Mummies of Urumchi

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

I've just received my copy of "The Mummies of Urumchi" by Elizabeth Wayland
Barber.

She's primarily an expert in the history of textiles, and is fascinating on
that subject -- here, mainly the characteristics of the textiles buried with
the mummies and the technology used to produce them.

She's also been closely involved with the recent investigations of the Tarim
Basin mummies (generally agreed to be Tocharians and proto-Tocharians) and is
very interesting on the more general aspects of the area as well.

In particular, the unique characteristics of the Tarim Basin -- its isolation,
the natural phenomena which make mummification so prevalent, and the absence
of any substantial population before the arrival of the population which
produced the mummies around 2000 BCE -- give us a fascinating insight into an
early IE-speaking group.

In fact, if we accept that the proto-Tocharians moved off from the PIE core
very early (which the linguistic evidence would seem to indicate) and then
stayed isolated in the Tarim Basin for a long time (which the linguistic and
archaeological evidence would seem to indicate), then we may be getting a
glimpse at what the earliest Indo-Europeans actually looked like and what
clothes they wore.