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Title: The Mummies of Urumchi
ISBN: 0393045218
Author:
Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Publicate Date: 1999-01
Publish: 1999-01
List Price: $35.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $18.23
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $3.94
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| Customer Review: |
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1: FASCINATING
I bought this book & read it soon after it was printed. I thought it was a great book at the time and I still get it out & read from it occasionally. I was thoroughly captivated by Barber's writing and the subject matter.
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2: good if you are interested in textiles
I enjoyed reading this book but did skip over some of the details of the textiles once I got the point. My textile-mad friend who is a spinner and knitter was more interested in this aspect. I enjoyed seeing how the scientists deduced the origin of these mummies, not just from textiles but from historical documents, the records in ancient cities in the area and carbon dating, paths of migration - they certainly have to know a lot in order to develop the understanding of these ancient people. For me, it is interesting that the ancestors of the Scots were also the ancestors of these mummies.
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3: A shared history from a new angle
I bought this book because I heard an interview with charming Elizabeth Barber about mummies in China. By the time the book was finished she had covered -- almost effortlessly -- a world where weather, textiles, religion, migration, agriculture, geography, mysticism, and so many other fields somehow come together.These events happen in exotic, unfamiliar and inaccessible places but they are surprisingly relevant to our own lives. So many of the side lessons -- like a bad weather year in east Asia could cause a wave of invasions as far as Moscow, and did for millenia -- have helped to make the conflict-prone post-9/11 days a bit more understandable, sadly. It's hard to believe that her short lessons about things like dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) and paleolinguistics (word origins and the people who used them) could turn into almost every day concepts, but it's true! Imagine -- we can what the weather was in the Swedish summer of 863 B.C.E. because of tree trunks from around the world! It's a mark of mastery to take a subject so large and present it clearly, and Ms. Barber has done so.
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4: Central Asian mummies brought to life
When most people think of mummies, they think of ancient Egypt, or maybe South America. In truth, mummification can occur whenever the conditions are right, and the arid Tarim River basin in Western China has revealed a large number of mummified bodies, thousands of years old.What sets these mummies out from others is their probable ethinicity. The author displays with great lucidity the thesis that these people were not Asian at all, but rather were closely related to the Celts. She does this by covering a wide range of available evidence, such as funeral practices, cloth, and language, as well as looking at the geography of the region and exptraploating as to how it may have affected the patterns of settlement three thousand years ago or more. At the end, I was convinced by her arguments, and in the process gained a better appreciation of the Celts, whom I had assumed I understood reasonably well. This is only possible because of the author's breadth of knowledge and research, well presented in a sparsely worded style. This book is a great combination of popular science and academic sholarship. I like it the more as the author has the intellectual honesty to admit the points on which her thesis may be lacking in evidence. This does much to inspire confidence in the work as a whole. Having just finished reading Tournament of Shadows, I prefer this book for its coverage of the Tarim River basin by far.
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5: Textile expert seeks answers about Caucasian migrations
A rather good look at a very interesting mystery of pre-historic European migrations. Central to this has been the discovery of mummies some three to four-thousand years old who posses what is termed a "Caucasian" appearance, both biologically and culturally. Elizabeth Barber is an expert on ancient textiles and the first part of this book, involved in a description of mummies' textiles (from observations made on a visit there) is in her element and makes what could have been a dreadfully tedious description quite lively. It ends up being the best discussion in the book. In fact I give this book an additional star over other scholarly books of this sort - rather bland usually - for causing me to read with deep interest page after page about what is really an analysis of textile stitching. After describing the better-preserved mummies and analyzing their goods and textile weaves and patterns, she then approaches the whole question of their origins and especially in whether one can link this culture to the theoretical proto Indo-European language-speakers. At this point there is an interesting but rather plainly-written collection of a good deal of information provided by explorers into the region, and comparisons to other cultures such as the Celts, and some linguistic analysis. Although it kept my interest, the jumping between time, place and peoples could sometimes be confusing. And I kept having to search through the maps to remember where we were in relation to where, as these parts of Asia are not very familiar to us. It lacks at the end a good tie-up of loose ends or a summary, that seems required after such a lengthy heaping of theories.
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