Victor Mair First Encountered the Bronze Age Mummies of China's Tarim Basin 23 Years Ago. He—And Others—Have Been Trying T
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WHEN W WEST Victor Mair first encountered the Bronze Age mummies of China’s Tarim Basin 23 years ago. He—and others—have been trying to figure out what those people were doing there ever since. By Samuel Hughes he first time Victor Mair saw a Tarim mummy, he didn’t believe what his eyes were suggesting. T It was the summer of 1988, and Mair, profes- sor of Chinese language and literature at Penn, was leading a Smithsonian tour through Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese province in the vast, desolate expanse of east-central Asia. They stopped in Ürümchi, Xinjiang’s capital, where the provincial museum had recently opened a small room at the end of its archaeolog- ical section. It was labeled Mummy Exhibition. Mair, his charges trailing behind him, parted the hanging curtains of the gallery doorway and entered the dimly lit room. PENN MUSEUM 40 JAN | FEB 2011 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE WENT T East THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE JAN | FEB 2011 41 He found himself surrounded by mummies, maybe half a dozen At that point, though, he was still a “Chinese language and in all. Not the usual sort of mummies, wrapped in rotting gauze literature guy with a lot of experience about central Asia,” or looking like something out of a zombie movie. These were albeit one who was “curious about everything.” And the dis- astonishingly well-preserved people of decidedly un-Chinese covery of Ötzi “galvanized” him. appearance, dressed in their everyday clothes. Though their “What really goaded me to go to the mummies was that [Ötzi] remains were identified as thousands of years old, they looked as had an army of researchers working on him,” he adds. “It wasn’t though they were sleeping and could wake up at any moment. fair. Those Xinjiang mummies—nobody was working on them; Mair was stunned—and skeptical. nobody even knew about them. I said to myself, ‘They’re every “I looked at the mummies and said, ‘Oh, this is a hoax,’” he bit as important as he is. Maybe even more important.’ They’re says. “They looked like something out of Madame Tussauds in the center of Asia, at the crossroads of Asia. Before that it Wax Museum—they’re too well preserved. Then all the cloth- was just a big lacuna in that part of the world; then all of a sud- ing was so immaculate, so pristine, and the colors were very den there were all these Caucasian people with all this advanced vivid and bright. And perfectly intact! Nothing destroyed.” technology, right up there against China—very early.” Mair had examined enough ancient manuscripts from the He pauses for just a moment, and adds: “That very afternoon, area to know that the salty sands and freeze-drying climate of I became an archaeologist.” the Tarim Basin, where the mummies were found, are highly conducive to preservation. (“The most linguistically diverse ichard Hodges, the Williams Director of the Penn library in the ancient world has survived in the drying sands Museum and an eminent archaeologist in his own of the Tarim Basin,” he and co-author James Mallory wrote in Rright, is talking with easy precision about the “two their 2000 book, The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the great issues” in world archaeology today. Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West.) But their One, he explains, is “that whole issue of man coming out of remarkable condition wasn’t the only Africa, particularly sub-Sahara Africa, puzzling thing about these mummies. and crossing into the Middle East, then “They had all this advanced technolo- moving eastwards and northwards.” gy: bronze, and high-level textile tech- That’s a sort of prelude to the second nology, different kinds of tools—they issue—which, he says, involves “what had wheels, for example. Everything was happening between Asia and made me think this was too advanced Europe and the Middle East and this for this time in this place.” crucible of the Old World” over the past Even more brain-scrambling was the three millennia. fact that they looked so … European. Their “The Tarim Basin is smack-bang in height (tall). Hair (blond, reddish-brown, the middle of this crucible,” Hodges fine-textured). Facial structure. Clothing. says forcefully. “And the archaeology Mair was especially drawn to one that’s come from it, the new finds that mummy whose remains were identified have been made in that region, are as dating back to 1000 BCE. Chärchän extraordinary.” The result is “a remark- Man, excavated from Chärchän (Qiemo The salty sands and freeze-drying climate of able chance to get to grips with those in Modern Standard Mandarin), was six- the Tarim Basin, where the mummies were extraordinary issues that have inter- foot-seven, with longish blond-brown found, are highly conducive to preservation. ested archaeologists for centuries on a hair and beard, and his clothing includ- big scale”—until they “lost interest ed a reddish-purple woolen shirt trimmed with red piping. because they were myopic,” Hodges adds. “And now this big, Mair promptly dubbed him Ur-David, on account of the grand narrative is back for us.” remarkable resemblance to his very-much-alive brother Dave. The narrative takes physical form in Secrets of the Silk But beyond that eerie resemblance bubbled a serious ques- Road, an exhibition of Tarim Basin mummies and artifacts tion: What in God’s name was a tall, fair-haired man with that that opens at the Penn Museum February 5 and runs through kind of clothing doing in east-central Asia 3,000 years ago? June 5. The exhibition is “fantastic,” says Hodges, “because Mair sent his tour members back to the hotel, and spent the it really demands that you have the kind of imagination to next few hours in that dark room, meditating on the implica- look across huge distances and ask big questions about who tions of its inhabitants. He filed the mental images away and we are and where we came from.” went back to studying manuscripts. For Mair, the fact that an exhibition of Tarim mummies and Three years later, he found himself reading a story in The artifacts is coming to the Penn Museum at all borders on the New York Times about a frozen 5,300-year-old body that had “miraculous.” Not just because it’s a blockbuster show with daz- just been discovered in the Ötztaler Alps on the border between zling objects and a raft of innovative special programs that rep- Austria and Italy. Ötzi the Iceman, as he became known, “died resents a quantum leap forward for the Museum, though it is and at the top of the Similaun Glacier, right near where my father it does. (See sidebar on p. 44.) It’s also that he had long since given pastured his animals when he was a boy,” says Mair. The weird up hope that any of those mummies and artifacts would ever convergence of time and place and professional interests make it out of China, let alone to West Philadelphia. prompts a grin. “I was born to be a mummy guy,” he says. Fifteen years ago, he was turned down for a similar show, on PENN MUSEUM 42 JAN | FEB 2011 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE the not-unreasonable grounds that the Museum was ill- group of the Indo-European family, one that has no close equipped to handle either the crowds or the climate-sensitive connections with any other subgroup,” in the words of Don mummies. Efforts to get a venue at the Natural History Ringe, professor of linguistics at Penn. And either they or Museum of Los Angeles County also foundered. So Mair went their ancestors came from the west. back to studying, excavating, writing about, and organizing “What’s clear and important is that the mummies are buri- conferences on the remarkable discoveries in Xinjiang. als of people who originally came to that part of the Silk Then, in February 2009, he got a phone call from Peter Road from far to the west,” says Ringe. “It’s not so clear Keller, head of the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California. whether they’re the ancestors of the Tocharians or are one of The museum, Keller told him, was planning an exhibition of the Iranian tribes that occupied most of the steppe for more Tarim mummies. than two millennia.” Though Tocharian documents dating “I said, ‘Oh, no, you can’t be,’” Mair recalls. “‘He said, ‘Oh yes back to the 5th century CE have been found, “the mummies we can. Do you want to be involved?’” are much, much older than any of these documents—they Mair had to pick his jaw off the floor before he could answer. date to the 2nd millennium BCE. Whether the Tocharians “I said, ‘Man, this is like a dream! It’s not gonna happen!’ were in Xinjiang at such an early time is an open question.” He said, ‘Yes, it is.’” In his investigations, Mair “was searching for cultures whose When Keller asked Mair if he wanted to edit the catalogue, core technologies and languages bore striking similarities to the response was a high-octane affirmative. He then asked if those of the ancient Caucasian cultures of Xinjiang,” wrote Mair would be interested in having the exhibition come to archaeology journalist Heather Pringle in The Mummy Congress: the Penn Museum. Science, Obsession and the Everlasting “I said, ‘What?! That’s what we’ve Dead. “Slowly, patiently, he worked his way been trying to do all these years!’” back through time and space, tracing the At that point Mair went to see Hodges, territories of these ancestral groups.” He knowing he was facing long odds.