Tales Woven by Fabrics

By the dozens, the mummies emerged from the arid salt beds around Urumqi in western China--tall, pale-skinned, fair-haired Caucasian men and women garbed in colorful wool twills that somehow survived up to 4,000 years intact.

Their well-preserved remains, which first came to Western attention in 1994, had been hidden so long that wind and desert sand have erased any concrete traces of their civilization, leaving only the enigma they embody.

Woven in bright blues, reds and purples, their wool clothing bears an uncanny resemblance to the tartan-like twill plaids found in prehistoric Central Europe made by the ancestors of the Celts. Their striking physical appearance--often more than 6 feet tall, with high-bridged noses and large, possibly blue eyes--heightened the mystery of their identity.

Until recently, Western scholars have had little opportunity to answer the provocative questions posed by these remains. The mummies and the contents of their tombs are housed under strict supervision in a museum in Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China.

But for a few months in 1995, local authorities allowed a small team of Western experts, including Elizabeth Wayland Barber at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, to study the mummies.

Now, in the first comprehensive published study of the remains, Barber, a leading authority on ancient textiles, suggests that the mummies are evidence that cultural contacts between the East and the West began more than 1,500 years earlier than previously believed.

“Most people think that contact only started with the Silk Road at around 100 BC,” Barber said. “We have pushed that way back.”

Using the artifacts from the tombs as a starting point, Barber has braided together strands of evidence from linguistics, archeology, forensic medicine and her own encyclopedic knowledge of weaving to conclude that Asia’s grass steppes were a remarkable thoroughfare for the spread of language, technology and humanity.

The discoveries are forcing scholars to revise their ideas of China’s earliest history.

Barber--who examined the mummies along with archeologist Victor H. Mair and textile expert Irene Good at the University of Pennsylvania--has marshaled her research in a book, “The Mummies of Urumchi,” published by W.W. Norton & Co.

Since the 1970s, Chinese and Xinjiang Uighur archeologists have discovered scores of tombs in prehistoric cemeteries in the Tarim Basin around Urumqi. The region lies in the far northwestern corner of China, bordered to the north by the Altai Mountains of Mongolia and to the west by Kazakhstan.

As a study in prehistoric fashion, the mummies are a testament to the high technology of textiles at a time when weaving was the chief expression of human ingenuity. The bodies themselves offer evidence of the unexpected ethnic diversity along the nomadic trails that once knit East and West.

The remains buttress the idea that prehistoric civilizations in both Europe and China arose from a common source in the grasslands of Persia, Barber contends.

In doing so, she draws a historical thread that reaches from Urumqi in the east to Ireland and Scotland in the west. As some tribes moved east from what is now Iran and southern Russia, other related tribes from the same region moved west into Europe.

Even as they drew apart, Barber said, they continued to share a preference for diagonal wool twill that, to an archeologist, is as distinctive a clue to their common cultural identity as a fingerprint.

Save for the material found in the graves, there is no evidence of twill weaving in the Tarim Basin until about 200 BC and not in central China until more than 1,500 years after that.

*

Based on her analysis of the fabrics found in the tombs, Barber concludes there were two waves of migration from the west. The first began about the time that wool-bearing sheep and large-grained varieties of wheat were first domesticated about 4000 BC. The second wave of nomads, whose graves contain the unusual plaid fabric, started east about 1,000 years later.

Moving at a pace set by their herds of grazing sheep, each group may have taken 1,000 years or more to make the journey.

Along with their knowledge of weaving and looms, these people brought to China the horse, the wheel and the chariot, even ideas of magic and divination, evidence suggests. When they returned westward, they may have passed back to Europe the earliest knowledge of silk.

“You have two waves of people coming east from the western shore of the Caspian Sea all the way across to the edge of China at such an early date,” Barber said. “That tells us there was the potential for Western ideas and Eastern ideas to trade hands at this remarkably early period.

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

Barber believes that the bodies are so well-preserved because they were buried in salt deposits and essentially freeze-dried--alternately desiccated by the extreme summer heat, then chilled in the region’s bitter winters.

Among the discoveries were:

* A bearded patriarch whose tomb dates from about 3,000 years ago. He was 6 feet 6. Curls of bright yellow-ocher face paint are still visible on his cheeks. He was buried wearing white deerskin boots, purple-brown woolen pants, a shirt and gaudily striped leggings. Three women, one of whom also stood well over 6 feet, were buried with him.

* An auburn-haired woman, her face painted in yellow swirls, whose tomb dates from 4,000 years ago. She was dressed in a beige woolen shawl, leather skirt, fur moccasins and a felt hood crowned with a single feather. Her appearance is so striking, Barber said, that she is known locally as the Beauty of Loulan, named for the area where her body was found. With her were buried a flat winnowing tray and a bag containing grains of wheat.

* A 3-month-old infant found in a tomb that dates from about 3,000 years ago. The baby wears a blue felt bonnet with red wool edging. Small blue stones cover the eyes, suggesting perhaps their color in life. The reddish shroud is tied with a plaited cord of red and blue dyed wool.

* An 8-year-old child whose tomb dates from about 2000 BC. He is wrapped in an unusual brown and tan wool blanket fastened with a dozen or so long carved bone pins. The blanket is woven in several checkerboard patterns of red-brown and tan, alternating with stripes of a thicker weave. The fabric incorporates so many different types of weaving, it looks like a practice piece made by a beginner learning the craft.

“I was so blown away by the 8-year-old child from 2000 BC,” Barber said. “The blanket he is wrapped in looks like a sampler a woman makes when she is first learning to weave.

“There was something so human about that weaving--with all its trial and error--that speaks so strongly across the millennia,” she said. “Perhaps when her [child] died, the mother wrapped the little body ever so carefully in her first piece of weaving, two valiant attempts laid gently into one grave.”