There’s a good post by Andrew Leonard at Salon in his column “How the World Works,” in part about the Tocharians, a group of people who lived in Central Asia long ago. If you’re a historical linguist with an specialization in Indo-European languages, the Tocharians are an interesting outlier, since their language shares characteristics with distant languages and not so much with their immediate neighbors.

Although it would, as always, be nice to know more about them, I would say that we know a fair bit about the Tocharians, from archeological and textual references and remains, including Buddhist manuscripts written in their languages. (Like hepatitis, there’s Tocharian A, B, and C.)

But they are supposed to be mysterious:

Why mysterious? Because hard evidence on who the Tocharians were or where they came from is scarce. Ethnically speaking, they are believed to be a Caucasian race that flourished for thousands of years in Central Asia before being swallowed up almost without a trace by their Turkic neighbors, sometime around the end of the first millennium (Recently discovered well-preserved corpses of European-looking bodies have even been cited by present-day Uighur Turk separatists as proof that China has no claim to Xinjiang.)

I’m not sure what counts as ‘hard evidence’ here but it doesn’t seem to me that we know more about, say, the Mayans and “who they were or where they came from.” Or any other ethnic group, for that matter. And by ‘ethnicity’ I mean those components of language and culture, not physical characteristics embedded in the idea of a ‘Caucasian race’ which is anyway a discredited physical anthropological term.

It’s certainly not clear that the Tocharians were “swallowed up … by their Turkic neighbors,” unless that means that they started speaking a Turkic language at some point in much the same way ethnic minorities all over the world get ‘swallowed up’ by their larger and stronger neighbors. That process doesn’t seem especially mysterious, does it? But we really don’t know what happened, why there aren’t Tocharian-speakers today — it could have been climate change or innovations in technology or population growth. Or, as I suspect, maybe they didn’t go anywhere — there’s lots of green-eyed Uighurs, especially on the southern rim of the Taklamakan.

Now, I don’t want to dump too much on Andrew Leonard because he has much else of interest to say in his article and he claims no Tocharian expertise. On the contrary, it’s cool that he mentioned them at all.

But Central Asia, as in his essay, often seems to be a blank slate onto which mysteries are projected. Mostly not in jest I think that the Indiana Jones movies are to blame; they’re retro homages to exactly the kind of swashbuckling archeologists who explored Central Asia around the turn of the century (Sven Hedin, Albert von le Coq, and Aurel Stein, for example). The homage has generated, or preserved, an archetype that seems to have become a dominant lens for understanding the region’s history.

The discovery of ‘European-looking’ corpses, the so-called Tarim Mummies, has inspired a lot of this kind of silly Indiana Jones-ing. Case in point: a PBS documentary entitled, “Mysterious Mummies of China.” Presumably these mummies and their associated artifacts, preserved via dessication in the desert, are ‘Tocharian,’ of some sort. What, pray tell, is so mysterious? We’ve known about the Tocharians for a hundred years and the discovery of new archeological material merely confirms and extends what we already knew. It’s cool, and important, but it’s not surprising or mysterious.

The transcript from the PBS documentary is really precious, presumably in an effort to make it more appealing to a broad audience. Victor Mair, a noted Sinologist, translates for Mr. He, a Chinese archeologist:

When I brought her out of the grave and held her in my arms, I realized —I realized that she was the most beautiful woman on earth. I was startled. I was holding the most beautiful woman on earth. (laughter) If she were alive today, or if I were alive 3,000 years ago, I would certainly make her my wife.

That’s a bit creepy, no? But that’s a main thrust of the program — these good-looking Europeans and their tartans and horse-bits in western China. Later on, to ominous music, we are asked:

NARRATOR: …Who were these enigmatic people? If Victor can corroborate his hunch that they descended from the ancient mummy people, a startling conclusion would be inescapable. This region, on the very doorstep of ancient China, was continuously populated by people of European origin from as early as 1800 B.C., through the boom days of the Silk Road.

Again, I’m not sure what’s startling or enigmatic here, unless we take the narrator at face value and believe that ancient China was influenced by these honorary Scotsmen of the desert.

The team requests permission to visit a remote site, never before filmed by foreigners. There, they may be able to glimpse the real faces of the Tocharians. This temple complex, carved out of sandstone cliffs, is riddled with caves where Buddhist monks made their homes….

JEANNINE DAVIS-KIMBALL: Oh, look! Look up there. You see the guy with the horse and the pointed hat?

VICTOR MAIR: Oh.

JEANNINE DAVIS-KIMBALL: There’s three of them on that horse. There’s three Saka there, with the pointed hats? Three Saka nomads.

I especially like that Victor Mair — who certainly knows better — and the other explorers are depicted as the discovers of a new archeological site, even though they climb up ladders and hold onto handrails that someone recently put there. It may be the first time foreigners have filmed the site, but I sort of doubt that the unnamed cave is new to our body of knowledge about the region. Likewise, any casual reader of Herodotus will be familiar with the pointed-hat Scythian (Saka) nomads. That might have been a find a century ago.

After an arduous climb up a flight of concrete stairs, the team makes an astonishing discovery:

NARRATOR: In a small passage at the back of the cave, Victor hits pay dirt.

VICTOR MAIR: I see the red beard and the red hair parted in the middle. It’s a distinctive style of Tocharians. He’s wearing a coat with wide lapels on both sides, and then folded over. It’s a shame that these figures have all been defaced by people of other faiths at some time in the past. But still, it’s very easy to see what they looked like, and we can tell who they were.

NARRATOR: The Tocharian figures are strikingly similar to the mummies that lived in these parts 1,000 years earlier. Victor’s quest has come full circle.

The fact that I can do something similar by walking to my bookcase (“an arduous climb” upstairs) is not as cinematically appealing I suppose.

So: why does it have to be mysterious? This is mysterious to me.

Next: Harwan.