But this is no early Celt from central Scotland. This is the
mummified corpse of Cherchen Man, unearthed from the scorched sands of the
Taklamakan Desert in the far-flung region of Xinjiang in western China,
and now housed in a new museum in the provincial capital of Urumqi. In the
language spoken by the local Uighur people in Xinjiang, “Taklamakan”
means: “You come in and never come out.”
The extraordinary thing is that Cherchen Man was found - with the
mummies of three women and a baby - in a burial site thousands of miles to
the east of where the Celts established their biggest settlements in
France and the British and Ireland
DNA testing confirms that he and hundreds of other mummies found in
Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin are of European origin. We don’t know how he
got there, what brought him there, or how long he and his kind lived there
for. But, as the desert’s name suggests, it is certain that he never
came out.
His discovery provides an unexpected connection between east and west and
some valuable clues to early European history.
One of the women who shared a tomb with Cherchen Man has light brown hair
which looks as if it was brushed and braided for her funeral only
yesterday. Her face is painted with curling designs, and her striking red
burial gown has lost none of its lustre during the three millenniums that
this tall, fine-featured woman has been lying beneath the sand of the
Northern Silk Road.
The bodies are far better preserved than the Egyptian mummies, and it is
sad to see the infants on display; to see how the baby was wrapped in a
beautiful brown cloth tied with red and blue cord, then a blue stone
placed on each eye. Beside it was a baby’s milk bottle with a teat, made
from a sheep’s udder.
Based on the mummy, the museum has reconstructed what Cherchen Man would
have looked like and how he lived. The similarities to the traditional
Bronze Age Celts are uncanny, and analysis has shown that the weave of the
cloth is the same as that of those found on the bodies of salt miners in
Austria from 1300BC.
A fascinating article from www.Independent.co.uk.
There is an embedded Video below from The Discovery channel. If it does not open there is a link just above it.
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