Mummies of Urumchi

[Ralf-Stefan Georg]

>>Georg at home.ivm.de writes:

>>generally accepted on which kind of evidence, if I may humbly ask ?

>-- I'll refer you to the JIES and the volume of monographs that Mair edited.

The JIES does not publish exclusively first-rate papers, but that's of
course only my personal opinion ;-)

>It's also common sense.  There population in question abruptly appears in the
>(previously virtually uninhabited) Tarim basin in the 2nd millenium BCE.
>There's no abrupt discontinuity in the record after that until the arrival of
>the Uighurs in historic times, and we have records that the people there prior
>to the Uighurs were Tocharian-speaking.
>
>It's not in serious dispute.

Well, I would dispute it. What we have here is basically the fault of
argumentum e silentio. Tokharian preceded Uighur in Turkestan (right, but
so did Iranian languages), but our Tokharian texts are from the early
Middle ages, and the mummies are *millennia* earlier. It is true that
between the Mummies and Tokharian we don't have really much in the way of
records which would tell us anything about the ethnolinguistic makeup of
any population there, but isn't the simple identification of those two
entities (the mummies - Tokharians) an oversimplification ? It is like
claiming that the Similaun man was an Italian (OK, I'm drawing a
caricature, but is it very far from the issue here ?).

I cannot help suspecting that the whole business of identification of the
mummies with Tokharians (or sometimes Celts) is mainly based on the fact
that the mummies were palefaces (and thus, for some people, could only have
been Indo-Europeans of some kind).

By allowing this we repeat age-old mistakes of confusion of race and
language over and over again. I prefer to stand by a position which says
simply and painfully: we don't know (whether any Tokharian was spoken in
the region as early as the mummies' days and whether these very bodies are
anything in the way of evidence fo that). Next step will be that I read in
some textbook that the presence of Tokharian in Turkestan is secured for
this early time (in fact I don't have the shred of a doubt that this is
precisely what is going to happen). It isn't. Those mummies could have
spoken anything (ignoramus ignorabimus). Of course it could have been sthl.
Tokharian or Indo-European, but there is no way to *know* this. Wor"uber
man nicht reden kann, dar"uber muss man schweigen, if you allow for yet
another rehearsal of this very popular Wittgenstein-quote.

The phenomenon which is unfolding here yet another time is that, whenever
we *don't know* and cannot possibly hope to *know* one day (in the
strictest sense of the word), people talk possibilities. OK with that. But
after some time these possibilities develop into "secure knowledge" by
virtue of being repated over and over again (and appeals to "common sense",
whatever that may be) and, voilà, we have a new and intriguing fact for the
tabloid press.

Come to think of the story of Troy being Luwian-speaking. Could well be,
I'm not doubting this here on principle, but the *only* piece of evidence
for this so far is *one* tiny little Luwian seal unearthed on a site in
Troy. Could have got there by zillions of ways, but no, Troy was
Luwian-speaking, a major breakthrough in ancient Anatolian studies.
Although sad, it's not the main point that the popular press brings it
across like that,  the sad thing is that healthy skepticism in the
scientific community dwindles away so easily and quickly. For who wants to
be a spoilsport nowadays ?

So, I take the freedom to call both stories ("Tokharian" mummies and Luwian
Troy) hypes. Possibilities, yes, possibilities are both, but we should not
mistake (even plausible) possibilities for established facts.

St.G.
St.G.

Stefan Georg
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