This is Cherchen Man. He stood about six feet tall, had light hair and fair skin, and he lived about 3,000 years ago in what is today the Xinjiang region of western China. He sports facial tattoos. And the world’s oldest surviving pair of pants.
He’s among a group of mummies found in the Tarim Basin dating from between about 1900 B.C. and 200 A.D. I’ve wanted to write about them for a while.
I recently watched China’s Secret Mummies, a National Geographic video available on the Penn Museum’s website. It’s about 45 minutes long; unfortunately, more than half of those 45 minutes are eaten up by bullshit reenactment footage and suspense-making editing. But it’s still a good overview of the mummies, and it reveals what researchers from National Geographic’s Genographic Project were able to learn from their DNA.
What they found was surprising. After the mummies were discovered, their Caucasian facial features and woolen (sometimes plaid) textiles led many to speculate that they came from Europe, or—more fancifully—were Celts.
Sidenote: As a former Celticist (air quotes), I find this conclusion funny. I refuse to think of “Celt” as anything more than a linguistic designation, or something denoting a discrete genetic or cultural group. (Interesting and surprising read: The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story by Stephen Oppenheimer.)
Anyway, like I said, the DNA results were surprising. Cherchen Man and his mummy-buddies showed east Asian genetic markers, leading the researchers to revise their understanding of the Tarim people. Likely, they were a mixed group—different cultures from east and west coexisting (and sleeping together) at a crossroads—rather than a western transplant culture hanging on in an unlikely eastern outpost, as had been previously thought.
Hope to post about some of the other Tarim mummies in the near future.
Image Source: Uyghur American Association.
![This is Yingpan Man. Or, more specifically: These are the clothes he was buried in. He’s another of the Tarim Basin mummies, though he’s much younger, historically speaking, than Cherchen Man. He lived sometime in the fourth or fifth centuries A.D.
Heather Pringle’s post from a few years back on Archaeology’s blog offers some background on the mummy and his clothes, which were featured in the recent traveling exhibit Secrets of the Silk Road. She consults Sinologist (and Tarim Basin mummy expert) Victor Mair.
The magnificent trappings of Yingpan Man are the first things that visitors lay eyes on in the exhibit. The Chinese government did not send the remains of the European-looking 6-footer who wore his brown hair in a topknot. But as Mair pointed out, Yingpan Man’s “sartorial shell” alone speaks volumes. Dating to the 4th or early 5th century AD, the attire of this ancient traveler clearly embodies all the wealth and splendor that flowed through the Tarim Basin after the Silk Road opened and linked China to the Mediterranean world. […]
Who was Yingpan Man? Mair has some ideas. He died in his early to mid-thirties, and he had clearly amassed a fortune by that point, most likely through trade. The town of Yingpan, after all, was an crucial trade node on the Silk Road. During this period, Mair pointed out, the richest traders along the route were Sogdians, an Iranian-speaking people whose homeland lay near Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan. So Mair believes that Yingpan man was likely a Sogdian merchant who died relatively young in a place far from home.
The fact that I’m just seeing clothes here—and no mummy—kind of creeps me out a little. The same way this did.
Image source: Yingpan Man by Penn Museum on Flickr:
“Yingpan Man,” front view of clothed body of male mummy, ca 3rd-4th century AD. Excavated from Yingpan, Yuli (Lopnur) County, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China, © Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwz754fDe01qifapbo1_400.jpg)
