The New Old Mummies from Eastern Central Asia: Ancestors of the Tocharian Knights Depicted on the Buddhist Wallpaintings of Kucha and Turfan? Some Circumstantial Evidence
by Ulf Jäger
Since the leading archeologist of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Wang Binghua of Ürümchi, and his Uyghur colleagues have discovered and excavated Bronze Age and Early Iron Age European-Caucasoid mummies at Qizilchoqa near Qumul (Hami) and other parts of the region starting in 1978, these mummies came to the attention of Prof. Dr. Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania. Two decades have passed since that time, but at the beginning of the nineties Prof. Mair initiated a major, cooperative research project centering on the mummies and their culture. As a result, an international group of scholars is now working on these sensational finds. Already it is clear that larger parts of the early history of China, of the ancient Silk Roads, and even of Eurasia have to be written completely anew. At the present moment, it is not certain what this new picture of Eurasia's early history / prehistory will look like. For this reason, many scholars and students of archeology and history met at the University of Pennsylvania for an international congress (April 19th-21st, 1996) to discuss the results of their studies.
For the mass media all over the world, the fact that Europeans of prehistoric times had been found in western China was a sensation. For scholars in the field of archeology and Indo-European philology, however, a much older question once more came back to their minds. This was the question of the so-called Tocharians, or better, those people of European appearance on the Buddhist murals of the Kucha area in the former "Eastern Turkistan", dating to the 5th-7th centuries ce. These murals had been found by the "Königlich Preussische Turfan-Expeditionen" before the First World War. Together with the murals in the Buddhist cave-temples had been found manuscripts in many scripts and languages. Most intriguing of all was the thitherto completely unknown Tocharian language, an Indo-European language of the Centum group, written in the Indian Brahmi-script. It shows connections to the western group of languages of this type, for example Celtic, Germanic, and Hittite. But the precise relationships among these languages and with the rest of the Indo-European language family is a question for linguists to solve.
The European-Caucasoid mummies of Qizilichoqa and other sites in Eastern Central Asia that have been excavated up to now are a little bit over one hundred in number. According to Prof. Mair, many more could be excavated. He supposes that some of the mummies of Qizilchoqa and adjacent areas around the Turfan and Tarim basins, which date -- according to modern methods -- to a time between 1800 bce and 300 ce, are the ancestors of the knights on the murals of the Buddhist caves at Qizil (in the Kucha area), discovered by the German Turfan-expeditions. So at least there is a gap between the youngest mummies and the knights on the murals of approximately another 300 years. But the circumstantial evidence in support of Prof. Mair's assumption is extremely persuasive.
Besides the fact that the deceased people, or better the mummies, are of European-Caucasoid race or stock, their grave goods also show indications of being connected to prehistoric cultures in western and northern Europe....