Friday, May 31, 2019

The Tarim Mummies


Tocharia map image

Quoting from Wikipedia: 
The Tarim mummies are a series of mummies discovered in the Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang, China, which date from 1800 BCE to the first centuries BCE.

At the beginning of the 20th century, European explorers such as Sven Hedin, Albert von Le Coq and Sir Aurel Stein all recounted their discoveries of desiccated bodies in their search for antiquities in Central Asia. Since then, numerous other mummies have been found and analyzed, many of them now displayed in the museums of Xinjiang. Most of these mummies were found on the eastern end of the Tarim Basin, or along the southern edge of the Tarim Basin

The earliest Tarim mummies, found at Qäwrighul and dated to 1800 BCE, are of a Caucasian physical type whose closest affiliation is to the Bronze Age populations of southern Siberia, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and the Lower Volga.
Photo courtesy Wikipedia
My interest in these mummies is their possible relationship to the Jaredite migration across ancient Asia.  The location is overlapping and the time time period, is close, although a little latter for the mummies, but they could have been from some of the remnant population left behind from Jared's group.  My feeling is that Jared's people would have been a mixture of Shemites, Japhethites, and Hamites with a majority of Shemites.  However, judging from the Olmec culture in the New World, the majority should have been distinctly mongoloid, but whether this cultural trait (or mutation) originated from one of the three dominant groups or some other source is not obvious.  However it does seem to postdate the dispersion from Babel.
In any event, it would be wise to study the Tarim mummies, their language, writing, artifacts, etc. with a possible connection in mind.   

The Dunhuang Manuscripts

In 1900 a cache of religious manuscripts from a sealed cave was discovered at Dunhuang, China by a Daoist monk and began to be circulated and exhibited by collectors and museums.  In many respects the collection is similar to one gathered by the Nephite leaders in the Book Of Mormon and hidden away by one of their last prophets Mormon (in about 380 AD) near a place called by them Cumorah (Morm. 6:6).  A study of it may give us some clues to the still hidden Mormon collection.
Dunhuang Caves courtesy Wikipedia
According to Wikipedia
The Dunhuang manuscripts are a cache of important religious and secular documents discovered in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, in the early 20th century. Dating from late 4th to early 11th centuries, the manuscripts include works ranging from history and mathematics to folk songs and dance. There are also a large number of religious documents, most of which are Buddhist, but other religions including DaoismNestorian Christianity and Manichaeism are also represented. The majority of the manuscripts are in Chinese. Other languages represented are KhotaneseSanskritSogdianTangutTibetanOld Uyghur languageHebrew and Old Turkic. The manuscripts are a major resource for academic studies in a wide variety of fields including history, religious studies, linguistics, and manuscript studies.

The documents were discovered in a sealed cave by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu on June 25, 1900. From 1907 onwards he began to sell them to Western explorers, notably Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot. ...Those purchased by Western scholars are now kept in institutions all over the world, such as the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. All of the manuscript collections are being digitized by the International Dunhuang Project, and can be freely accessed online.
Manuscript courtesy Wikipecia


Also included under heading Mogao Caves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogao_Caves