang Lequan, the Communist Party chief in Xinjiang, took a hard stance, saying that China would strike the “three evil forces” of terrorists, separatists and extremists. “We are prepared to strike them when the evil forces are planning their activities,” Mr. Wang said, according to Xinhua, the country’s state-run news service. Xinjiang is a vast northwestern region that is home to China’s population of 8.3 million Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim group with linguistic and cultural ties to neighboring central Asia. The region has long had tensions over cultural aspirations by some Uighurs for an independent state. In the past, China has blamed Uighur separatists for terrorist actions. Human rights groups have accused China of overstating any terrorist threat as a pretext for cracking down on the Uighurs. In January, the Chinese police attacked what the authorities said was a terrorist gang in Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang. Two people were killed and 15 others arrested. Initially, few details were released about the raid. On Sunday, Mr. Wang said investigators had found knives, axes and books about terrorism in the raid. He said other materials suggested the group planned an Olympic attack, although no specifics were provided. “Obviously, the gang had planned an attack targeting the Olympics,” Mr. Wang told Xinhua in an interview conducted during the meeting of the National People’s Congress, the country’s Communist Party-controlled legislature. [Really? Based on the evidence of "knives, axes and books about 'terrorism' supposedly discovered in this 'raid?' The only 'gang' here is one described by a terrorist Communist government, hardly spot-free and not above planting evidence or just making up things to feed to the government-controlled media.] Mr. Wang said the gang had ties to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a separatist group designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations. The thwarted airplane attack was also disclosed on Sunday. Nur Bekri, chairman of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region government, told state media that “some people were attempting to create an air disaster.” The incident occurred on a China Southern flight that departed Friday morning at 10:35 from Urumqi, heading for Beijing. But the plane was diverted to the city of Lanzhou after an onboard incident. A China Southern employee in Lanzhou confirmed that the airplane had been diverted to Lanzhou. The employee said the airport was initially told that the diversion was necessary because of “traffic control” problems. State media provided only a few details, noting that “the attackers were stopped in time by the air police, and all the passengers and crew members are safe.” Mr. Bekri suggested that more than one person was involved but declined to provide specifics, telling Xinhua that the authorities are investigating “who the attackers are, where they are from and what’s their background. “But we can be sure that this was a case intending to create an air crash,” he said. A China Southern employee at the Lanzhou airport confirmed that the airplane had been diverted to the city and that the incident had been handled by public security officers. The diversion was initially described as necessary because of “traffic control,” the employee said. One person with information about the incident said a Uighur woman apparently smuggled three containers of gasoline onto the flight. [How?] The person said that she took the containers into the bathroom and was later apprehended by members of the flight crew. That account seemed consistent with a Friday posting on a Chinese Internet chat room. The messages discussed a landing in Lanzhou and said that it had been discovered in mid-flight that people had brought gasoline on board and that four Uighurs had been led away after the plane landed. They appeared to be a first-hand account from a passenger sending messages via a hand-held device from the Lanzhou airport, but that could not be confirmed. nor could the identity of the person sending the messages. Zhang Jing contributed research.

The Witch's Hat

I thought this interesting, from Barbara Walker's "The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myth and Secrets," page 44, paperback edition: Apex Pointed conical cap worn by the Roman high priest, Flamen Dialis. When outdoors, he must always have the apex on his head.(1) It was a phallic symbol representing his continual union with the Queen of Heaven. It has been shown that "In the symbolism of dreams and of myths the hat is usually the phallus."(2) The Flamen's wife, the Flaminica, represented the Goddess. She was the more important dignitary of the two. If his marriage was terminated by her death, the Flamen immediately lost his sacred office and reverted to a private citizen. Such customs show that the powers of priests "in Rome as elsewhere, derived in the first instance from an older priesthood of magical women."(3) The same conical cap belonged to the Lord of the Underworld in Celtiberian pagan imagery. He was Helman: a man belonging to the Goddess Hel.(4) Sometimes he was said to be the god Frey, consort of Hel's heavely or lunar aspect, Freya.(5) The same conical cap evolved into the traditional headdress of sorcerers and witches; the Fool's Cap (or Dunce Cap) worn by the Carnival King; the bishop's miter; the pope's tiara; and before them all, the conical crown of Egyptian pharaohs, emblem of the king's union with the Sky-goddess. To the present day, the conical witch-hat is worn by tantric priests and sourcers in Tibet.(6) Notes: (1) Rose, 209. (2) Silberer, 87. (3) Briffault 3, 20-21. (4) Knight, D.W.P., 73. (5) H.R.E. Davidson, P.S., 134. (6) Waddell, 483. **************************************************************************** This information reminded me of something I'd read in "The Mummies of Urumchi" by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. From Subeshi (in the Turfan Basin, to the southeast of Turfan) a woman's mummy was recovered dating to the mid 1st millennium BCE. Among other accoutrements, "she wore a copious woolen skirt stripped horizontally in shades of red, yellow, and brown, with a dark felt hat rising high above her to two conical peaks like a twin-steepled church." (Pages 198-199) Another female body excavated also wore "a terrifically tall, conical hat just like those we depict on witches riding broomsticks at Halloween or on medieval wizards intent at their magical spells. "And that resemblance, strange to say, may be no accident. Our witches and wizards got their tall, pointy hats from just where we also got the words magician and magic, namely, Persia. The Persian or Iranian word magus (cognate with English might, mighty) denoted a priest or sage, of the Zoroastrian religion in particular. ... Magi distinguished themselves with high hats; ... In the conical hats of Subeshi we have yet more evidence sugesting Iranians in the area. But at this date, late in the first millennium BCE, their presence is nt surprising, since soon afterward we begin to get inscriptions along the south side of the Tarim Basis, some written in a provably Iranian dialect. "In addition to first drawing international attention to the unexpectedly western mummies in Urumchi, Victor Mair also surprised Orientalist circles by demonstrating that the Old Chinese word *m(y)ag(2) must come from the same source as magic: Persian magus. Ancient Chinese *m(y)ag denoted powerful individuals at the Chinese courts who, according to Mair's researches, 'were primarily responsible for divination, astrology prayer, and healing with medicines' - pretty much the same list of specialities that the magi had. Futhermore, the Chinese references to and representations of such round-eyed Western 'magicians' considerably antedate the Subeshi conical hats of the first millennium BCE. Some go back even to the Shang Dynasty (1500-1100 BCE)". (Pages 200-202) Interestingly, according to Wiki Classical Dictionary, the Apex (conical white hat) was "made out of the hide of a sacrificed animal, and having an olive branch and woolen thread at the top."