Almost seven years of excavations at the Small River Cemetery site in north central China have revealed a group of very well preserved corpses from nearly 4,000 years ago, and the kinky symbolism of their burial rites.
The Small River mummies are getting a lot of attention on account of the giant phallic symbols found on their graves. But another part of the story has far more powerful political legs; the Small River mummies appear, gasp, European. And that has only fueled an ethnic rivalry in the area that has absolutely nothing to do with ancient ritual penises.
(The New York Times ran a fantastic story on this yesterday; read it here.)
This isn’t the first set of mummies found in China that don’t look Chinese. In fact, this part of China, along the ancient silk road, appears to be just about overflowing with eastern european looking mummies (with mostly caucasian DNA).
For example, see this NOVA website about discoveries of similar mummies in the 1980s.
And the story has a sad but predictable modern twist. The area where these mummies are found is today inhabited by Turkish-speaking Uighur people, and increasing numbers of Han Chinese immigrants. Just like nearly everywhere else in China’s remote hinterlands (most notably, Tibet) there have been violent clashes between the more or less state sponsored immigrant Han and the local ethnic population.
The mummies, of course, have nothing to do with this modern struggle. The Uighur migrated into what is now China 1,000 years ago. And the Chinese government has been pushing ethnic Chinese into the hinterlands as state policy for about 50 years. They’re all johnny-come-latelies next to the Small River mummies. But don’t tell the Uighur, desperate to hold onto their homeland (1000 years is a long time… even if it isn’t 4,000). They’re claiming that the mummies are evidence of their ancestral right to the area.
If they could get involved, perhaps the Small River mummies, given how they wanted to be remembered in death, would suggest that everyone “make love, not war.”
Louis Wertz 