Mostafa Waziri of the Supreme Council of Antiquities announced the discovery of several statues, including a 14-inch-tall bronze figure of the god Nefertum, lying beside intact, painted wooden coffins in a deep burial shaft in the Saqqara necropolis, according to an Ahram Online report.
God Nefertum statue is inlaid with valuable precious stones red agate, turquoise, and lapis lazuli. It is 35 centimeters tall and the name of its owner Badi Amunis engraved on its base. Badi Amun is from the 26th Dynasty.
The mission uncovered as well a number of intact wooden coffins. Waziri said that the newly discovered bronze statue of the god Nefertum was found lying beside the 26th Dynasty coffins.
A carved statue of the god Nefertum was unearthed in Saqqara necropolis on Thursday, alongside a group of intact wooden coffins which the antiquities ministry has said it will reveal more details about on Saturday.
The secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities said that the Nefertum statue is one of several statues that the mission discovered while performing the excavation work inside an 11 meter-deep burial shaft.
Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities revealed that it will announce more details about Saqqara’s discoveries on Saturday.
On September 6, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced that more than 13 intact and sealed coffins were discovered in Saqqara, which is considered a massive discovery. The discovered coffins were found inside an 11-meter deep shaft, where three sealed niches were also found.
“An indescribable feeling every time we witness a new archaeological discovery, especially when it is an 11-meter-deep shaft encompassing a number of sealed pharaonic human coffins.
A wonderful feeling that we are revealing a new secret of our great civilization… Stay tuned for the announcement of a new discovery in Saqqara! A big thank you to all my colleagues in the ministry for their efforts and dedication,” Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Khaled al-Anany said on September 6.
Waziri announced that the names of the coffin owners have not yet been discovered, but will be revealed in the upcoming days as the excavation work continues.
The first studies revealed that the newly uncovered coffins are sealed and have not been opened since they were buried in the shaft and that most probably they were found in the same location.
On September 18, a group of 14 intact wooden coffins was discovered four days ago in a burial shaft. The newly uncovered burial shaft was found next to the shaft that was revealed last week and housed 13 coffins in Saqqara Necropolis.
The total number of intact coffins in the area has now reached 27; the coffins are 2,500 years old and still keep some of their original colours. The discovery was made by the Egyptian archaeological mission headed by Waziri.
It is worth mentioning that the Saqqara discovery houses the largest number of coffins in one burial since the discovery of the Al-Asasif cachette.
On April 18, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism & Antiquities announced via the internet a new archaeological discovery in Saqqara Necropolis.
Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Khaled el-Anani uploaded a set of photos of him with excavation workers in Saqqara on his official account on Instagram.
The discovery was a burial well leading to a room containing a large collection of statues, pottery, and Ushabtis, in addition to a sarcophagus. This well was located next to the Wahty Tomb, which was discovered in November 2019 in the sacred cemetery of animals.
The statement of the Ministry of Tourism & Antiquities confirmed that work began in this promising region in April 2018, indicating that work is still underway.
The discovery was located at the site of the necropolis of sacred animals and birds in Saqqara, in which, during the past 2 years, many archaeological discoveries were made by the personnel of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Giant “Skeletons of Enormous Size” Discovered In New Mexico – New York Times Article From 1902
Researcher Graham Hancock coined the phrase, ‘we’re like a species with amnesia,’ and it’s true. Despite the fact that it seems the story of human history is well uncovered, every single year there are new discoveries made that challenge what we once held to be true. In some cases, there are discoveries which are concealed from the general public for various reasons, a great example of that would be the black budget world.
There also seem to be amazing discoveries that are completely ignored by mainstream media and most of these discoveries would shake the foundations of human history. Another great example is the bodies recently discovered in Nazca, Peru – three-fingered/towed humanoid beings whose physical anatomy is far different from that of a human. Another example would be the stories regarding intelligent ancient civilizations, like Atlantis, for example, which many scholars now believe to have actually existed.
Out of all the information that’s out there regarding intelligent ancient civilizations, and more, even if just one of these stories is true, it would completely change what we thought we knew about human history and the history of our planet. I believe the story of our past might be different from what seems to be the only two available options, creationism and evolution. There may be a myriad of other factors involved.
These discoveries would also shake the foundations of many people’s belief systems. The human race has been kept from so much information, and forced into a specific worldview that’s designed to benefit the ‘1%.’
In today’s day and age, it’s always best to keep an open mind, especially when new information is constantly emerging (for those who are curious enough to actually look) which challenges the old.
Giants?
Did giants once roam the Earth? It’s been in the literature and lore of multiple cultures throughout human history, from the Maya, the global indigenous populations, the Bible, and more since what we perceive as the beginning of time. For example, the Bible tells us that when the Gods were on Earth, they were giants. “This, when you bring up in conversation, normally brings up, you know, laughter and people giggling and thinking you’re joking, and yet, the Bible is full of references of giants in our history.” – Michael Tellinger
Tellinger is referring to the Nephilim, as referenced in Numbers 13:33 of the Bible: “We saw the Nephilim there (the defendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”
Again, it’s not just the bible, it’s lore from cultures that pre-dated religion as well as the indigenous.
Tellinger is a renowned author/politician who has made several groundbreaking discoveries regarding lost ancient civilizations that once roamed the Earth. Here’s an article about him, with a picture of him standing next to a giant footprint, almost the size of a full human being.
There are several examples of physical evidence which exists to support the idea that giants once roamed the Earth. For example, stored in the vaults of the medical school at WITS University, Johannesburg, there is part of an upper leg bone with a hip-joint that would have stood approximately 12 feet tall. It’s been there since the early 1960s and was found by miners in Northern Namibia. It is one of the most precious and rare specimens available today that clearly indicates the existence of giants in Southern Africa more than 40,000 years ago.
Apparently, in 1883 the Smithsonian, a United States government/military led organization at the time sent a team of archaeologists to South Charleston Mound. According to the official report, the team discovered a number of giant skeletons ranging from 7 to 9 feet tall. Some of them had a “compressed or flat-head type” which would resemble similar skeletal characteristics to those found in Egypt and South America.
Whether or not this is ‘fake news’ is highly debatable, as there is a lot of evidence to suggest it’s not. The list goes on and on, and what’s interesting is an article published in the New York Times in 1902 that also deals with the subject.
The article goes on to describe two stones with “curious inscriptions” and underneath were the bones of a body that “could not have been less than 12 feet in length.” According to the NY Times article, “the men who opened the grave say that the forearm was 4 feet long and that in a well-preserved jaw the lower teeth ranged from the size of a hickory nut to that of the largest walnut in size .”
Apparently, the chest of the body had a circumference of 7 feet.
The bodies were first discovered by Luciana Quintana, it was on his ranch these specific bodies were found, according to the article, “Quintana, who has uncovered many other burial places, expresses the opinion that perhaps thousands of skeletons of a race of giants long extinct will be found. This supposition is based on the traditions handed down from the early Spanish invasion that have detailed knowledge of the existence of a race of giants that inhabited the plains of what now is Eastern New Mexico. Indian legends and carvings also in the same section indicate the existence of such a race.”
Here’s another New York Times article about skeletons that were discovered in 1885. Going back further still, in 1774 settlers found what they called “The Giant Town,” which housed several gigantic skeletons, one being an eight-foot-tall male.
“In addition to the human skeletons found in NY State, there is also the famous case of ‘The Cardiff Giant,’ a white alabaster-like statue of an 11-foot man who showed an exposed penis and hieroglyphic inscriptions. This statue caused a worldwide sensation and was exhibited in New York City to thousands of paying customers before it was declared a fake by the NY newspapers, despite the fact that scholars from Harvard and elsewhere insisted that the statue was genuine.” – Richard Dewhurst
Dewhurst is an Emmy Award-winning writer. He’s a graduate of NYU with degrees in journalism, film, and television, he has written and edited for the History Channel, the Arts & Entertainment Channel, PBS, Fox Television and Fox Films, ABC News, TNT, Paramount Pictures, and the Miami Herald. He himself is well research and you can read his article on the topic here: “The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America“
The Story of Human History
As mentioned earlier, we don’t really know the full story of human history, and when new evidence and information pops up, either from the past or today, which challenges the current accepted framework, it seems like people lose their minds. What we have today, in large part, is dogma, instead of actual fact.
With all of the discoveries being made and all the discoveries that have been made which mainstream media completely ignores, we are clearly not being told something about the true origins of humanity. The idea that a powerful group of people protecting their interests by suppressing information in multiple fields is unsettling. For a plant and its people to thrive, it must live in complete transparency.
Hundreds of Rock Art Images Documented in Australia
Cosmos Magazine reports that 572 Maliwawa Figures have been documented for the first time at 87 different rock art sites in northern Australia’s Arnhem Land. Paul Taçon of Griffith University said the red figures, drawn between 6,000 and 9,400 years ago, depict humans and animals living in relationships and engaging in different activities.
Maliwawa macropod over 3MFC hand stencil, Namunidjbuk.
The researchers suggest they are a missing link between early-style Dynamic Figures, 12,000 years in age, and X-ray figures made in the past 4,000 years.
The images were created in various shades of red, with stroke-infill or outline forms and a few red strokes as infill. Some are more than 50-centimeters high.
Large male Maliwawa human figures from an Awunbarna site.
The scenes depict humans and macropods, including three bilbies and a dugong, and lead researcher Paul Taçon, from Australia’s Griffith University, suggests the presence of various forms of headdresses shows they are not just simple depictions of everyday life.
“Maliwawas are depicted as solitary figures and as part of group scenes showing various activities and some may have a ceremonial context,” he says.
“Human figures are frequently depicted with animals, especially macropods, and these animal-human relationships appear to be central to the artists’ message.
“Indeed, animals are much more common than in the Dynamic Figure style rock art in terms of percentage of subject matter, as 89% of Dynamic Figures are human, whereas only about 42% of Maliwawa Figures are human.”
Griffith colleague and co-author Sally May says the discovery of bilby images at an Awunbarna site was surprising as Arnhem Land historically has not been within their range.
The solitary dugong painting, which is the oldest known image, also appears out of place. “It indicates a Maliwawa artist visited the coast, but the lack of other saltwater fauna may suggest this was not a frequent occurrence,” May says.
However, the intrigue of the paintings goes beyond what they depict, with researchers curious about the artists and the techniques they used.
“The Maliwawa back-to-back figures are the oldest known for western Arnhem Land and it appears this painting convention began with the Maliwawa style. It continues to the present with bark paintings and paintings on paper,” Taçon says.
As for the people behind the paintings, Taçon says they cannot rule out the possibility that a small group of artists produced Maliwawa rock paintings.
There is also the possibility that only a couple of artists made the paintings with one responsible for the outline forms, the other creating the fuller stroke-line infill examples.
The Egyptian Minister of Tourism and Antiquity said on Saturday that archaeologists discovered dozens of ancient coffins in a vast necropolis in the South of Cairo.
Khalid el-Anany said at least 59 sealed sarcophagi, with mummies inside most of them, were found that had been buried in three wells more than 2,600 years ago.
“I consider this is the beginning of a big discovery,” el-Anany said, adding that there is an unknown number of coffins that have yet to be unearthed in the same area.
He spoke at a news conference at the famed Step Pyramid of Djoser in Saqqara where the coffins were found. The sarcophagi have been displayed and one of them was opened before reporters to show the mummy inside. Several foreign diplomats attended the announcement ceremony.
The Saqqara plateau hosts at least 11 pyramids, including the Step Pyramid, along with hundreds of tombs of ancient officials and other sites that range from the 1st Dynasty (2920 B.C.-2770 B.C.) to the Coptic period (395-642).
Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said initial studies show that the decorated coffins were made for priests, top officials, and elites from the Pharaonic Late Period (664-525 B.C.).
Khalid el-Anany, Egypt’s tourism and antiquities minister, right, and Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, left, stand over a sarcophagus at the Saqqara archaeological site, 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of Cairo, Egypt on Saturday, Oct. 3, 2020. El-Anany says at least 59 sealed sarcophagi with mummies inside were found in three wells at the vast necropolis, believed to have been buried there more than 2,600 years ago.
He said archaeologists also found a total of 28 statuettes of Ptah-Soker the main god of the Saqqara necropolis, and a beautifully carved 35 cm tall bronze statuette of god Nefertum, inlaid with precious stones.
The name of its owner, Priest Badi-Amun, is written on its base, he said.
Egyptian antiquities officials had announced the discovery of the first batch coffins last month when archaeologists found 13 of the containers in a newly discovered 11 meter-deep (36 feet) well.
The Saqqara site is part of the necropolis of Egypt’s ancient capital of Memphis that includes the famed Giza Pyramids, as well as smaller pyramids at Abu Sir, Dahshur, and Abu Ruwaysh. The ruins of Memphis have designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in the 1970s.
El-Anany said the Saqqara coffins would join 30 ancient wooden coffins that were discovered in October in the southern city of Luxor and will be showcased at the new Grand Egyptian Museum, which Egypt is building near the Giza Pyramids.
The Saqqara discovery is the latest in a series of archeological finds that Egypt has sought to publicize in an effort to revive its key tourism sector, which was badly hit by the turmoil that followed the 2011 uprising.
The sector was also dealt a further blow this year by the global coronavirus pandemic.
“Gift of the Century” Egypt unveils 59 ancient coffins in major archaeological discovery
Mysterious Secret Tunnel Discovered Under Ancient Pyramid in Mexico
Hidden passage to the underworld could just have been found, at least according to the mysterious ancient civilization that built it.
A secret tunnel leading down a chamber deep underneath the Pyramid of the Moon, a massive temple located in the ancient city of Teotihuacán, near what is now Mexico City, confirmed by the Archaeologists
The research team believes that the chamber may be used as a funeral ritual, while the tunnel may have represented the route to the underworld—a powerful concept for the Aztecs, Maya, and other pre-Columbian societies.
Gomes Believe that the tunnel is one of the most important discoveries in the history of Mexico.
Gomes Believe that tunnel is one of the most important discoveries in the history of Mexico.
Using a technique called electrical resistance technology, researchers from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) mapped an image of the earth beneath the pyramid without breaking any ground.
This is how they discovered the hollowed-out chamber about 26 feet under the pyramid, with a diameter of 49 feet, as well as the subterranean tunnel.
The Pyramid of the Moon.
First settled as early as 400 B.C., Teotihuacán became the thriving center of the ancient Mesoamerican world by 300 A.D., around the time the city’s largest structures, including the Pyramid of the Moon, were completed.
No one knows for sure who founded Teotihuacán, or why the civilization centered there suddenly and mysteriously collapsed starting around A.D. 600. By A.D. 750, the surviving members of a population that at its height may have numbered some 200,000 had dispersed, leaving their once-great metropolis and its sacred pyramids behind.
The Aztecs first found the city’s ruins around 1300, and gave it its name, which means “the place where men become gods” in their Nahuatl language.
Since the 17th century, the temple known in the pre-Hispanic world as Meztli Itzácual has been the site of dozens of archaeological excavations.
Built on elevated ground, the Pyramid of the Moon is the highest point in the ancient complex. This pyramid towers above 12 smaller pyramid platforms believed to be stages where both animal and human sacrifices took place. It is located at the opposite end of the so-called Avenue of Death from Teotihuacán’s largest structure, the Pyramid of the Sun.
Aerial view of Aztec Pyramids, including the Moon Pyramid, in San Juan de Teotihuacan, Mexico
Earlier tombs found inside the Pyramid of the Moon have contained sacrificial remains, including deformed human skulls, as well as jewelry and other grave objects made of greenstone.
According to Verónica Ortega, director of the Integral Conservation Project for the Plaza of the Moon, excavations of the newly discovered chamber will likely turn up similar objects.
“These large offering complexes constitute the sacred heart of the city of Teotihuacán, the reason why everyone saw it as the mecca of the civilization,” Ortega said in a statement. “What can be found inside them will help unravel the relationship this ancient metropolis had with other regions of Mesoamerica.”
The oldest crown in the world, which is considered to be more than 6000 years old, has been shown for the first time in America. The ancient relic, which dates back to the Copper Age between 4000–3300 B.C., is shaped like a thick ring and features vultures and doors protruding from the top.
It is assumed that the crown engaged in funeral ceremonies of important people at the time. The crown was found in a remote cave in the Judaean Desert near the Dead Sea in 1961 among hundreds of other objects from the period.
Known as the ‘Nahal Mishar Hoard’, more than 400 objects were discovered by Pessah Bar-Adon and his fellow Israeli archaeologists in the cave which became known as the ‘Cave of the Treasure’.
The world’s oldest crown: This headpiece dating back to the Copper Age between 4000-3300 B.C. was found in a remote cave in the Judaean Desert in Israel in 1961.
The pieces included two clay statues of Gods – The Lady and Ram of Gilat – and a full array of Copper Age figurines made from copper, stone, elephant ivory and clay.
There was also a scepter decorated with horned animals, clay goblets and bowls. It has been suggested that the hoard was the sacred treasure belonging to a shrine at Ein Gedi, some twelve kilometers away.
The purpose of the hoard remains a mystery, it may have been to keep them protected in an emergency, although it is believed the objects may have been used in public ceremonies.
Around 150 artefacts from the collection can be seen at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World as part of the ‘Masters of Fire:
Huge hoard: Archaeologists discovered more than 400 items hidden within the cave
Other discoveries: Among the other items discovered in the cave was a libation vessel in the shape of a woman carrying a churn, pictured left, and a fenestrated stand with three bowls and sculpted motifs, pictured right
Daniel M. Master, Professor of Archaeology at Wheaton College and a member of the curatorial team, said: ‘The fascinating thing about this period is that a burst of innovation defined the technologies of the ancient world for thousands of years.
‘People experimented with new ways to use not just copper, but also leather, ceramics, and textiles – sometimes successfully, sometimes not.’
Jennifer Y. Chi, ISAW Exhibitions Director and Chief Curator, added: ‘To the modern eye, it’s stunning to see how these groups of people, already mastering so many new social systems and technologies, still had the ability to create objects of enduring artistic interest.’
The exhibit also features objects from the Peqi’in Cave, another important discovery site.
The most significant finds included are eight ossuaries, or burial containers, for human skeletal remains. Some were designed to look like human faces or figures and all are decorated with red stripes or zigzag patterns.
These ossuaries held the bones of more than one person – the vast majority were men. Those who had their bones stored would have held positions of importance within society.
For use in funerals: An ossuary with painted and sculpted facial features, pictured left, and a painted anthropomorphic ossuary with sculpted nose, stamped eyes, and gaping mouth, pictured right
Unusual: A libation vessel in the shape of a Ram carrying cornets
Never before seen strange 5,000-year-old clay figurine with a tattooed face and bone mask
In Russia, a macabre was found it is a 5000-year-old mass grave containing the bodies of five decapitated individuals. Archaeologists suspect the ancient Odinov culture in Siberia were head cultists.
Professor Vyacheslav Molodin said that the graveyard of Ust-Tartas 2 in the city of Novosibirsk comprises three decapitated adults and two teenagers. It is assumed that their heads were cut after death – and then kept for worship.
‘Odinov people definitely had a head or skull cult,’ said the archaeologist.
‘It is a characteristic feature of this culture that they had graves with cut off heads. They were perhaps put into a sanctuary, or buried separately in a different way.’
In another grave on the same site, an astonishing figurine has been found on the shoulder of an ancient woman who was laid to rest with her head on a man’s abdomen.
The skeletons of the ancient presumed lovers were cocooned together under a birch bark blanket for five millennia, but in this case, their heads were not severed.
The man lay on his back, she on her front, facing him in a timeless embrace. Perched on the female’s shoulder was a palm-sized clay figurine with a tattooed face.
Bronze Age statuette with a tattooed face was found on the shoulder of the buried ancient woman. It features a deep recess down its centre
Dr Molodin called the Bronze Age figurine discovery the ‘most astonishing find’ of the summer archaeological season this year
‘Interestingly, our anthropologists and genetics found that the Odino people were Mongoloids, yet the face of the figurine had clear Caucasian features. We don’t see the gender of the figurine, which is unusual, and we can’t say if it was dressed’, said Vyacheslav Molodin. Pictures: Novosibirsk Institute of Archeology and Ethnography
It has a mask made of bone – horse vertebrae – decorated with what appears to be an image of a bear’s muzzle, say scientists. Inside the grave, it had been placed on its front and had its head broken off.
It was then turned upside down so that it ‘looked up’ towards its owner in a bizarre ritual – something ‘yet unseen’ by Novosibirsk archaeologists.
One side of the middle of the statuette also has a long narrow hole, which had a bronze plate and also some organic substance inside it. Chemical tests are needed to establish more about what was placed inside that opening.
Dr Molodin said the discovery was unique.
‘We’ve never come across anything like this, despite our extensive knowledge of the Odinov culture’s burial rites,’ he said to the Siberian Times.
‘The woman must have been an unusual person to have such a figurine “escorting” her to the afterlife.’
Dr Molodin, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), called the Bronze Age figurine discovery the ‘most astonishing find’ of the summer archaeological season.
While the Odinov cattle-breeding people were Mongoloids, the face of the figurine ‘has obviously Caucasian features’ with ‘big eyes and a snub nose’, he said.
This was a tiered grave that had two more people buried beneath the loving couple that were facing each other.
It’s possible the palm-sized figurine was hoped to escort the ‘unusual’ woman to the afterlife. It had its head broken off so it ‘looked up’ at its owner in a bizarre ritual
In a Desert in China, a Trove of 4,000-Year-Old Mummies
Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary graveyard in the midst of the terrifying desert north of Tibet. Its people died almost 4,000 years ago, and their remains were well preserved by dry air.
The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead of a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation.
The long-vanished people have no name because their origin and identity are still unknown. But many clues are now emerging about their ancestry, their way of life, and even the language they spoke.
Their graveyard, known as Small River Cemetery No. 5, lies near a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, a region encircled by forbidding mountain ranges. Most of the basin is occupied by the Taklimakan Desert, a wilderness so inhospitable that later travelers along the Silk Road would edge along its northern or southern borders.
The mummy of an infant was one of about 200 corpses with European features that were excavated from the cemetery.
In modern times the region has been occupied by Turkish-speaking Uighurs, joined in the last 50 years by Han settlers from China. Ethnic tensions have recently arisen between the two groups, with riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. A large number of ancient mummies, really desiccated corpses, have emerged from the sands, only to become pawns between the Uighurs and the Han.
The 200 or so mummies have a distinctively Western appearance, and the Uighurs, even though they did not arrive in the region until the 10th century, have cited them to claim that the autonomous region was always theirs. Some of the mummies, including a well-preserved woman known as the Beauty of Loulan, were analyzed by Li Jin, a well-known geneticist at Fudan University, who said in 2007 that their DNA contained markers indicating an East Asian and even South Asian origin.
The mummies in the Small River Cemetery are, so far, the oldest discovered in the Tarim Basin. Carbon tests done at Beijing University show that the oldest part dates to 3,980 years ago. A team of Chinese geneticists has analyzed the mummies’ DNA.
Despite the political tensions over the mummies’ origin, the Chinese said in a report published last month in the journal BMC Biology that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China. The team was led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun, with Dr. Jin as a co-author.
All the men who were analyzed had a Y chromosome that is now mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia, but rarely in China. The mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, consisted of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe. Since both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA lineages are ancient, Dr. Zhou and his team conclude the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin some 4,000 years ago.
A 3,800-year-old mummy, the Beauty of Xiaohe, found at the Small River Cemetery.
The Small River Cemetery was rediscovered in 1934 by the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman and then forgotten for 66 years until relocated through GPS navigation by a Chinese expedition. Archaeologists began excavating it from 2003 to 2005. Their reports have been translated and summarized by Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in the prehistory of the Tarim Basin.
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.
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 of the community attached to fertility. Nowadays those who suffer from infertility can have access to the right medications to help them with their issues, as well as medications like for erectile dysfunction, whereas back then there were more natural ways to help procreation happen.
Arthur Wolf, an anthropologist at Stanford University and an expert on fertility in East Asia, said that the poles perhaps mark social status, a common theme of tombs and grave goods. “It seems that what most people want to take with them is their status if it is anything to brag about,” he said.
Dr. Mair said the Chinese archaeologists’ interpretation of the poles as phallic symbols were “a believable analysis.” The buried people’s evident veneration of procreation could mean they were interested in both the pleasure of sex and its utility, given that it is difficult to separate the two. But they seem to have had a particular respect for fertility, Dr. Mair said, because several women were buried in double-layered coffins with special grave goods.
Living in harsh surroundings, “infant mortality must have been high, so the need for procreation, particularly in light of their isolated situation, would have been great,” Dr. Mair said. Another possible risk to fertility could have arisen if the population had become in-bred. “Those women who were able to produce and rear children to adulthood would have been particularly revered,” Dr. Mair said.
Several items in the Small River Cemetery burials resemble artifacts or customs familiar in Europe, Dr. Mair noted. Boat burials were common among the Vikings. String skirts and phallic symbols have been found in Bronze Age burials of Northern Europe. There are no known settlements near the cemetery, so the people probably lived elsewhere and reached the cemetery by boat. No woodworking tools have been found at the site, supporting the idea that the poles were carved off-site.
Wang Da-Gang
The Tarim Basin was already quite dry when the Small River people entered it 4,000 years ago. They probably lived at the edge of survival until the lakes and rivers on which they depended finally dried up around A.D. 400. Burials with felt hats and woven baskets were common in the region until some 2,000 years ago.
The language spoken by the people of the Small River Cemetery is unknown, but Dr. Mair believes it could have been 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 a hundred in Latin (centum) and in Sanskrit (satam).
The Small River Cemetery people lived more than 2,000 years before the earliest evidence for Tokharian, but there is “a clear continuity of culture,” Dr. Mair said, in the form of people being buried with felt hats, a tradition that continued until the first few centuries A.D.
