Secrets of the Silk Road revealed

   Three well-preserved mummies exhibited for the first time outside of Asia are now on display at the Bowers Museum. The mummies have European features and Western artifacts were found buried with them. 
   Nearly 4,000 years old, the flaxen-haired Beauty of Xiaohe lies wrapped in a finely-made woolen shroud above a boat-shaped coffin made of curved poplar flanks. 
   Secrets of the Silk Road also features the mummies Yingpan Man, found buried in Persian garments, and an infant girl mummy. She is wrapped in a blanket of red wool and wears a blue felt bonnet. 
   The Silk Road was an interconnected series of trade routes from China to as far as the Roman Empire. The artifacts shown in the exhibit exchanged hands several times along the Silk Road. Hundreds of mummies were found buried in the Tarim Basin in the Far Western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China in the early ‘90s. The exhibit is on loan from the Chinese government.
   A skillfully-woven basket containing grains of wheat was found next to the Beauty of Xiaohe’s head. “Wheat is a Western import, suggesting she had contact with the West via the Silk Road,” said Victor Mair, professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Mair is one of several experts who contributed their professional opinions. 
   Buried in the fourth or fifth century, Yingpan Man is clad in the most affluent vestments of the three mummies. He wears a white-painted mask illustrating his strikingly European features. “The prominent nose doesn’t resemble the noses seen in Chinese descendants,” Mair said. 
   Yingpan Man’s trappings, or ornamental clothing, “are definitely of European origin. Besides his rich clothing, Yingpan Man was buried with lavish goods including a necklace, bow and arrows, and a Roman glass bowl,” Mair said. 
   The infant girl mummy died in the eighth century B.C. Little blue eyestones were found over each eye.   
   “The fact that blue stones do not occur in this region in any quantity suggests that they hunted far and wide to find these stones. There is a tiny bit of hair that shows that she was sort of a strawberry blond,” professor Elizabeth Barber, a textile expert from Occidental College, explained in the museum’s audio tour. 
   Secrets of the Silk Road will be on display until July 25. For more information visit the website at www.bowers.org.