http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/science/16archeo.html?8dpc
A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets
By NICHOLAS WADE
In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air. It resembles boats with oars.

Liu Yu Sheng SYMBOLISM Archaeologists believe the hundreds of 13-foot poles at the Small River Cemetery in a desert in Xinjiang Province, China, were mostly phallic symbols.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/03/16/science/16archeo-span/16archeo-span-articleLarge.jpg

pantherpanther said:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/sc...cheo.html?8dpc
A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets
By NICHOLAS WADE
In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air. It resembles boats with oars.

Liu Yu Sheng SYMBOLISM Archaeologists believe the hundreds of 13-foot poles at the Small River Cemetery in a desert in Xinjiang Province, China, were mostly phallic symbols.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/03/16/science/16archeo-span/16archeo-span-articleLarge.jpg

Click to expand...

Hi Panther,

I failed to get the first link to the NYTimes to work.

The second link I managed to see, taking that forest of poles as phallic symbols is weird to me. Is there some evidence by Liu Yu Sheng why that entire collection of corpses would be buried with their phallic symbols extended so long and massed together. Does he suppose some vast male ritual?

Fascinating though. I am beginning to reconsider whether the association of 2 and all even numbers to Yin female and 3 and all odd numbers to Yang male may well be symbolism derived from human genitalia.

Frank

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/science/16archeo.html?8dpc
Try again.

"As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, Dr. Mair recounted, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand.

At the foot of each pole there were indeed boats, laid upside down and covered with cowhide. The bodies inside the boats were still wearing the clothes they had been buried in. They had felt caps with feathers tucked in the brim, uncannily resembling Tyrolean mountain hats. They wore large woolen capes with tassels and leather boots. A Bronze Age salesclerk from Victoria’s Secret seems to have supplied the clothes beneath — barely adequate woolen loin cloths for the men, and skirts made of string strands for the women.

Within each boat coffin were grave goods, including beautifully woven grass baskets, skillfully carved masks and bundles of ephedra, an herb that may have been used in rituals or as a medicine."

Another image:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/03/16/science/16archeo-3.html

In the women’s coffins, the Chinese archaeologists encountered one or more life-size wooden phalluses laid on the body or by its side. Looking again at the shaping of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman’s boat, the archaeologists concluded that the poles were in fact gigantic phallic symbols.

Many of the women buried there wore string undergarments like the one in this drawing. The men’s boats, on the other hand, all lay beneath the poles with bladelike tops. These were not the oars they had seemed at first sight, the Chinese archaeologists concluded, but rather symbolic vulvas that matched the opposite sex symbols above the women’s boats. “The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism,” Dr. Mair wrote. In his view, the “obsession with procreation” reflected the importance the community attached to fertility.

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Hi Panther,

The second page of the new link makes a lot more sense. They were a sea faring people like the Greeks whose pious citizens put a religious icon with a square log body, a boy's head on top and an erect phallus at the bottom on their doorposts. It was a great city tragedy when someone went through the city at night breaking them off and thus interfering with the potency of the city and its troops.

Just the oars did not make a lot of sense. I particularly like the skirts illustrated on the second page, like our Hawaiians and their hula.

Frank

Frank,
They may have been sailors, indeed, with roots in Northern Europe. This area was on the Silk Road. Iranologists revised their knowledge when the Tokharian texts (6th-9th century AD) were discovered last century in the Tarim Basin . The possibility that this language existed 4000 years ago is intriguing "Tokharian, an ancient member of the Indo-European family of languages. Manuscripts written in Tokharian have been discovered in the Tarim Basin, where the language was spoken from about A.D. 500 to 900. Despite its presence in the east, Tokharian seems more closely related to the “centum” languages of Europe than to the “satem” languages of India and Iran. The division is based on the words for hundred in Latin (centum) and in Sanskrit (satam).

Hi Panther,

Cool, any indication that they were gentile pagans (worshiped the Olympian Gods?) or the earlier Hecate and Themis? From the cemetery they seem more river boat people than sea faring folks. However if they traveled North-South rather than just East West they would have experienced change in latitude which is the great insight of the ancients. If you watch the shadow of a vertical stick (and they seem to have enjoyed long poles very much) through the day, especially around Noon when the sun crosses the Zenith you experience that shadow pointing to true geographical N. pole with an angle that will change with the latitude. All needed to know the Earth is a globe is to watch the shadow of the Earth across the full moon during lunar eclipses. That is where the turtles in your slogan come from. The ancients notice the similarity of the giant turtles rounded back with its mountains and ridges and green plants growing on it. That mimicked their observations of the globe.

It was the notions of the antipodes, that the Planet could be a complete globe with folks living 'upside down' and all hanging in space or revolving that they couldn't quite accept.
So a Planet like a giant turtle, curved with mountains, streams and plants on top while there was a flat bottom and supported by a great black ocean invisible by humans. If you read Genesis 1 in the King James, they clearly believed there was water supporting both the Planet and the stars with only a watch crystal of 'firmament' that held enough air for human respiration.

It appears the Minoans dressed their women with square cut dresses so their bare breasts were available to nurse their babies and mollify their men. It seems this ended with the great Earthquakes and invaders that made defense more important than enjoyment of life. There is a species of baboons that have an adaptation for monogamy that arises from a shortage of available food sources (takes a male's full time effort to feed the couple) while the female tends the kids and evades the excessive density of predators.

This site sounds like a great model for Halloween, St. Pat's and other major party times:
Tyrolean hats, loin clothes and hula skirts in boats on cruising to resort isles carrying long poles with emblems of your preferred sex object. Would be very popular here in Vegas. :bag:

Frank,
The orgin of these people isn't clear, and there were many migrations. I mean from Siberia west and south, Africa to many places in Asia and Europe, from Europe to the East, from Egypt to west Africa (the Dogons, who had advanced astronomical knowledge?); and the Native American tribes seem to have come from China at least 10,000 years ago.
We don't know much about the early global travels of sea faring peoples, except some ( perhaps at least by 9th century ? ) could make maps and had navigational skills, as with the Vikings and Chinese. Does this conform to the picture " of a Planet like a giant turtle, curved with mountains, streams and plants on top while there was a flat bottom and supported by a great black ocean invisible by humans." ? Granting Chinese world maps from the 14th or 15th century are genuine, and their fleets stopped in California as late as the 15th (with ships longer and wider than football fields) ,were they using the same knowledge that the Greeks and Egyptians apparently had?

Chinese science boosts Uigher claim to mummies

The discovery of a large number of ancient Silk Road mummies, with European features and red hair, has become a bone of contention between Uighurs and Beijing.

From: http://www.unfreemedia.com/asia/2010/03/how-a-large-number-of.html

Click to expand...

Mysterious Mummies? Maybe 10 Years Ago.
What is news?

That's the question I have about a current New York Times story that was briefly listed as the front page feature earlier today, titled "The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To":

From: http://china.notspecial.org/archives/2008/11/mysterious_mumm.html

Click to expand...

Ch.

fkegan said:

Hi Panther,

I failed to get the first link to the NYTimes to work.

The second link I managed to see, taking that forest of poles as phallic symbols is weird to me. Is there some evidence by Liu Yu Sheng why that entire collection of corpses would be buried with their phallic symbols extended so long and massed together. Does he suppose some vast male ritual?

Fascinating though. I am beginning to reconsider whether the association of 2 and all even numbers to Yin female and 3 and all odd numbers to Yang male may well be symbolism derived from human genitalia.

Frank

Click to expand...

Hi, Frank:

China.Org.Cn said at 2005:

At No.5 archaeologists also discovered miscellaneous large wood-carved figures, small wooden masks, engraved wooden arrows, red ox heads, snake-shaped wood poles and wood carvings of male and female genitalia.

From: http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/Archaeology/130815.htm

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And:

The tomb complex yielded rare cultural relics including wooden ware, animal hair fabrics, jade, stone ware, and fur and bones of animals such as sheep, cattle, fowl, lynx and weasel.

It also yielded genital-symbolic objects, indicating a prevailing phallicism at that time, but little bronze ware had been unearthed, though many wood ware objects were obviously made with bronze ware, and it might be that bronze ware objects were too rare to be buried as funerary objects, Zhu said.

Most tombs were built by the same procedures, experts said. Ancient people first dug sand pits, put coffins made of diversiform-leaved poplar inside, and then erected pieces of carved wood representing the dead's gender, Zhu said.

From: http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/Archaeology/126811.htm

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These people conserved such interests even after died, of course, they had to be turks.

Mysterious Bronze Age Europoid Mummies in Western China:
at: http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1676&category=Science





Yours,

Charly

These people conserved such interests even after died, of course, they had to be turks.

Click to expand...

Hi Charly,

Are the Turks more interested in expressing their sexual preferences than other peoples?

It seems that it just as easily could have been a matter of the time. Millennia ago it seems various peoples were fascinated by the magic of their passion and how such resulted in everything they need to survive and continue. Human procreation, crop and livestock procreation, even the ongoing love affair between Father Sun and Mother Earth.

The question of their European traits is intriguing and that they were buried in boats. Suggests a foreign maritime people who traveled far in their boats, over rivers most likely, who although they are buried in a vast desert were still a maritime people and would want their dead to be able to travel by boat and have their favorite desired body parts with them.

Frank

Websites:

Bowers Museum: March 27, 2010 Opening Exhibit - Secrets of the Silk Road:
http://www.bowers.org/index.php/learn/events_details/294

4,000-Year-Old Caucasian Mummies in Tarim Basin:
http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=665

Zaghunluq Ancient Mummies: http://www.centralasiatraveler.com/cn/xj/cq/zaghunluq.html

Xiaohe Tombs: http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/Archaeology/130815.htm

Wikipedia Tarim Basin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_Basin

Wikipedia, Tarim Mummies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies

Wikipedia, Silk Road: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road

fkegan said:

Hi Charly,
Are the Turks more interested in expressing their sexual preferences than other peoples?
...

Click to expand...

Hi, Frank:

Maybe not, but I was said that chinese have been always totally discrete or even shy about these matters, they had to be non-chinese for raising phalluses an vulvaes at a cemetery.

Mummies are discovered long ago. Victor Mair's book haven't almost 10 years ?
But the new is maybe that chinese want to hold that Uigurs were not natives in Xinjiang region, no indigenous rights for them.

Uyghurs as indigenous people; a new UHRP report highlights Chinese government violations of Uyghurs' indigenous rights. Published 10/5/2009 | UHRP and UAA Reports , Press Releases

At: http://www.uhrp.org/articles/3011/1...ions-of-Uyghurs-indigenous-rights-/index.html

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​

Q&A: China and the Uighurs
The latest unrest in China's western Xinjiang region follows a long history of discord between China's authorities and the Uighur minority.

From BBC News
At: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7540636.stm

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Is not necessary to be diviner for seeing a sad future for minorities.

Yours,

Charly

P.D.:
Look the picture, don't you believe that 孚 FU, hand over a child, could sometimes mean 俘 FU, WAR PRISONER, as modernists said?

Ch.

Some figures:
Not a province but an autonomous region, which means that was preferred a sort of not so slow acculturation instead of a quick annihilation solution.

Ch.

Hi Charly,

I am familiar with current Uighur troubles, remember there was a considerable group of them incarcerated in Gitmo who Obama released.

The question was what were they like 3500 years ago. Aren't the Turks a mysterious people with a linguistically very strange language. The Turks today are famous for their clearly square heads, what kind of heads do these mummies have? Tyrolean hats are not today associated with Turks, etc.

These mummies clearly have more direct interest in having their phallic symbols close at hand than modern Han Chinese. But some of the more interesting genital representations were kept at the distance of a 13 foot pole.

But this also raises the more pertinent question, how would the modest Chinese represent their genital sexual symbols? A broken pair of lines for Yin and a single long line for Yang. That is one intriguing possibility to me.

Frank

http://www.turks.org.uk/index.php?pid=35

Originating in Mongolia and Siberia, the Turks had begun to mobilise in the sixth century, long before the Uighur ascendancy. In 568, for example, a Turkic ambassador had been dispatched to Constantinople. By 744 their rule reached from Mongolia to the Caspian. For most of the next thousand years they were to dominate not only Central Asia and Xinjiang (formerly known as Chinese Turkestan) but also the Caucasus and Anatolia.

The name ‘Turk’ came to stand for unity and a common language: variants of Turkish are still spoken from the Balkans to Yakutia (present-day Siberia). These early Turks were sky-worship-pers who consulted shamans and magic pebbles. The Uighur kings converted to Manichaeism, the ‘religion of light’, imported by refugees from the Middle East. In 840, perhaps too used to easy living, they were driven out to settle in their former lands of Xinjiang and Gansu, with a new capital, Kucha, near Turfan in western China. ..

A rich literary inheritance was established for them by Mahmud al-Kashghari, the eleventh-century Turkic poet and scholar. By his time, the Uighurs had abandoned their quasi-runic script of 38 characters, which was not deciphered until the late nineteenth century, for a modified Sogdian script of seventeen letters, derived from Iranian.[ Indo-European family of languages] This they bequeathed to Genghis Khan and his invading Mongols, their ethnic cousins, for whom they acted as administrators. With the arrival of Islam from the West, Arabic script {28 letter alphabet, Semitic family of languages] prevailed.
[The Latin script was adopted officially in 1928.The earliest known Turkish alphabet is the Orkhon script. Turkic languages have been written in a number of different alphabets including Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Latin and some other Asiatic writing systems.]

The Uighur khanate in eastern Xinjiang survived until the 1930s. ‘Uighur’ is a generic name for all the Turkish Muslim people of Xinjiang, whether descended from the Uighurs of Turfan or not. Still essentially Turkic, their language and way of life are now under threat.