What’s the Straight Dope on the Cherchen man (and his family), a reported Celtic mummy from 1000BC found in Western China? All my Google searches take me to news pages and paranormal websites when I search for him.
So, is he actually a Celt, or was he a local? If so, where in the Celtic world was he from? Also, what is the current thinking on how he ended up in China? Are there more examples of European mummies like this in Western China?
Just a WAG, but maybe he was from Galatia, the ancient Celtic kingdom in modern-day Turkey. That would put him on (or near) the Silk Road, and from there the distance isn’t that great to the kingdoms of Central Asia, many of which are now part of China.
I think you’re talking about the Tarim mummies from the Tarim Basin in China.
They weren’t Celtic, though. The earliest mummies come from around 1800 BC, and the proto-Celts wouldn’t be inventing themselves for another five- or six-hundred years with the Urnfield and Hallstatt cultures in Europe.
They did, however, most likely speak some precursor to the Indo-European language called Tocharian.
As to where they came from, nobody knows for sure. Linguistically, they separated from PIE at a fairly early date (roughly contemporaneous with proto-Greek). Genetically, they share features with modern Austrians. They looked like Scots-Irish… blonde or red hair, light eyes, and (by golly!) dressed in tartans.
He is defnitely not Celtic. 1000 B.C. is too early even for the Celts in Galatia: at that time they had not gone much east of Central Europe. My guess is that he’s called “Celtic” for one of two reasons: (1) he’s European-looking (light hair, pale eyes, etc.) and far-flung and exotic, or (2) he was found in association with plaid cloth in ancient times.
He is likely to be a Tocharian, whose Indo-European language was spoken in that area into historic times. Elizabeth Barber writes a bit about this guy and his kin in The Mummies of Ürümchi, including the plaid cloth. I highly recommend the book (even though she’s mostly interested in cloth): readable and interesting and answers all your questions. Try a search on the author’s name for more information if you want everything online.
Tocharian isn’t closely related to Celtic, but it was once thought to be because both preserve some archaic features of Indo-European and you know how the popular mind is: once they get hold of an idea, it’s difficult to dislodge even when scholarship moved on a hundred years ago.
Well…
Tocharian is a ‘centum’ language, not a ‘satem’ one. (For those not aware, the two great divisions of Indo-European are usually referenced by their terms for ‘hundred’, it being a common marker among a large number of distinguishing features. The centum languages include Italic-Romance, Celtic, and Germanic; the satem include Baltic-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian [in each case among others].) Why the easternmost documented Indo-European language belongs to the group that is otherwise western for the most part is a question that has exercised philologists.
Celtic was a far more widespread group in immediate pre-history than even during ancient history. As of the last I knew, there was consensus that the La Tene and Hallstadt cultures were both Celtic, on archaeological grounds. The Celts seem to have occupied, the British Isles, France, old West Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, with incursions into northern Italy (Cisalpine Gaul) and parts of Spain not simply described, displacing the Iberians (who may or may not have been collateral ancestors of the Basques; evidence is far too scanty to tell) from parts but not all of the Iberian Peninsula.
In general, though, I agree with your points, in particular that whatever he was, was definitely not a Celt, and that Celtic and Tocharian are not that closely related (They’re about as close as Norwegian and Romanian, if anyone needs an easy parallel.)
Well, sort of. It’s centum in the sense that it doesn’t participate in the sound change k’ > s of the satem languages, and so the Tocharian A word for 100 is känt (Toch. B, kante), but Tocharian split off before most of the other sound changes that the Western I-E centum languages share. It was once thought that the Tocharian was a Western I-E langauge and that the Tocharians had migrated in from Western Europe, but this is no longer generally held to be true.
Regarding your other point, you’re absolutely correct about the spread of the Celts. I just meant that it’s not early enough for the date of the mummies. In 1000 BC, Celts had not yet reached Iberia, Britain or Ireland, or Anatolia.