THE MUMMIES OF URUMCHI, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, W.N. Norton and Company, New York, 1999 This is a popular presentation by a textile enthusiast of some remains found in the Tarim Basin of Western China. Chapter One, "Mystery Mummies" (pp. 17-21), introduces the finds, the remoteness and inhospitable nature of the region and questions posed by the discovery of early Indo-European types in the same area as the later Tokharan manuscripts. Chapter Two, "A Man With Ten Hats" (pp. 23-45), mentions details concerning clothing: By way of decoration on the plain-weave fabric, the tailor of Cherchen Man's suit whipped bright red yarn as a sort of piping over the seams on both the shirt body and trouser legs and around the neck and front opening of the shirt. It produces a very subtle but effective ornamentation -- subtle both because the piping is so fine and because its bright red color rests against the purply-red-brown background. p. 27 There is mention of preservation both of bodies and clothes, and references are made to remains from Egypt and Peru. Phrygian style hats are mentioned and Indo-European issues raised. Next comes the less demanding herding lifestyle and the impact on herders of adverse climatic conditions and the consequences for neighbouring settled agricultural societies. There's a return to clothing and references to pants, sleeves and reddish dye added to brown wool. Cherchen Man's face had been painted with yellow ochre. The chapter closes with the introduction of Uyghur archaeologist Dolkun Kamberi and reference to the dig at the cemetery near Zaghunluq. The ancient burial ground of several hundred graves stretched for three-quarters of a mile in length and roughly half a mile in width (1.1 by 0.75 km). pp. 43-45 Chapter Three, "Plus Three Women and a Baby" (pp. 47-69), examines the three women found in the same pit as Cherchen Man as well as the baby (perhaps three months old or less) found in a nearby pit covered by a slab of poplar. 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. p. 52 The baby had two blue stones over its eyes and was dressed in cloth like that of the adults. There is consideration of cloth and techniques in making it both here and in other sites, including at Pazyryk, five hundred miles north of Urumchi, where there are kurgans with wood, permitting dendrochronological dating from c. 480-430 B.C.E. The author ponders the similarity of the Japanese cord-making technique kumihimo to products found at Urumchi. She mentioned being informed that she has been able to examine about one-fifth of the cloth at the museum. She reminds the reader of the great problem of damage to archaeological sites from local treasure seekers. She provides between pages 64 and 65 sixteen pages of plates, demonstrating in brilliant colour the human, cloth and other subject matter of her book. She states that there is no archaeological indication that the Tarim basin had permanent settlement prior to 2,000 B.C.E. Chapter Four, "The Beauty of Loulan" (pp. 71-87), begins with a look at this woman and the technique of making her clothes, including her "hoodlike woolen cap." (p.72) The four-thousand-year-old woman also possessed a neatly woven bag or soft basket. Inside it the archaeologists found some grains of wheat, and those who had laid her to rest had covered her head and chest with a large, flat basket in the form of a winnowing tray, used to clean wheat of its chaff. p. 74 There's mention of wheat coming from the west; millet and rice lay to the east. Another woman, similarily attired, and a child of about eight years are mentioned. Next there's reference to burial custom and tomb construction. The ancient gravediggers laid out the corpse, wrapped in its cloak or shroud, full length in a pit in the sandy ground with the head pointing east. Usually they used small boards to form a sort of coffin, often lidless and always bottomless -- more like a low fence to hold back the restless sand long enough to lay the body in. After arranging a few gifts, such as a bag-shaped basket of wheat, a comb, or small bundles of ephedra twigs, the burial party covered the corpse against predators, sometimes stretching hides or a broad winnowing basket over the top or laying a row of small planks crossways. Then they filled the pit. Such graves generally contain neither pottery nor metal. p. 81 There were other graves, more impressive, with a sun pattern of poles marking them. However, as these were deeper they did not dry so fast and hence decomposition was greater. The poles lead to the topic of the shift of the river's course c. 330 C.E. and the resultant loss of vegetation around the former Lop Nor. There has been apparently a series of such movements of the river and the lake across the nearly level plain. Chapter Five, "The Early Explorers" (pp. 89-108), begins by describing the travels of Sven Hedin and Marc Aurel Stein. It discusses the linguistic factors in Kroran perhaps being the original from which Prakrit derived Kroraina and Chinese Loulan. It mentions Stein's find of remains similar to more recent Urumchi mummies. He also remarks that one edge of the shroud had been formed into a pouch that held twigs of ephedra, a plant prized in both ancient and modern times for its stimulant properties. (Ephedra still provides an important asthma medicine, ephedrine. See Chapter 8.) Twigs of it also occurred in graves excavated in the 1980s at Qawrrighul. pp. 95-106 It refers to modern dating by radiocarbon and dendrochronology. It mentions findsby Folke Bergman whose bringing of remains back to Sweden led Vivi Sylwan to write her 1941 book WOOLEN TEXTILES OF THE LOU-LAN PEOPLE. Her descriptions there lead to loincloths both in the Tarim and as far west as the Celts. Chapter Six, "Tokharians and Other Hairy Barbarians" (pp. 111-129), introduces the concept of related languages, of the Proto-Indo-European language and of the two Tokharian languages. Linguistically these twins show features lumping them most closely with the westernmost Indo-European languages: Celtic and Italic, and to some extent Germanic. But they are not particularly similar to their nearest geographical neighbors, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (see fig. 6.3). This is all the more surprising because other Tarim Basin people in the first millennium A.D. were writing and speaking Indic and Iranian languages. And indeed, the twins have many loanwords from these neighbors. But their basic structure is neither Indic nor Iranian, nor that of any other Indo-European daughter group. the pair forms a separate branch of the tree and on the face of it, one that originally hobnobbed with the most westerly branches. pp. 115-116 There's a look at Chinese accounts of the Yuezhi who had been powerful until their defeat by the Hsiang-nu in the 2nd C.B.C.E. when the Yuezhi king contributed his head as a drinking glass and his son moved to Daxia (Bactria), whence the Chinese envoy Zhang Qian found him unwilling to take up old eastern conflicts. There's some linguistic discussion, such as Indo-European words in Chinese, for example, the Kunlun Mountains coming from Tokharian klyom or klyomo, likely cognate with Latin caelum. Our Tokharian manuscripts consist mainly of random scraps of translated Buddhist literature and shreds of local business dealings -- not a good cross section of the total vocabulary, But we do have a few relevant terms, including a clearly Indo-European word for "weaver" (wawattsa or wapattsa, cognate with English weave, web -- see fig. 6.4). So we know the Tokharians came to the Tarim Basin with an ancient knowledge of weaving. p. 128 Chapter Seven, "Hami and Hallstatt" (pp. 131-145), looks at the remains of the fair haired people of this important oasis area some three hundred miles east of Urumchi. The plaid garments are reminiscint of the Celts. For Tokharian shares more linguistic features with Celtic than with any other branch. Since the similarity extends to textile technology too, the case warrants careful investigation. In fact it was this puzzle that had drawn me to Chinese Turkistan in the first place. p. 133 She distinguishes relatively modern tartan design from Celtic plaid twills dating from at least the early first millennium B.C.E. I got a little Sliders' twitch when I read her assertion: Much of Caesar's fame and power, in the first century B.C., came from subduing Gaul and southern Britain and annexing them to the Roman Empire. p. 135 She says she didn't see much Hami material and what she did see, though quite similar to finds from Hallein, varied from Hallstatt cloth. This similarity is shared by a find at Tsarskaya in the Caucasus, near the generally believed PIE homeland. This chapter has an appendix commenting on looms. Chapter Eight, "The Oasis Hoppers and Their Kin" (pp. 149-167), begins by mentioning the inhospitable nature of the area and the difficulty of accessing archaeological reports before perestroika. She mentions American participation in 1989 at the dig at Gonur Depe, differences in procedures (horizontal versus vertical) and the indication: that people of a single Early Bronze Age culture had begun to spread across the oases of Russian Turkistan two or three centuries before 2000 B.C., -- moving from southwest to northeast -- that is, headed directly toward the Pamir and Tien Shan ranges and (if one could get over those huge hurdles) the Tarim Basin. p. 151 There's consideration of routes into the Tarin basin and the ease, or rather difficulty, of moving in with sheep. And, there's a look at the significance of ephedra in the burials and the whole issue of the sacred drink haoma (Persian) or soma (Sanskrit) and the suggested use of ephedra with an hallucinogen, the ephedra being taken to stay awake for the journey into the overworld. Chapter Nine, "Pulses in the Heart of a Continent" (pp. 169-194), begins by mentioning the current inhospitable nature of the Tarim Basin, varying conditions since the last Ice Age and the existence of archaeological sites requiring not jeeps, but helicopters and global positioning equipment. There's a quick look at human evolution and the development of language and the concept of some areas as linguistic "spread zones" and others as "residual zones." The great spread zones include, for example, Mesoamerica, the South Pacific islands, part of sub-Saharan Africa (accounting for the recent spread of Bantu languages there), and -- the most famous, perhaps the most active spread zone of all -- the central Eurasian steppes... p. 184 She lists Indo-European, Hungarian, Turkic and Mongol pulses from the steppes. She enters the PIE homeland controversy by stating: The proto-Indo-Europeans must have lived east of the Dneipr River (map 7.6, 9.9) -- must, because they did not know of an important tool that developed in Central Europe from 5500 B.C. on: the warp-weighted loom. As one moves east, the Dneipr is where the archaeological evidence for that tool stops. Those Indo-Europeans who ended up farthest to the south and east used other looms, and those who ended up west of the Dneipr borrowed from other languages all the words to do with the warp-weighted loom. So they could hardly have spent the Neolithic living right there in Central Europe, where it was invented. p. 191 The chapter closes with a mention of DNA analysis expected to play a greater role in 21st Century archaeological research. Chapter Ten, "Sands of the Silk Road, Sands of Time" (pp. 197-214), begins by mentioning more recent burials than those previously the focus of the book. There are some from 700 B.C.E. and later at Turfan. ...a second man displayed the most interesting sewing job yet dug up in the Tarim basin. He had undergone chest surgery, and the two incisions were sewn up with horsehair. p. 200 Then comes the linguistic correspondence of magic, magi and myag. Ancient Chinese myag 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 specialties that the magi had. p. 201 There's mention of the Iranian origin of the Old Chinese word for chariot and of Tarim burials of horse skulls and legs. There's a survey of the contact between Persia and the West, including the invasion by Alexander the Great and the Hellenization of the Central asians, including the Tokharoi (Yuezhi) and the fusion of Buddhist and Hellenic styles into the Gandharan. There's comment on the stimulus of cross-cultural interaction. There's reference to the Silk Road and the import of Roman glass into Han China. The author mentions the accounts of Marco Polo and the doubts some people have, due to errors he made and things they feel he ought to have mentioned ("Chinese calligraphy, the Great Wall of China, tea drinking, bound feet, or a host of other things..." p. 210), whether he actually made the trip into China. The book closes by noting the continued presence of Caucasians in the Tarim Basin. Besides the striking coloured plates, there are some two dozen maps. The book is written in a popular style. I could have done without the 1000 B.C.E. Tarim Times and the rubies in the cereal, but, even I must admit the diagrams of the spider effectively convey the meaning of plain weave, twill and long hop twill. This work is an interesting contribution to those interested in PIE, Central-Asian, textile and archaeological studies.