In another thread, there has been discussion of the historic Jesus, where he came from and where he may have been after the time of crucifixion. I was interested in the Druid/Celtic connection between Jesus family and Britain.
It reminded me of how fascinating I find the Tarim Basin Mummies of the Taklamakan Desert that range from 2500 BC to about 400 BC. These are Caucasoid Mummies and the most fascinating aspect is that the earliest mummies have tartan and other woven clothing. Later Mummies have a horse and Shamanic instruments in the burial. There was marijuana and ephedrine found in the burial goods. The textiles are amazing. Bronze items are noted before the expected historic period.
The Mummies were found near the Silk Road. The age and sophistication of these Celtic looking people means that whatever culture that we later knew linked with the Druids could have spread worldwide. Druids may well have been connected with The historic Jesus...that was a thousand years or two later than these mummies.
Michael Tsarion maintains that high culture spread globally from Ireland at such an early date that it preceded the later high culture of Egypt. This is what I would think of as the Global Culture wiped out by a catastrophe.
After years of controversy and political intrigue, archaeologists using genetic testing have proven that Caucasians roamed China’s Tarim Basin 1,000 years before East Asian people arrived. The discoveries in the 1980s of the undisturbed 4,000-year-old ”Beauty of Loulan” and the younger 3,000-year-old body of the ”Cherchan Man” are legendary in world archaeological circles for the fine state of their preservation and for the wealth of knowledge they bring to modern research.
Archeological finds connected to them made it clear that there was an ancient civilization. This has been named Tocharian and the people were referred to as the Tocharians. The Greek historians thought they were a Scythian tribe. There is evidence both from the mummies and from Chinese written records, that attest to the unique features of the early inhabitants of the Tarim Basin.
The Roman historian Pliny mentions a people with flaxen hair and of uncommon tall proportions, who were living on the western fringes of Seres (“silk” or “from where silk is coming”). It seems that the Tocharians were also engaged in the silk trade. Two routes of the ancient Silk Road led through their territory in the Tarim Basin.
Details about the Tochari however were sparse and the ancient world did not known were they exactly lived. They spoke Tocharian, which is one of the most obscure branches of the Indo-European language group. The existence of the Tocharian languages and alphabet was not even guessed at, until chance discoveries in the mid 20th century brought to light fragments of manuscripts in a then-unknown alphabetic syllabary that turned out to belong to a hitherto unknown branch of the Indo-European family of languages.
In the early 20th century, Caucasian mummies in the deserts of western China were considered anomalies---perhaps just ancient travelers or immigrants. Over the past thirty years Chinese archeologists have unearthed hundreds more of these mummified Caucasoids (as well as abundant skeletal remains amounting to thousands of ancient individuals) in the Tarim basin of Central Asia. The Tarim is in the huge Taklamakan desert in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang, formerly known as eastern Turkestan.
Today the ancient Chinese texts which speak of legendary tall people with red hair and green eyes (formerly denigrated as mere "myths") are being reinterpreted. They are not just imaginary tales as has been assumed until recently, but they tell of the very real Tocharian-branch Indo-European people, relatives of the Celts and Scythians, who possibly controlled the Silk Road during Middle and Egyptian New Kingdom times, and down to the Classical Greek era. They certainly would have been involved in the transmission of technology and culture between East and West at a very early date.
Many of the mummies have been found in very good condition, due to the dryness of the desert. They share European features (slender, elongated bodies, angular faces, recessed eyes), and many of them have their hair intact, ranging in color from blond to red to deep brown, and generally long, curly and braided. Their clothing, also well preserved, points towards a common European Iron Age technology.
The time span of the Central Asian Caucasoids is from 2500 BC to 400 B.C. The location is within a few hundred miles of the Altai "Scythian" burials which date from approximately 500-300 BC. There is definitely some connection here. There is also a connection between the Taklamakan people and the Crimean Scyths, the Celts and the Picts.
They likely influenced the "indigenous" tattooing of the tribal peoples of India, and possibly are antecedent to the Jomon culture of Japan (ancestors of the tattooed Ainu). There is credible evidence that some of the tattooing tribes of northern Asia migrated eastward to become certain tribes in the Americas as well.
http://www.tattooheaven.com/CentAsia.html
Mysterious Mummies
Tocharian texts and many frescoes from the Tarim Basin have been found and attribute to a high standard of the civilization. Unfortunately very often the faces on these frescos were vandalized in the past due to their "European" features.
A later Chinese account describes the Tocharians, known in Chinese as Yuezhi as living “north of India".The presence of Indo-Europeans in the Tarim Basin in the 1st millennium BC suggests that cultural exchanges happened between Indo-European and Chinese populations at a very early date. It has been suggested that such activities as chariot warfare and bronze-making may have been transmitted to the east by these Indo-European nomads."Their land is at a high altitude; the climate is dry; the region is remote. There are so many riding horses in that country that the number often reaches several hundred thousand. City layouts and palaces are quite similar to those of Daqin (the Roman empire). The skin of the people there is reddish white. People are skilful at horse archery. Local products, rarities, treasures, clothing, and upholstery are very good, and even India cannot compare with it."
http://www.theculturedtraveler.com/A...akla_Makan.htm
The Tarim Basin Mummies
Textile analysis from material found on mummies has shown some similarities to the Iron Age civilizations of Europe dating from 800 BC, including woven twill and tartan patterns strikingly similar to Celtic tartans from Northwest Europe.
One of the unusual finds with one of the mummies was a distinctively pointy hat of a kind worn by Celtic priests or wizards (druids) and which later is found in many European cultures of Medieval times. This may suggest very ancient Indo-European roots for this garment
Textile samples from the late second millennium B.C. found in the Tarim Basin graves also provide evidence of the diffusion of European technological sophistication to China. One fragment was a wool twill woven with a plaid design which required looms that have never before been associated with China or eastern Central Asia at such an early date. Irene Good, a specialist in textile archeology at the University of Pennsylvania, has confirmed that the plaid fabric was virtually identical stylistically and technically to textile fragments found in Austria and Germany at sites from a somewhat later period.
Dr. Elizabeth J.W. Barber, a linguist and archeologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the author of Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton University Press, 1991), confirms that the Chinese did not use and did not even know twill, but obtained knowledge of the weave from the West, and only after the Han period. Significantly, there appear to be many connections between the Tarim Basin mummies and the 5,000 year old "Ice Man" found in the Austrian Alps in 1991. These include the type and style of clothing, personal artifacts, solar-religious symbolism, and tattoos for healing and decoration — as well, of course, as the distinct racial commonality.
The evidence, therefore, increasingly seems to confirm a Celtic culture extending across Eurasia at least 4,000 years ago. As one academic, James Opie, an expert on design motifs in ancient rugs and bronze implements, has pointed out, it is highly significant that Celtic endless-knot motifs, swastikas, and animal-style decorations have been discovered from Europe, through Iran, to China.
The religion of the Celts — including the Scythians — was solar, and three- and four-armed swastikas as solar symbols are an omnipresent element in Celtic art. Likewise, the Tarim Basin Europeans displayed a definite penchant for spiral solar symbols, painting them on their faces and engraving them on the bridles of their horses. This in itself suggests that they were Nordics who were and always have been worshippers of the sun and sky, and more generally of Nature. As Dr. Michael Puett, a historian of East Asian civilization at Harvard University, has argued, the Tarim Basin mummies reveal clear processes of a cultural diffusion from Europe outward.
All of this supports the thesis of the pioneering archeologist Colin Renfrew, who challenged the previously accepted idea that prehistoric culture began in the Near East or Central Asia and was only later "diffused" into "barbarian" Europe. It confirms that the cultural prerequisites for civilization are much, much older in Europe than has been acknowledged, and suggests that far from Europe being civilized from outside, it was rather the rest of the world, including Asia, which was civilized by colonizing Europeans.
http://library.flawlesslogic.com/china.htm
Textiles of Tarim Mummies
One of the hallmarks of Celtic culture is the use of the sacred Ogham (pronounced Oh-wum) alphabet by the Druuids, who are Celtic Brahmins. Many scholars believe that Ogham was only used by the Irish, and not by other Celts. However, this is clearly disproved by many Ogham inscriptions appearing in different places, including France, Iberia (Spain and Portugal), the Danube valley, and the Tocharian regions.
Furthermore, inscriptions of Ogham have been found in ancient sites in Japan, some of them megalithic. One Japanese scholar who studies these inscriptions and the sites they are found in believes that the inscriptions indicate that some of the Buddhist monks who brought Buddhism to Japan were Tocharians, or had maintained the use of the sacred writing system of the Tocharians.
There is also extensive evidence of many sorts that Celts crossed the Atlantic from Europe to North American millennia ago, long before the Viking excursions into North America, who perhaps followed Celtic routes. The evidence is archeological, epigraphical, linguistic, folkloric, among others.
http://www.hinduwisdom.info/articles_hinduism/258.htm