NEWS

Mystery of mummies topic of talk Monday (March 27)

CHAPEL HILL -- Cherchen man lies 6-foot-6, in woven purple pants, striped leggings, a shirt and white deerskin boots. Yellow paint accents his pale, bearded face. His height, features and bright woolen clothes complete the profile of a European Caucasian.

But the man, 3,000 years old and preserved to near perfection -- like dozens more mummies found near him -- was buried in China. They prove a Caucasian, European presence there some 1,500 years before scholars have thought possible, sparking debate of age-old ideas that Eastern and Western civilizations developed independently of each other.

Dr. Elizabeth Wayland Barber, one of only three Western scholars to have studied the mummies, will discuss these and other mysteries of ancient civilizations Monday and Tuesday (March 27 and 28) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Barber will illustrate her three lectures, all free and open to the public, with slides including her own color images of Cherchan man, the Beauty of Loulan and others among "The Mummies of Ürumchi" ("uh-ROOM-kee"), also the name of her landmark 1999 book from W.W. Norton & Co. Her talks will be:

"The Mummies of Chinese Turkestan," at 8 p.m. Monday in 121 Hanes Art Center, her main talk about the mummies;

"The Clues in the Clothes: Some Independent Evidence for the Movement of Families," at 3 p.m. Monday in Toy Lounge, on the top floor of Dey Hall; and

"Penelope and the Origins of Greek Art," on other areas of her research, at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday in 218 Hanes.

Sponsors are Carolina's departments of art, anthropology, classics, linguistics and research laboratories of archeology. For more information, call 962-7640.

Barber, professor of linguistics and archaeology and co-chair of classics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, is a leading expert on ancient textiles. Her analyses were key in establishing the mummies' age and European origin, say stories on her work by major media including The Los Angeles Times, The Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald and the World Wide Web site of ABC News.

"Barber's work, especially on textiles, has been nothing short of revolutionary in the field of archaeology," said Dr. Donald Haggis (HA-gis), a UNC-CH associate professor of classical archeology. "Her work will be of great interest to students of art, art history, history, linguistics, anthropology, classics, archaeology, women's studies, gender studies and culture studies. She will bring to campus a window into past human activities and human history rarely taught or discussed in universities."

Sheep were not indigenous to Urumchi, the northwestern region of China where the mummies were found in their woolen clothes, Barber said. And the clothes' twill weaving patterns and bright colors matched looms and fashions found in prehistoric Europe, not China.

A 3-month-old infant, buried just above Cherchen man and three women, wore a bright blue felt bonnet with red wool edging, her eyes covered with blue stones -- perhaps, their color in life. With her was a sheep’s udder fashioned into a nursing bottle. Barber believes an epidemic most likely took the mummies' lives.

"It is clear that (other members of the community) tried to keep the baby alive after the mother and father had died," Barber told ABC News.

Another mummy, an auburn-haired woman whose tomb dates from 4,000 years ago, wore a beige woolen shawl, leather skirt and fur moccasins. She is called the Beauty of Loulan, for the area where she was found and her striking appearance.

The grasslands of Persia, stretching from southwestern Europe across the belly of Asia to China, offered a potential thoroughfare for the exchange of language, culture and technology between Europe and China, Barber said. She believes that Celtic tribal nomads began migrating west from Europe twice, once beginning about 4,000 B.C. and again about 1,000 years later. Paced by grazing sheep, each group may have taken 1,000 years or more to reach China, she said.

"It is possible for ideas to have gone both ways," Barber told the Times. But "it looks as if most of the ideas were headed east," Barber said.

The Chinese found the mummies in 1978 but did not reveal their existence to the rest of the world, according to news reports. Barber believes the communist government wished to avoid suggestions that the West could have had any influence on the country's development.

University of Pennsylvania archeologist Victor Mair discovered the mummies in a Urumchi museum in 1987 by venturing past a door that was supposed to have been locked during his visit. In 1995, the Chinese allowed Western experts to study the mummies for the first time. Mair enlisted textiles expert Irene Good from Pennsylvania's faculty and Barber to join him in the study.

Carolina linguistics professor Dr. Craig Melchert said salt beds where the mummies had been unearthed preserved them so well that slides accompanying Barber’s lectures could be "rather spectacular."

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