Nova: Mysterious Mummies of China
Broadcast Transcript � PBS Air date: January 20, 1998
This is a summary of the program reduced from 13 pages to one. If you want to read the whole story use the above link to the PBS Nova site. If you want more PBS mummies go to this link for three more programs:
Ice Mummies
In the Takla Makan Desert in central Asia, mummies of non-Asian peoples were found. The mummies are 3,800 years old.
One corpse was partially dismembered and was a sacrificial victim for the main occupant of the tomb. Her eyes have been gouged out, she's lacking her arms beneath the elbow joints, and from the pelvis down below, there is nothing remaining.
There is also a child 8-16 months old, who was buried alive in a hole over the main occupant of the grave. He was put in head first, and his feet were sticking up, another sacrificial victim. He died screaming and crying. He was wrapped in wool, better made than Chinese wool. The child was fair-haired.
Another woman was buried below them, their mistress, also European.
There are people in Western China, the Uyghurs, who don't have Chinese features.
Builders along the Silk Road were know as the Tocharians 2,000 years ago. Were they related to the Mummy People?
A search of a museum reveals a young woman with an overbite, which is European in nature, and an elderly man with reddish hair.
They also find woolen textiles woven into twill and tartan patterns in blue, white, and red. The textiles are similar to Celtic tartans from Northwest Europe. Scientific reconstruction of the heads of the mummies produces a face that strongly resembles ancient Celts and Saxons.
The mummy people used the wheel long before it was known in China, and may have played a role in introducing it to Chinese civilization.
There were also Nomads in this region, who were riding horseback centuries before the Chinese. They were also advanced in archery.
There are 3,000-year-old rock engravings similar to ones in Bulgaria and the Ukraine. The characters have long noses, long faces and round eyes.
According to the ancient Chinese, the European nomads had red hair, bluish-green eyes and had long noses. The Chinese also said that they were hairy and looked like monkeys.
The nomads were great riders and excellent archers.
Along the emerging Silk Road, watch towers were raised to warn travelers of approaching nomads. In time, cities sprang up along the Road. But who built them? Ancestors of the Tocharians, a mysterious people possibly descended from the ancient mummies, may have founded one city, Jiaohe. The European-looking bodies recently discovered lived near Jiaohe date to about 300 B.C., when the town was first settled.
This region, bordering ancient China, was populated by people of European origin from as early as 1800 B.C., when the Silk Road flourished.
More rock carvings reveal characters with European features, red and blond hair and even Indo-European script was found, related to Western European languages.
They belonged to a people related to those who lived in eastern Europe in a region around the Urals and the Black Sea. While most of their ancestors migrated west, the mummy people went east, through the Russian Steppes, to the Takla Makan.
By about the 10th Century, the Tocharians had almost disappeared from history, either migrating or being absorbed by the Turkish peoples. Inhabitants of the Tarim Basin still have blond hair, with light eyes and very fair skin. They are most likely descendants of the Tocharians.