President Musharraf and the Red Mosque Radicals

The action taken by President Perves Musharraf against the Islamist radicals holed up in Lal Masjid or 'the Red Mosque' in Islamabad, have been portrayed by some pundits as a heroic offensive against creeping Talibanization. This is largely a perception based upon wishful thinking. Musharraf is vulnerable at present and the last thing he wants to do is provoke a confrontation with religious fundamentalism. In deciding to act against the radicals of Lal Masjid, Musharraf was driven by a set of circumstances he could no longer ignore.The Pakistani president is facing an opposition that is becoming increasingly united. His rule is being challenged in the courts. Popular opinion isn't on his side either, if the media is any indication of prevailing attitudes. Moreover there are elements in the establishment that are sympathetic to the Red Mosque militants.When female vigilantes from the mosque were raiding massage parlors and video stalls, kidnapping and harassing those they accused of 'moral crimes', Musharraf did little to stem these Islamist excesses in the heart of the capital. Some of the more cynical suspect the reason he has been slow to act is because Jamia Hafsa, a madrassa associated with Lal Masjid, is alleged to have clandestine connections with the establishment. These cynics believe Jamia Hafsa is being used by partisans to whip up a distraction at a time when the government is under pressure with other challenges. It's hard to determine how much credence, if any, can be given to this conspiracy spin on the Islamabad drama.So what were the factors that prompted Musharraf to act despite the risks?International perceptions that he was caving in to militancy weren't helping his image, but this type of criticism of Musharraf has been going on for years without yielding any dramatic turnaround in his approach. In the present stand-off however he has been able to rely upon the cooperation of key religious elements that aren't supportive of the Lal Masjid militants. For example the central board of madrassahs in Pakistan - Wafaq-ul-Madaris - took the unusual step of suspending Jamia Hafsa's membership. Also the Islamic contingent in the Pakistani legislature came out strongly against the militants. Developments such as these made the move on the mosque less of a risk for Musharraf.However there is another reason why the President chose to send in the Rangers. The Chinese have been extremely unhappy that their nationals are being targeted by Islamist radicals in Pakistan. Back on June 23, 2007, female vigilantes from Jamia Farida and Jamia Hafsa forced their way into a massage parlor in Islamabad. The workers they abducted from the establishment, included seven Chinese nationals. Although the Chinese workers were released the next day, the clerics of Lal Masjid railed loudly against corruption and warned that Chinese nationals would not be given a free pass.Complaints from China ensued, delivered by Zhou Yongkang Zhou, the Chinese Minister for Public Security. He referred explicitly to Lal Masjid radicals as "terrorists" and demanded that Pakistan act more forcefully to protect Chinese nationals working in the country. This was far from the first time that China has issued such appeals to Pakistan.Musharraf has for some time been handicapped in what he can reasonably accomplish on the security front without the risk of alienating segments of the population he badly needs to keep on-side - or at least in a condition of sullen inaction. The impotence of Musharraf is clearly demonstrated by his inability to act more forcefully against Al Qaeda in the tribal areas. His impotence has also extended to an inability to intervene effectively in cases that involved assaults on Chinese nationals. For example Waziristan warlord, Abdullah Mehsud, was responsible for ordering the abductions of Chinese engineers. No amount of pressure from China in cases such as this is likely to produce overnight results for the simple reason that in parts of Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) the prestige and popularity of tribal leaders such as Mehsud eclipses that of Musharraf.Adding to the political tensions generated by this spate of kidnappings and assaults, is the appalling record of China in the Western Xinjiang region, where about half of the population is Muslim Uighur. Under the pretext of rooting out terrorists, the Chinese have basically been engaging in systemic repression, a tactic that Human Rights Watch describes as "a matter of state policy".Needless to say the ruthless tactics used in Western Xinjiang have made Pakistani Islamists more sympathetic to the plight of the Uighurs. In turn, the Chinese claim that Uighur 'terrorists' have taken refuge in Pakistan, and are present in FATA, where they have targeted Chinese workers. The Chinese also made the allegation that the attack on the Islamabad massage parlor workers was partly engineered by Uighur students who were present in Lal Masjid. Beijing also suggested that Uighur activists could pose a security threat to next year's Olympics, which is being hosted by China.The pressure on Musharraf to act from a number of sources was considerable. What is disturbing though, is that it required these kinds of pressures to get the President to take on the radicals in the very capital of the country. His reluctance is even more surprising when you consider what the militants have been up to. According to relatives, many of the young women inside the mosque are being held against their will. The stated aim of the leader, Maulana Abdul Aziz, was no less than the introduction of sharia law across-the-board in an effort to 'Islamize' the capital. The militants have been engaging in vigilante-style kidnappings, assaults and the burning of property - for example pornographic and media-related materials stolen from vendors. They also instituted a sort of Islamist kangaroo court in the mosque - more symbolic than anything else - as a way of demonstrating their fidelity to sharia law.If this affair can be brought to a successful conclusion without excessive loss of life, it will likely strengthen Musharraf's position in the short term. However it may also raise the expectations of his allies. They may deduce that if he can take on a mosque complex in Islamabad, he should be able to act more forcefully elsewhere. What this thinking overlooks is that Islamabad is friendly turf compared to the hostility that exists toward the government in some of the tribal regions. On the other hand if the siege ends with major loss of life, the defenders could well be viewed as martyrs, even by those Pakistani Muslims who failed to offer their support. Tensions are high as it is, with an effort on Friday to shoot down Musharraf's plane as it was taking off from the military airport in Islamabad.Elections are coming up in Pakistan later this year. It will be difficult for Musharraf to maintain broad-based control given the increasing opposition he is facing. He has publicly discussed remaining as President while relinquishing the dominant role he has had with the military. This could prove to be a risky move, but probably a risk worth taking. Most of all at this juncture, he needs greater legitimacy, or at least the perception of it.
Tags: President Musharraf, Islamabad, Lal Masjid, Red Mosque, Abdullah Mehsud, Maulana Abdul Aziz
Posted by Aidan Maconachy at 1:42 PM
Labels: red mosque radicals

Take It From: http://www.surfonsteroids.com/index.php?q=aHR0cDovL2FpZGFubWFjb25hY2h5YmxvZy5ibG9nc3BvdC5jb20vMjAwNy8wNy9wcmVzaWRlbnQtbXVzaGFycmFmLWFuZC1yZWQtbW9zcXVlLmh0bWw%3D

Poyiz We Alman Qizliri

Korash Atahan

Almaniyede Poyiz tola,
Poyiz tola chachliridek Alman qizlarning.
Qiz aqidu bu dölette poyizda,
qizlar poyiz, her terepke uchar poyizlar.
Bu qizlarning güzellikidin,
hem poyizning toliliqidin,
Kömülgendek, gül- chéchekke tuyilidu yollar!

Almaniyede poyiz tola,
Poyiz tola chachliridek Alman qizlarning.
Qizlar aqar bu dölette poyizda,
Köriner shunga poyizlarmu qizlardek.
Altun chachlar, zengger közlerdin…
Istigechke néminidur xiyalim,
Béqishimiz yéqin dostlardek, teqdirdashlardek.
Qizlar aqar bu dölette qushlardek,
Béqishimiz tonushlardek,
Tonushmaqni isteymiz,
Her béqishtin bilinidu, alemche bir menalar.
Poyiz ötisher,
Talay pursetler kéler hem kéter.
Ketsimu ger poyizda hemme,
Kételmeymen esirdek birge,
suyuqlinip barar jénimda,
Yürükümge neqishlengen, u shirin Héslar.

Qizlar aqar bu dölette poyizda,
Bu qizlarning güzellikidin, poyizlarning toliliqidin,
Qénimizda aqidu oxshash tiniqlar,
Almishidu nepesler, qoshilidu tuyghular.
Biz bilmeymiz,
Künler öter oqtek ittik, arimizda bir sir bar!
Biz bilmeymiz, zadi bizge némiler kérek?
Chéchilidu yollargha,
Shirin chüshler neqishlengen dez ketken Yürek.

Almaniyede poyiz tola,
Poyiz tola chachliridek Alman qizlarning,
Her tal chachta sheytan bardek sihir bar.
Chachlar yilan, közler zengger oq, téxi men esrar.
Her terepke ötishidu poyizlar,
hem uzap kétidu yéngidin-yéngi sheherlerge.
Nepesler qatnaydu jenup shimalgha,
ashiqlardek uchrishidu issiq tiniqlar.
Her bir seper réwayetke aylinar,
dertlik yighlar bu seperde azghanlar.
Haman üser tashqa söygü yelkini,
kim bilidu, müküp yatqan bir sir bar,-
Loghilaymu* bu melekler, bu qizlar!?

Qizlar aqar bu dölette poyizda,
körinidu poyizlarmu qizlardek.
Emma kechken her bir poyizda,
héchkim bilmes bir sir bar!
Béqishimiz tonushlardek,
Tonushmaqni isteymiz… bu qandaq istek?
Göshxor qushlardek, choqumanglar qelbimni,
Ah! Alman qizliri, Ah! könglümni utiwalghan poyizlar?!

Eskertish:* Loghilay- Gérman xelq epsanilliridiki sahipjamal.

30.07.2002 Halle-Saale, Gérmaniye

Might we say that the White race is very old, much traveled, and steeped in the wisdom of the ages...

Secrets of the Red-Headed Mummies

By Heather Pringle
From: hengist How could an ancient mummy found in remote China have red hair and caucasian features? The answer has sparked a battle over smuggled DNA, Western imperialism, and history as we know it
Until he first encountered the mummies of Xinjiang, Victor Mair was known mainly as a brilliant, if eccentric, translator of obscure Chinese texts, a fine sinologist with a few controversial ideas about the origins of Chinese culture, and a scathing critic prone to penning stern reviews of sloppy scholarship. Mair's pronouncements on the striking resemblance between some characters inscribed on the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Chinese symbols were intensely debated by researchers. His magnum opus on the origins of Chinese writing, a work he had been toiling away at for years in his office at the University of Pennsylvania, was eagerly anticipated. But in 1988, something profound happened to Mair, something that would touch a nerve in both the East and the West, raising troubling questions about race, racism, and the nature of history itself.
That year, Mair had led a group of American travellers through a small museum in Ürümchi, the capital of China's remote northwesternmost province, Uyghuristan (XUAR). Mair had visited the museum several times before, but on this occasion a new sign pointed to a back room. "It said something like 'Mummy Exhibition,' " recalled Mair, "and I had the strangest kind of weird feeling because it was very dark. There were curtains, I think. Going in, you felt like you were entering another world."
In a glass display case so poorly lit that visitors needed to use flashlights to look at its contents, Mair spied a bizarre sight. It was the outstretched body of a man just under six feet tall, dressed in an elegantly tailored wool tunic and matching pants, the colour of red wine. Covering the man's legs were striped leggings in riotous shades of yellow, red, and blue, attire so outrageous it could have come straight from the pages of Dr. Seuss. But it was not so much the man's clothing that first riveted Mair's attention. It was the face. It was narrow and pale ivory in colour, with high cheekbones, full lips, and a long nose. Locks of ginger-coloured hair and a greying beard framed the parchment-like skin. He looked very Caucasian: indeed he resembled someone Mair knew intimately. "He looked like my brother Dave sleeping there, and that's what really got me. I just kept looking at him, looking at his closed eyes. I couldn't tear myself away, and I went around his glass case again and again and again. I stayed in there for several hours. I was supposed to be leading our group. I just forgot about them for two or three hours."
Local archaeologists had come across the body a few years earlier while excavating in the Tarim Basin, an immense barren of sand and rock in southern Xinjiang. The region was not the kind of place that generally attracted well-dressed strangers. At the height of summer, temperatures in the basin soared to a scorching 125 degrees Fahrenheit, without so much as a whisper of humidity, and in winter, they frequently plunged far below freezing. The desert at the basin's heart was one of the most parched places on Earth, and its very name, the Taklamakhan, was popularly said to mean "go in and you won't come out." Over the years, the Chinese government had found various uses for all this bleakness. It had set aside part of it as a nuclear testing range, conducting its blasts far from prying eyes. It had also built labour camps there, certain that no prisoner in his right mind would try to escape.
The Taklamakhan's merciless climate had one advantage, however. It tended to preserve human bodies. The archaeologists who discovered the stranger in the striped leggings marvelled at the state of his cadaver. He looked almost alive. They named him Cherchen Man, after the county in which he was found, and when they set about carbon dating his body, they discovered that he was very, very old. Indeed, the tests showed that he had probably roamed the Tarim Basin as early as the eleventh century bc. When Mair learned this, he was astonished. If the mummy was indeed European in origin, this would undermine one of the keystones of Chinese history.
Scholars had long believed that the first contacts between China and Europe occurred relatively late in world history -- sometime shortly after the mid-second century bc, when the Chinese emperor Wudi sent an emissary west. According to contemporary texts, Wudi had grown tired of the marauding Huns, a nomadic people whose homeland lay in what is now southwest Mongolia. The Huns were continually raiding the richest villages of his empire, stealing its grain and making off with its women. So Wudi decided to propose a military alliance with a kingdom far to the west, beyond Mongolia, in order to crush a common foe. In 139 bc, the emperor sent one of his attendants, Zhang Qian, on the long trek across Asia. Zhang Qian failed to obtain the alliance his master coveted, but the route he took became part of the legendary Silk Road to Europe. In the years that followed, hundreds of trading caravans and Caucasians plied this route, carrying bundles of ivory, gold, pomegranates, safflowers, jade, furs, porcelain, and silk between Rome and the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an.
Nationalists in China were very fond of this version of history. It strongly suggested that Chinese civilization, which had flowered long before Zhang Qian headed west, must have blossomed in isolation, free of European influence, and it cast early Chinese achievements in a particularly glorious light. In one popular book, The Cradle of the East, Chinese historian Ping-ti Ho proudly claimed that the hallmarks of early Chinese civilization -- including the chariot, bronze metallurgy, and a system of writing -- were all products of Chinese genius alone. According to Ping-ti Ho, those living in the ancient Celestial Kingdom had never stooped to borrowing the ideas of others and their inventive genius surpassed that of the West.
Mair, a professor of Chinese in the department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, had long doubted this version of history. He suspected that the Chinese had encountered Westerners from Europe long before the emperor Wudi dreamed up his military alliance. Several early Chinese books, for example, described tall men with green eyes and red hair that resembled the fur of rhesus monkeys. Most scholars dismissed these accounts as legendary, but Mair wasn't so sure. He thought they were descriptions of Caucasian men. During his studies of Chinese mythology, he had found stories strikingly similar to those in early Greek and Roman tales. The parallels were too frequent to be mere coincidences. And he kept stumbling across words in early Chinese texts that seemed to have been borrowed from ancient languages far to the west. Among these were the words for dog, cow, goose, grape, and wheel. But though Mair repeatedly argued the case for early trade and contact between China and the West, he had no hard archaeological evidence of contact, and no one took him very seriously. "People would laugh at me. I said that East and West were communicating back in the Bronze Age and people just said, 'Oh yeah? Interesting, but prove it.' "
Never for a moment did Mair expect to find the kind of flesh-and-blood vindication that Cherchen Man promised. Still, he was wary of a hoax. The man's tailored woollen clothing, with all the complex textile technology it implied, was unlike anything Mair had ever seen from ancient Asia, let alone a remote outpost like Xinjiang. The mummy itself seemed almost too perfectly preserved to be true. "I thought it was part of a wax museum or something, a ploy to get more tourists. How could they have such advanced textile technology three thousand years ago? I couldn't put it into any historical context. It didn't make any sense whatsoever."
Mair began asking his Chinese colleagues about Cherchen Man. He learned that European scholars had unearthed several similar bodies in the Tarim Basin almost a century before but had regarded them as little more than oddities. In 1895, for example, the British-Hungarian scholar Marc Aurel Stein exhumed a few Caucasian bodies while searching for antiquities and old Central Asian texts in the Tarim Basin. "It was a strange sensation," noted Stein in his later writings, "to look down on figures which but for the parched skin seemed like those of men asleep." However, Stein and the Europeans who followed him were far more interested in classical-era ruins than in mummified bodies, and failed to investigate further.
Early Chinese archaeologists in the region also came across some of the bodies, but they were no more interested than the Europeans. They thought it likely that a few ancient foreigners had strayed into this outlying territory of ancient China by chance. But in the 1970s, while surveying along proposed routes for pipelines and rail lines in Xinjiang, Chinese archaeologists happened upon scores of the parched cadavers, so many that they couldn't excavate them all. Most of the bodies were very Caucasian-looking -- a major discovery that went unreported outside a small circle of archaeologists in China. The mummies had blond, red, or auburn hair. They had deep-set eyes, long noses, thick beards, and tall, often gangly, frames. Some wore woollens of what looked like Celtic plaid and sported strangely familiar forms of Western haberdashery: conical black witches' hats, tam-o'-shanters, and Robin Hood caps. Others were dressed only in fur moccasins, woollen wraps, and feathered caps, and buried with small baskets of grain. This last group, it transpired, contained the oldest of the Caucasians. According to radiocarbon-dating tests, they roamed the northwestern corner of China in the twenty-first century bc, the height of the Bronze Age, just as Mair had long been suggesting.
Not only had they wandered the Tarim Basin, they had also settled there for a very long time. Cherchen Man had walked the Tarim deserts in the eleventh century bc, a millennium after the earliest Caucasians. Moreover, murals from the region depict people with fair hair and long noses in the seventh century ad, while some local texts of the same era are inscribed in a lost European language known as Tocharian. If the writers were descendants of the Caucasian-looking people who arrived in Xinjiang nearly 2,800 years earlier, one can only conclude that this was a very successful colony.
Convinced now of the authenticity of the mummies, Mair began puzzling over their meaning. Who were these ancient invaders, he wondered, and where exactly had they come from?
Victor Mair is a big, rugged-looking man in his mid-fifties, a shade over six foot one, with size-fourteen feet and the clean-cut good looks that one often sees in former pro-football players. The American-born son of an Austrian immigrant, he stands nearly a head taller than most of his colleagues in China, a physical advantage that he often tries to minimize in group photographs by stepping down off a curb or onto a lower step. He has short, neatly combed grey hair, a large aquiline nose, observant blue eyes, and a jesting wit he uses to particularly good effect, laughter being the best way of bridging any awkward cultural gap. He neither smokes nor drinks, and never did, and is, by his own admission, a born leader. Possessed of an uncommon self-confidence, which sometimes comes across as arrogance, he is also a man of many surprising quirks.
I got my first glimpse of this quirkiness in a downpour in Shanghai, in June of 1999. I had arranged to meet Mair in the Chinese city, where, eleven years after first seeing the mummies, he was hoping to begin a new round of dna testing on them. In our early phone conversations, Mair had told me that he would be travelling with a geneticist who hoped to take tissue samples from the Tarim Basin mummies stored at the Natural History Museum in Shanghai.
It sounded as if everything had been arranged. But as I quickly discovered upon my arrival in Shanghai, Mair was still a long way from gathering the samples. Housed in a small guest house for foreign lecturers at Fudan University, he strode the hallways like a weary giant. He had just spent two full days in meetings with his Chinese colleagues, trying to hammer out a deal. But the talks were stalling. To clear his head, Mair invited me to join him for a walk. In the downpour, I struggled to keep up with him, dodging flocks of cyclists in their shiny yellow rain slickers, and black pools of nearly invisible potholes. Mair wove around them absently. Instead of a raincoat, he wore two long-sleeved plaid shirts, one inside the other. He didn't seem to care that he was getting soaked.
Nothing, he explained as we walked in the rain, was ever simple when it came to the Xinjiang mummies. Dead as they had been for thousands of years, they still managed to stir strong feelings among the living. In China, a restive ethnic minority known as the Uyghurs had stepped forward to claim the mummies as their own. Numbering nearly seven million, the Uyghurs viewed the Tarim Basin as their homeland. Largely Muslim, they had become a subjugated people in the late nineteenth century. During the 1930s and 1940s, their leaders managed to found two brief republics that later fell under Chinese control. But Uyghur guerillas continued fighting stubbornly, until their last leader was executed in 1961. Since then, the Chinese government has dealt harshly with any sign of separatist sentiment. Amnesty International's 1999 report for Xinjiang made grim reading. "Scores of Uyghurs, many of them political prisoners, have been sentenced to death and executed in the past two years," it noted. "Others, including women, are alleged to have been killed by the security forces in circumstances which appear to constitute extra-judicial executions."
Still the Uyghurs refused to give up, and when they caught wind of mummies being excavated in the Tarim Basin, they were keenly interested. Historians had long suggested that the Uyghurs were relative latecomers to the region, migrating from the plains of Mongolia less than two thousand years ago. But Uyghur leaders were skeptical. They believed that their farmer ancestors had always lived along the thin but fertile river valleys of the Tarim, and as such they embraced the mummies as their kin -- even though many scholars, Mair included, suspected that Uyghur invaders had slaughtered or driven out most of the mummies' true descendants and assimilated the few that remained. Still, in Xinjiang, Uyghur leaders picked one of the oldest mummies as an emblem of their cause. They named her, with some poetic licence, the Beauty of Loulan and began printing posters with her picture. That she was so Caucasian-looking was not a problem in Uyghur eyes: some Uyghurs had Caucasian features. People in Tarim Basin, Jungarie, und the Uyghur province's capital Urumchi, were captivated. Musicians began writing songs about her that subtly alluded to the separatist cause.
This sudden outburst of mummy nationalism alarmed the Chinese government. Before long, everything related to the Xinjiang mummies was considered a matter of state security. No one in government was in any hurry to authorize a genetic test on them. If the mummies' dna revealed even a partial link to the Uyghurs -- a not unlikely prospect, given the Uyghurs' mixed heritage -- it would further strengthen the separatists' claims to the region in the eyes of the world. This was something the Chinese wished to avoid, especially after the international condemnation of their treatment of another ethnic minority, in Tibet. Adding to the problem was the Chinese sensitivity to any matter touching on the Tarim Basin. Beyond the wispy river valleys and beneath the Tarim's bleak desert plains lay immense oil fields. According to Chinese geologists, they contained nearly 18 billion tons of crude, six times more than the known reserves of the United States.
Chinese officials were not the only ones worried about genetic testing. Western scholars fretted, too. Some hated the thought that Europeans could have succeeded in planting settlements so far into Asia thousands of years ago. Not only did such a migration threaten the Chinese version of history; it seemed vaguely to smack of ancient colonialism, a notion that many historians abhor. "There's a lot of Western guilt about imperialism and sensitivity about dominating other people," said Mair. "It's a really deep subconscious thing, and there are a lot of people in the West who are hypersensitive about saying our culture is superior in any way, or that our culture gets around or extends itself. So there are people who want to make sure that we don't make mistakes in our interpretation of the past."
Certainly, the presence of ancient Europeans in China -- even in its outer reaches -- could be twisted and distorted to political ends: people with racial agendas had long been searching for just such evidence. During the 1930s, for example, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler had taken an unhealthy interest in Genghis Khan, the most famous leader of the Mongols, who in the thirteenth century had conquered vast stretches of Central Asia, from southern Siberia to Tibet, and from Korea to the Aral Sea. "Our strength," observed Hitler in a thundering speech to the commanders of Germany's armed forces in 1939, "is in our quickness and brutality. Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees in him only a great state builder. . . ."
But Hitler's admiration of the ancient Mongol presented a serious problem for a party that placed great stock in racial purity. Genghis Khan, after all, was not Caucasian. He belonged to an Asian race that the Nazis heartily despised as inferior. Himmler, who fancied himself a historian, finally came up with a solution based on pure whimsy. He told one anthropologist that Genghis Khan and his elite Mongol followers were actually Caucasians, descended from the citizens of Atlantis who had decamped from their mythical island home before it sank, cataclysmically, beneath the waves. These Mongol Caucasians, Himmler claimed, were a special kind of Caucasian: German blood flowed through their veins.
One recent book suggests that Himmler went so far as to request a collection of mummies from Central Asia. But Mair doubted it. "In all of my reading of works emanating from these expeditions," he said, "I have never come across any indication that they brought such corpses back to Europe."
Even so, the bizarre racial ideas of the Nazis troubled Western scholars. They worried about where genetic testing of the Xinjiang mummies might lead, and worse still, about who might ultimately try to profit from the research. Testing the mummies was like taking a stroll through a minefield: there was no telling what might explode in the traveller's face.
"It would be especially bad news if any of the mummies were German," observed Mair later, in the guest house where he was staying. "They've had two world wars in which they were the perpetrators and if any of these mummies were even remotely Germanic, forget it. People just wouldn't want to talk about it."
As amazed as Mair had been by the mummies back in 1988, he hadn't had the time to study them. In September, 1991, however, he picked up a newspaper and read about the discovery of a frozen, partially preserved corpse of a 5,300-year-old man in a glacier along the Austrian-Italian border. This became Europe's famous iceman, known as ִzi.
The news startled Mair. His own father had grown up in Pfaffenhoffen, a small Austrian village just a short distance away from where scientists had dug the iceman from a glacier. His father's family had grazed their herds in the same alpine meadows where ִzi had probably wandered. The iceman, he realized, might well be a distant relative. Might he also have had some connection to the ancestors of Cherchen Man, who looked so much like Mair's own brother? "I saw the headlines and I jerked," Mair recalls. "I looked at that iceman and I said, 'These guys out in the Tarim are just like him.' One's in ice and the others are in sand. It didn't take half a second."
Austrian scientists planned on performing sophisticated scientific tests, including dna analysis, on the iceman. It occurred to Mair that similar tests on Cherchen Man and his kin could do much to trace the ancestry of the mummies. He immediately wrote to Wang Binghua, one of the foremost archaeologists in Xinjiang, outlining the project that was forming in his mind. He also called Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, a distinguished geneticist at Stanford University who was an expert on ancient dna. Cavalli-Sforza instantly saw the possibilities. He recommended that Mair contact one of his former students, Paolo Francalacci, at the University of Sassari, in Italy. Mair did just that, and working closely with Wang over the next months he managed to hammer out a deal with the Chinese goverment. Beijing finally gave the team a green light in 1993.
Francalacci thought it best to collect samples from mummies left in the ground, as opposed to bodies already stored in museums. This would reduce the possibility of contamination with modern dna. So in ܲ? he set off, along with Mair and Wang Binghua, for the well-documented grave sites found during the Chinese pipeline and railway surveys of the 1970s and in archaeological studies since. Dozens of these mummies, many lying in relatively shallow underground tombs, had been left alone because of the enormous cost of curating them.
At each chosen grave, the young geneticist donned a face mask and a pair of latex gloves, and docked tiny pieces of muscle, skin, and bone from the mummies, often choosing tissue along the inside of the thighs or under the armpits because these regions had been less exposed to the excavators. He sealed each sample in a plastic vial. After several days, he had collected twenty-five specimens from eleven individuals, enough for a modest study. But there was little time for celebration. In a stunning about-face, Chinese authorities suddenly demanded Francalacci's samples, refusing to allow them out of the country.
Then a mysterious thing happened. Just shortly before Mair departed for home, a Chinese colleague turned up with a surreptitious gift. He slipped five of the confiscated, sealed samples into Mair's pocket. These had come from two mummies. The grateful Mair passed the samples on to Francalacci, who began toiling in Italy to amplify the dna.
For months, the Italian geneticist laboured on the mummy samples, trying to extract enough dna for sequencing. The nucleic acids had badly degraded, but still, Francalacci kept trying various methods, and in 1995 he called Mair with a piece of good news. He had finally retrieved enough dna to sequence, and his preliminary results were intriguing. The two Xinjiang mummies belonged to the same genetic lineage as most modern-day Swedes, Finns, Tuscans, Corsicans, and Sardinians.
The genetic studies were promising, but they only whetted Mair's curiosity. It was not just that Cherchen Man bore an uncanny resemblance to his own brother Dave (whom he had taken to calling Ur-David), it also had to do with Mair's own deeply rooted beliefs. "Everything that I've done," he explained, "even though it's been running all over the map, it's all been tied into making things accessible to the everyday guy, the worker. That's what it's all about and that's why I looked at these mummies. They were just everyday guys, not famous people."
Mair had acquired this outlook at an early age. His immigrant father, whom he adored and deeply admired, was a lathe operator for a ball-bearing company in Canton, Ohio. His mother was a poet and songwriter. Growing up in a working-class family, Mair was continually reminded of the importance of ordinary people, who sweated on the assembly lines or who bent over mops and brooms at night. These were the kinds of people history tended to ignore.
Now, with this same instinct for the common man, Mair redoubled his efforts to trace the mummies' ancestry. In Xinjiang, a Chinese colleague had slipped him another parting gift: a swatch of blue, brown, and white cloth taken from a twelfth-century-bc mummy. The fabric looked like a piece of Celtic plaid. Mair passed it over to Irene Good, a textile expert at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Good examined it under an electron microscope. The style of weave, known as a "two over two" diagonal twill, bore little resemblance to anything woven by Asian weavers of the day. (Indeed, it would be almost another two millennia before women in central China turned out twill cloth on their looms.) But the weave exactly matched cloth found with the bodies of thirteenth-century-bc salt miners in Austria. Like the dna samples, the mysterious plaid pointed straight towards a European homeland.
Excited by the textile connection, Mair organized a new expedition to Xinjiang with Good, her fellow textile expert Elizabeth Barber, and her cultural anthropologist husband, Paul Barber. As the two women pored over the mummies' clothing, Barber examined the bodies themselves, studying their mummification. Mair hoped this might offer clues to the origins of the people themselves. But the ancient desert dwellers, he discovered, had not taken any of the elaborate measures favoured by the Egyptians or other skilled morticians. Instead, they had relied on nature for a few simple tricks. In some cases, family members had buried their dead in salt fields, whose chemistry preserved human flesh like a salted ham. Often, they had arranged the cadaver so that dry air flowed around the extremities, swiftly desiccating the flesh. Cherchen Man, for example, had benefited from both techniques.
Mair, too, assisted in the work. In his spare time, he translated key Chinese reports on the mummies and published them in his own journal, The Sino-Platonic Papers. This gave Western archaeologists access to the scientific findings for the first time. He wanted to make the mummies the focus of a lively scientific and scholarly investigation. So he set about organizing a major international scientific conference on the mummies, bringing leading archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, geneticists, geographers, sinologists, historians, ethnologists, climatologists, and metallurgists to the University of Pennsylvania to discuss their ideas. After everyone left, Mair dutifully edited and translated two large volumes of their papers, clarifying their arcane prose until everyone interested in the field could understand it. "If I have grey hair," he joked, "it was because I was sitting there slaving over this stuff."
When he had finally finished, he sat down in his office with a pad of paper and a pen. He sifted through hundreds of studies on matters as diverse as linguistics, pottery styles, methods of tomb construction, and metallurgy across Eurasia over the past seven thousand years, searching for cultures whose core technologies and languages bore clear similarities to those of the ancient Caucasian cultures of Xinjiang. These he recognized as ancestral societies. Slowly, patiently, he worked his way back through time and space, tracing the territories of these ancestral groups. Eventually, after months of work, he sketched a map of what he concluded was their homeland. The territory stretched in a wide swath across central Europe, from northern Denmark to the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. But its heart, some six thousand years ago, lay in what is now southern Germany, northeastern Austria, and a portion of the Czech Republic. "I really felt that that fit the archaeological evidence best," Mair later told me.
When he finally showed his map to some of his colleagues, though, they were deeply dismayed. Elizabeth Barber, one of his closest collaborators, angrily demanded that he redraw it, insisting that linguistic evidence, particularly the ancestry of ancient words for looms, pointed to a homeland much farther east. Realizing that he had gone too far for the comfort of his colleagues, and that he had yet to find the proof he needed, he bowed to their pressure. He redrew the map, placing the homeland in a broad arc stretching from eastern Ukraine and southern Russia to western Kazakhstan. Then he published it in the conference proceedings. "I thought, for this book, it wouldn't be too bad," he confessed, shaking his head. "I decided I wouldn't go against the flow that much, because that is a big flow with some really smart people." Then he looked down at the map in front of him. "But in my own integrity and honesty, I'd want to put it in here." He sketched a narrow oval. Its centre fell near the Austrian city of Salzburg.
All of which brought us to Shanghai, and the rain, and the final arbiter, hopefully, of more dna testing. Convinced he was right, and desperately wanting to find the proof that would dispel all doubt, Mair believed genetics still offered the best hope of vindication. If dna testing was sufficient to convict or exonerate men in a court of law, it would surely be strong enough to persuade even the most skeptical of his colleagues. He needed samples for another, more powerful type of dna testing, but as he had just discovered, the Chinese officials had upped the ante again. Japanese researchers had recently paid $100,000 to acquire samples of the ancient matter for dna testing, and officials at Shanghai's Museum of Natural History now wanted a similar sum from Mair.
Mair didn't have it, and he was running out of time. Still, he remained surprisingly upbeat. During a break in the negotiations one afternoon, he invited me to follow Xu Yongqing, the head of the Shanghai Museum of Natural History's anthropology department, down the stairs to a basement room in the museum. Unlocking the door to a small room behind the employees' bicycle racks, Xu led the way inside. Along three of the walls, mummies in glass cases reclined luxuriously on red velvet cloth. Stacked three high in spots, they looked much like train passengers bedded down for the night in their berths. Mair stood quietly, scanning the room. Then he saw what he wanted to show me. In one of the lower glass cases, a young woman lay stretched out on her back, stripped of her fine woollens. Her knees were pressed demurely together, her arms rested comfortably at her sides, and her breasts lay round and full, as if she had perished in the midst of nursing a child.
But it was the hair that caught my attention. A long wavy golden-brown mane twisted down her back. Standing in that room, I felt an unexpected sense of kinship with her, surrounded as she was by strangers. And I wondered just what had prodded her ancestors to exchange the cool greenness of Europe for the scorching barrens of the Tarim Basin.
As always, mair had some ideas. He believed a new invention had spurred this woman's forebears to embark on this eastern exodus: horseback riding. Some 5,700 years ago, he explained, Eurasians had begun rounding up wild horses, and sometime later they started sliding bits into their mouths and swinging their bodies onto their backs. These seemingly simple acts led them to conquer terrestrial space. For the first time ever, human beings were able to travel swiftly over immense distances, an accomplishment so exhilarating and adrenalin-charged that they suddenly gave full rein to their wanderlust.
So equipped, Mair went on with growing enthusiasm, early Europeans had easily spread out across Eurasia, their brisk progress recorded in the ancient campsites they left behind. Some of the invaders swept northward, becoming the Germanic tribes; others journeyed west to become the Celts of the British Isles. But the ancestors of the Xinjiang people had headed east across the grassy steppes of Asia, repelling any who tried to bar their path, and four thousand years ago, a small group of latecomers rode into the vacant river valleys of the Tarim Basin. Finding sufficient land to make a life there, they stayed, passing on their love and knowledge of fine horses to their descendants. When mourners buried Cherchen Man, they arranged a dead horse and a saddle atop his grave, two essential things he would need in the next life.
In all likelihood, observed Mair, some of these European invaders rode even further to the east and north, beyond the reach of desiccating deserts. And there they brought with them such new Western inventions as the chariot, a high-performance vehicle designed for warfare and sport, and bronze metallurgy, which made strong weapons that retained their killing edge. Very possibly, a few of these invaders carried with them the secret of writing. While examining the hand of an ancient woman exhumed near Cherchen Man, Mair had noticed row upon row of a strange tattoo along her hand. Shaped like a backward S, it clearly resembled the early Phoenician consonant that gave us our modern S. Mair has also found the identical form of S -- which resembles an ancient Chinese character -- along with other alphabetiform signs, on artifacts of this era from western China.
Chinese scholars, it occurred to me, were unlikely to take much comfort in the thought of these invaders. And they were unlikely to be pleased by the pivotal role these intruders may have played in ancient Chinese life. Western inventions, after all, shaped the course of history. Fleet chariots enabled Chinese armies to vanquish their enemies, and sturdy bronze swords reinforced dreams of empire. And a secret system of writing bequeathed Chinese officials the means to govern the conquered lands effortlessly.
But invention is only one small part of the story. What societies make of technological leaps forward is as important as the act of creation itself. It was the genius of others, after all, who unwittingly made the West strong. It gave Europeans the compasses that guided mariners overseas to Asia and America. It provided the printing presses that disseminated knowledge of these new lands to the masses. It bestowed the gunpowder that fuelled conquest. Indeed, all these came from Chinese inventors.
There are many ironies joining East and West in the inseparable embrace of history. Mair savours them. His trip to Shanghai in the rain ended in disappointment. He left China empty-handed. But he is now raising funds and fervently seeking permission to conduct further dna tests on the mummies of Xinjiang. Until that day, Ur-David waits in a museum storage room in China, unclaimed as a long- lost brother.

Take it from:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030628015124/http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Temp/Temp-ChineseMummies-Ayre.htm

Mawzusiz

Korash Atahan

Gürkirep yanimiz,
Üzülmeydu, U ateshler biz chachratqan.
Baqqinche ziminning u chétidin,
Öchti dep oylaysen, emma u yalghan!
Tirilidu Oghuzhan...
Yögilidu téxi bizge ming yillar,
Yügireymiz tarixning jenubidin shimali taman.

Gürkirep yanimiz,
Üzülmeydu, u ateshler biz chachratqan.
Yögilidu bizge yene talay ming yillar,
Öchti, dep oylaysen, emma u yalghan!
Tirilidu Oghuzhan...
Yügreymiz tarixning Shimalidin jenubi taman,
Quyash tugh uyghurgha, asman qorighan!

16 may 2005 Frankfurt am/Main

Bir Kishlik Sheher

Korash Atahan

Qatar ketken yultuzlar,
yéqilidu… öchirilidu… qaytidin...
almishidu zamanlar shunchilik biep.
Saet istirilkisi sanchilghan köktin,
saqiydu soghaq tiniqlar,
künler aqidu qandek örkeshlep.
Ah! bu Sheher bir kishlik sheher,
Men, men bar peqet, yürimen tinep.

Bilmeymen,
men bilmeymen sewebini yénishlarning,
Tamchiymen zérikishlik reqemlirige asma saetning.
Mungluq ünleydu tarix chalghan ney...
zérikishlik, chüshünüksiz hem bek mupessel.
Yalghan külüshtin,
chongqur bir uh tartishni körimen ewzel!
Bilmeymen sewebini…hem bilmigendek,
Ghemge pétishini chüsh renglik perishtilerning.
Goya men miqlanghan kökke,
suwighan wujudumni ikekler sheher.
Bir közüm yash, yene biride qan,
qanitimda qip yalingach uxlaydu ejel!

Ah! bu Sheher bir kishlik Sheher
Men, men bar peqet, yürimen tinep.
Neqishliner qonghur kirpigim eynek tashlargha.
Ah! bu Sheher bir kishlik sheher,
Shunche sidam,shunche soghaq, önggen bimehel.
Ah!bu Sherher bir kishlik sheher
Men, men bar peqet yürimen tinep__
Tashqa aylanghan,
Pirchen´gi ishletken qelemni izlep,__ goya esirlep!
Ah! bu Sheher bir kishlik Sheher,
Men, men bar peqet, yürimen tinep.
Unutqandek hemmini...
Qip yalingach qanitimda uxlaydu ejel!

17-Oktebir 2002 Frankfurt am/Main

By Michael Sheridan

Beijing’s ‘war on terror’ hides brutal crackdown on Uyghur Muslims
07/22/2007 Western Sources

Thw Sunday Times
July 22, 2007

THE CHINESE executioners came for Ismail Semed before 9am. They led him out of his cell as the sun climbed over the Tien Shan mountains in the land he called East Turkestan.

The day before, he had seen his wife, Buhejer, his son, 7, and his daughter, 6, for the last time. After three years in prison and 15 months of uncertainty since a secret trial, they had 10 minutes to say farewell.

Semed was 37, a Muslim and a political activist. He was not guilty of murder nor any act of violence.

Three Chinese judges sentenced him to death for “attempting to split the motherland” and possession of firearms and explosives. He said he was tortured into a confession. Two men whose evidence was used against him were already dead, having been executed in 1999.

In his final moments with his family - his parents, brother and sister were also there, all crying - he quietly accepted his fate.

“I did my best to prove I was innocent. I am so sorry that I leave you with two children. Please take care of them and let them get a good education,” he told his wife.

The end seems to have been quick. A group of prisoners were executed at the jail that morning, February 8, Chinese officials confirmed, and economy was the order of the day.

They gave Semed’s body back to his family at a dusty cemetery where devout Muslims are laid to rest with no tombstones to mark their graves.

Buhejer described it to a reporter who called from Washington on behalf of Radio Free Asia, about the only source of regular news on this forbidding place. “I saw only one bullet hole,” she said, “in his heart.”

The dead man was one of 9m Uighur Muslims in China’s far west, a Turkic people whose quest for national identity is one of history’s lost causes.

The dying embers of their struggle flamed into protests, shootings and bombings in the 1990s, all concealed from the world until September 11, 2001, when China discovered the usefulness of the “war on terror”.

Today China is waging a propaganda and security battle to guarantee its control over Xinjiang, its name for the vast province rich in minerals and strategic supplies of oil and gas which are vital to the expanding Chinese economy.

China claims that Al-Qaeda has trained more than 1,000 members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, classified as a terrorist group by America and the United Nations.

The group took its name from the short-lived Republic of East Turkestan that was declared in Xinjiang after the second world war, then crushed by the communist revolution of 1949.

China has persuaded Pakistan and Kazakhstan to hand over captured militants for interrogation, secret trials and execution, a policy that may have fuelled the fundamentalist rage now gripping Pakistan.

Semed, alleged to be a political thinker behind the group, was caught while studying in Rawal-pindi in 2003 and was sent back.

Next month 1,600 Chinese troops will join exercises with Russia and the former Soviet Central Asian republics to cooperate against Islamic extremists.

Chinese security services have also created a pervasive apparatus of informers and deployed new units of black-clad antiterrorist police to patrol around mosques and markets in the cities of Xinjiang.

But the iron-fisted security policy has made more enemies than friends. Extensive travel and interviews in Xinjiang this month unveiled a society segregated by religion and ethnicity, divided by reciprocal distrust, living in separate sections of tightly policed cities.

The same human rights abuses that exist across China - forced labour for peasants, children trafficked to slave as beggars, girls lured into sweatshops - deepen political tensions here and turn young men to violence.

Two western intelligence officers said the Chinese consistently exaggerated Uighur terrorist links with Al-Qaeda to exploit any opportunity to strike at their home-grown opponents. Chinese information was unreliable and no western intelligence service had handed back Muslim citizens to China, they said.

One of the officers said the real concern was that Chinese repression was creating recruits for terrorism.

In recent weeks has come proof that 58 years of Chinese military occupation have crushed significant opposition but failed to win loyalty. Officials have confiscated the passports of thousands of Muslims in a crackdown to break the growing influence of militant Islam.

Police ordered the Muslims to hand in their passports and told them that the documents would be returned only for travel approved by the authorities.

The aim is to stop Chinese Muslims slipping away to join militants in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The decision has inflamed resentment among Muslims preparing to go to Mecca for the annual hajj in December. “Bin Laden, hao [good],” said one angry Muslim, who had been deprived of his passport. “Saddam, hao. Arafat, hao.”

The memory of state violence exercises a powerful deterrent, however. Flying into the border city of Yining, the Chinese airliner descends over dun-coloured mountains into a bountiful valley rich in orchards and farms, home to a mixture of Uighurs, Kazakhs and Russians.

The ethnic Chinese inhabitants of Yining stick to their own districts. It is the tenth anniversary of a time when blood ran in the streets here and bitterness still runs deep.

“I was in the People’s Armed Police when the rebellion broke out in ’97,” said a burly Chinese driver, who proceeded to give a vivid and satisfied account of this barely known massacre.

“For a while we lost control,” he said. “The insurgents got into an armoury, killed our men and seized the weapons. There was chaos. We brought in the army - they changed into police uniforms - and then we got even. The central government ordered us to crush them without any hesitation. Believe me, we did.

“We lost a few people but we killed - I don’t know exactly - thousands of them. These people know our strength. We taught them a good hard lesson.”

Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur businesswoman and politician now in exile, says she saw a horrific police video of the “good hard lesson” when she went to Yining in 1997 to investigate. It showed unarmed adolescent boys and girls shot dead on camera, their bodies tossed into trucks. A mother and her group of children, aged five or six, crumpled under a volley of bullets. The taped slaughter went on and on, with excited commands and shouts of glee from the Chinese on the soundtrack. Perhaps one of them was the driver.

A subdued hush has now descended on the city. The cold looks from Muslims when a Chinese walked into a shaded cafe near the main mosque told their own story. He left sharply.

Today the clash of civilisations resounds loudest in Kashgar, 2,400 miles west of Beijing, a crossroads of religions, commerce and culture. In January, only 48 miles to the southwest, “antiterrorist” units raided a training camp in the mountains where the old Silk Road winds into Pakistan, and killed 18 men with the loss of one policeman.

The clash was hailed by the state media, which called it a blow to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. But Chinese residents said the operation was bungled, allowing militants to escape.

“They made a mess of it and those people are still out there. We know they have many smuggled weapons,” said a retired military officer, “so now our side is distributing arms to trained men in the bingtuan.”

He was referring to the gigantic army-controlled companies that built up Chinese economic activity in Xinjiang and still dominate its business.

“All cars travelling south from Kashgar must have an armed escort along a section of the road through the desert,” said a local tour operator.

China has invested billions of yuan to modernise Kashgar, renovating the square in front of its principal mosque and building new hotels to accommodate backpackers and upmarket western tourists. It has also imported thousands of ethnic Han Chinese to populate new apartments, a pattern of mass immigration used across Xinjiang.

They dwell in effective segregation from the Muslims, who keep to their old quarters of mud-brick houses, mosques and reeking alleys where freshly killed sheep hang up for sale.

The communist party does its best to achieve integration through politics. According to the Kashgar Daily, 84% of local members are Uighurs.

“Good relations are only on the surface,” said a Chinese businesswoman. “They’re not real.”

Loud-mouthed Chinese tourists strut around the precincts of the great Id Kah mosque, reclaimed only at prayer times by the Uighur men who sit outside and stare at them sullenly.

In 1949 the Uighurs were 90% of the population of Xinjiang. Today they account for less than half.

“It is the classic colonialist model,” said Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch, author of a critical report on Xinjiang.

In Urumqi, the industrialised capital city of Xinjiang, there was evidence that repression had united Uighurs with rival Muslim sects. A red banner hung from the eaves of a 100-year-old mosque, whose lines recalled a classical Chinese temple and whose congregation were members of the Hui, a Muslim minority from central China. “All pilgrimages to Mecca must be organised by the National Islamic Organisation under the law,” it read.

“They have taken all our passports too,” said an elder at the mosque.

“We Muslims must follow the party and the government to make our prayers in a stable setting and under a correct policy,” the imam warned his flock at Friday prayers.

Chinese intelligence woke up late to the fact that Hui Muslims were being financed by extremists from the Middle East.

Their clerics, influenced by Saudi Arabia’s purist Salafi doctrine, often fulminated against Israel and the West.

“The Hui are much more radical than the Uighurs,” said Bequelin. Such radicalisation is fuelled by injustices endured by many Chinese but all the more potent when suffered by an angry minority.

South of Kashgar, an almost medieval system of forced labour, known as the hasha, continues to exist on plantations, where local Muslims are ordered to pick almonds and fruit for sale to the thriving markets of China.

The government denied it, but several people in Kashgar said their relatives were engaged in such unpaid work, and a fruit wholesaler in Urumqi admitted that it still went on.

The practice dates from the era of Khans and slave traders and was supposedly abolished after “liberation” by the Chinese communist party.

Then there is outright child slavery, exposed last month in a brave report by the Hong Kong magazine Phoenix Weekly. More than 4,000 Uighur children have been kidnapped and turned into beggars or thieves by “big brother” Fagin figures, an estimate confirmed by the provincial welfare office.

The gangmasters, usually Uighurs themselves, set daily targets of up to £50 for stealing or begging, on pain of beatings. The children are sent to richer parts of China, the girls subjected to sexual harassment and the boys tempted into drug addiction to make them easier to manipulate.

Almost as bad is the plight of hundreds of Muslim girls conscripted from desert villages and sent for “work experience” in factory sweatshops. Last March Chinese officials went into the dirt-poor villages around Yarkand, south of Kashgar, to collect more than 200 girls as young as 15 for a work programme.

The girls found themselves labouring long hours in a factory more than 1,000 miles from home on the east coast of China. Their promised wages of £33 a month went unpaid.

Several girls escaped and made their way back to Xinjiang. Chinese officials then threatened their relatives with punishment.

The other families fear that their daughters will drift from factories into prostitution, a frequent refuge for the penniless migrant female in China.

In a traditional Muslim society that fears shame and values dignity, such a fate can be seen as worse than death. It is a powerful incentive for the militants.

All over Xinjiang, China can point to growing prosperity, cleaner water, new schools, paved roads, modern hospitals, efficient airports, cybercom-merce and huge energy plants.

The price, say Uighurs, is the slow extinction of their identity. Their children take compulsory Chinese lessons. Teaching in Uighur is banned at the main university. Their fabled literature, poetry and music are fading under the assault of karaoke culture. Their history is rewritten.

For western tourists, who come to Xinjiang to roam the ruins of the Silk Road, the Chinese have erected a new museum in Urumqi. It portrays the final Chinese conquest of this harsh territory, first claimed by the Han emperors in the era before Christ.

The slick exhibits equate its 9m Uighurs with the 4,900 Tartars, 11,100 Russians and 14,500 Uzbek inhabitants.

“All cooperate as one family under the glorious nationality policy of the party,” an inscription in Chinese characters proclaims.

To the family of Ismail Semed, however, it stands for grief, not glory.

Additional reporting: Sara Hashash

Bloody history of Xinjiang

Xinjiang province is crossed by the centuries-old Silk Road trade route once travelled by Marco Polo

1949 Conquered by Chinese communists

1990s Shootings and bombings against Chinese targets

1997 Massacre of Muslims in border town uprising

2001 China joins war on terror, extradites and executes militants

2007 Crackdown continues to sustain oil and gas, building boom and gold rush

Population About 20m — 45% Uighur Muslims, 40% Han Chinese. As many as 45 other minority nationalities, including Kazakhs and Mongols, officially recognised
*****
Please look at another Information and read all comments from hier:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/china/article2116123.ece
By Korash Atahan

Uyghuristan Sanga Nime Boldi

N.Atahan*

Güzel Uyghuristan sanga nime boldi?!

Güzel Uyghuristan sanga nime boldi?!

Gülliring soluptu, qushliring tozuptu. Kishiler shunchilik jimip kétiptiki, yürek sözlirini yütiwétiptu. Közliridin qorqunch chiqip turuptu. Xuddi bet-beshire bir mexluqni körgendek. Anilarning közliridin toxtimay yash éqip turuptu. Balilar qorqqinidin mehelilerde échilip-yéyilip oyniyalmaydighan, mekteplerde öz tilida oquyalmaydighan, kochilarda erkin nepes alalmaydighan, meschitlerge yüreklik kirelmeydighan boptu.

Kishiler shunchilik solushuptiki, yüz yil, yaq ikki yüz yil, yaq uningdinmu uzaq yillarningyaqi, ularni heqqaniyet yamghuri bilen héchkim sugharmaptu! Balilarning, anilarning hem ashu qarchuqliri qurup ketken atilarning közidin yash emes qan éqiptu!

Hey Uyghuristan, sanga nime boldi?! Bizge nésip bolghan Meripet, til, senet we höriyet qeni!? Qedimki ata-bowilirimiz ming teste urush qilip, qan töküp, yaratqan möjiziler qeni!? Parlaq medeniyitimiz, atamiras tupraqlirimiz eshu kishilerdek jim-jit, yoqap kétiwatidu, qum astigha pétip kitiwatidu!

Eger eshu bichare xelqning arisidin mert ezimetler chiqip, dilliri rastchilliq hem musteqilliqni tartsa, ashu it siyaqidiki mexluqlar teripidin basturiliwatidu!

Rastchilliqni, musteqilliqni towlighan tilliri késiliwatidu!

Rastchilliqni, musteqilliqni közligen közliri oyiliwatidu!

Rastchilliqqa, musteqilliqqa érishish üchün midirlawatqan put-qollar késiliwatidu!

Ey Alla igem! Pütkül kainatni yaratqan igem! Bizge nime boldi!? Bizge nime boliwatidu!? Bu nime bolghuluq!

Bichare anilarning, atilarning közidin qan-yiring éqiwatidu ! Ular köz nuridin ayrildi! Ular jan- jigiri bolghan perzentliridin ayrildi!

Hey Alla igem, Ashu awat meschitliring qurughdilinip qaldi! Uningda ezan emes qara buran huwlawatidu. Hetta öz imanimiz bilen, sangha muhebbitimizni bildürüsh üchün qaranghu bulunglargha kirmisek bolmaydighan boldi!

Séning muqeddes jaying bolghan mekkige bérishqa teyyarliq qilghan waqtimizda, yol xetlirimiz tartiwélindi! Alla igem! Büyükler neziri chüshken güzel Uyghuristangha köz tegdimu?!Atilar mirasi, qutsal tupraqlirimizgha lenet yaghdimu!? Nime boldi!? Bu néme körgülüktu emdi!?

Yaratqan igem, bizge küch-quwet ata qil! Bizge nusret béghishla!

22-Iyul, 2007 Gérmaniye

*****
Eskrtish:

N.Atahan*___ Aptor N.Atahan 15 yash, U 1992-yili 7-ayning 15-küni Sherqiytürkistanning Bashbaliqi Ürümchide, ziyaliy ailiside dunyagha kelgen. U 7 yash waqtida resammliqqa ishtiyaq baghlighan. Sizghan eserliri muellimlerning diqqitini qozghighan. U bashlanghuch mektepke kirgendin kéyin, nurghun meshiq eserlerni yazghan bolup, ular shier, nesir, hékaye qatarliqlarni öz ichige alidu.

Uning resmiy ijadiyitini 2001-yili, yeni 5-yilliqta oquwatqan chéghida yazghan we sherqiytürkistandiki ösmürlerge ayit, dangliq onwérsal jornal „Tarim Ghunchilliri“da élan qilinghan „Acha bolmaq tes“ dégen maqala bilen bashlandi dýishkimu bolidu.

Biz bu yerde, u tetil waqtidin paydilinip yazghan "Uyghuristan Sanga Nime Boldi" dégen eserni silerge teqdim qilduq.

U hazir, bir tereptin ottura mektepning her türlük derslirini ela oqughandin bashqa, ishtin siritqi chaghlarda ijadiyet bilen shughulliniwatidu. Biz uning oqushigha we ijadiyetlirige utuq tileymiz.

___ Muherrirdin
22.07.2007

Xitay hökümiti Uyghur ziyalilirigha bolghan ziyankeshlikni téximu kücheytmekte

Öz xewirimiz: Ürümchi sheherlik 14- Ottura mektepning oqutquchisi, yash alim, dangliq tarixchi Yüsüpjan Yasin ependining "Uyghurlarning Qedimqi Ejdadi Mu Heqqide Izdinish" namlik maqalisi, 2004-yili Turpan jornilining shu yilliq 2-sanida élan qilinghandin kéyin, Uyghur aptonum rayonluq qonchaq hökümetning maarip dairliri, 2005-yilidin bashlap aptor üstidin éghir siyasiy, iqtisadiy we memuriy jaza yürgüzüshke bashliganidi.2006- yili Awghustta xitayning Uyghur aptonum rayonluq teshwiqat bölümi bilen Ürümchi sheherlik Maarip tarmaqliri Yüsüpjan Yasin ependi üstidin mexsus höjjet chüshürüp, aptorni „Siyaset, Millet, Tarix we Medeniyet heqqide Pantürkizimliq xata qarashni terghip qilip, jemiyette intayin yaman tesir kozghighan“ dégen bednam bilen eyipligenidi. Bu höjjette "Aptor yene Uyghurlarning tarixta dunyawi Impériyelerni we küchlük döletlerni qurghanliqini, Sherqiytürkistanning Uyghur millitining ata miras wetini ikenlikini teshwiq qilish arqiliq, xelqaradiki Sherqiytürkistan milliy bölgünchilirining Uyghur dölitini tirildürüsh herkitini élip bérishi qanunluq dégan idiyini tarqitip, Uyghur aptonum rayonining muqimliqini buzushqa we döletni parchilashqa urunghan“ dep eyipligen.

Dangliq tarixchi Yüsüpjan Yasin ependining neshir qilghan eserlirini oqup teshkürüshke qatnashqan xitay yallanma mutexessisliri, aptorning Türkche menbelerden we Intérnétten paydilanghanliqinimu „Milliy bölgünchilik qilish“ we „Pantürkizimchilik“ jinayet dep eyiplep, Xitay hökümitining qanun tarmaqlirigha, uni siyasiy jehettin eyipleydighan qara matériyal yollighan.

Buning bilen Xitay hökümiti Uyghur aptonum rayonluq qonchaq hökümetke buyruq chiqirip, Yüsüpjan Yasin ependini xizmitidin toxtatqan we uning söz – herkitini qattik nazaret qilishqa bashligandin bashqa jismaniy, iqtisadiy we rohiy jehettin ailiside turghuzup qattiq rijim astigha alghan. Uning ailisidin sirtqa chiqip erkin herket qilishinimu chekligen.

Sherqiytürkistandin biwaste igiligen xewerlerdin qarighanda, yash alim, dangliq tarixchi Yüsüpjan Yasin ependi xizmitidin toxtitilghandin kéyin, Xitay hökümitining istixbarat we maarip tarmaqliri, uninggha qarita qorqutush, tehdit sélish, kiche-kündüz aram bermeslik, normal turmush tertiwini buzush we ménge tazilash herikitini élip barghan.

Xitay qanun tarmaqliri uni yene, izchil türde mejburiy wastilar bilen bölgünchilik, Pantürkizimchilik, hökümetke qarshi turush meselilirige bérip chétilidighan, hökümet teripidin teyyarlanghan ötkür siyasiy ishlargha baghlinidighan, iqrarnamilerge qol qoyup bérishke we özining yoqarqidek xataliqlarni otküzgenlikini iqrar we étirap qilishqa qistighan.

Bu jeryanda Yusupjan Yasin ependi heptide bir qétim éghizche we ayda bir qétim yazmiche mesile tapshurush, özining ailide nime ishlarni qiliwatqanliqi, oylawatqanliqini, kimler bilen alaqe qilidighanliqi we idiyising özgürüsh jeriyanini, Xitay istixbarat orunlirining munasiwetlik kishilérige doklat kilishqa zorlanghan.

Xitay istixbarat orunliri uni ailidin ibaret shekli özgergen türmige bent qilghandin bashqa, uning éléktironluq alaqilliri yeni télefon, Intérnét we chaqrighu aparatlirini we weten ichi- siritigha ayit poshta alaqillirini 24 saet nazaret astigha élip, u arqiliq yene nurghun Uyghur ziyalilirigha tehdit keltürgen.

Ürümchi sheherlik maarip tarmaqliri yene Yüsüpjan Yasin ependige bésim ishlitip, uni xitayning jamaet xewipsizliki we istixbarat organliragha hökümetke qarshi chiqqan Uyghurlar heqqide matériyal yollap, bu organlarning xizmetlirige ichkiy jehettin masliship bérishke qistighan.

Ürümchi sheherlik 14- ottura mektepning sabiq Mudiri Chen Mei Shian dégen xitay Yüsüpjan Yasin ependini téximu éghir jazalitish meqsitide, uning puchérkisi we namidin „Xitay hökümitige zeherxendilik bilen hujum qilghan“ dégendek atalmish nam bérilgen, saxta bir naraziliq erzi teyyarlap, yuqiri derijilik organlarga tapshurgan. Shuning bilen, xitayning maarip tarmaqliri xitay jamaet xewpsizlik organliri bilen til brüktürüp,Yüsüpjan Yasin ependini idiyiside éghir mesile bar dap eyiplep, uning üstidin siyasiy bésimni hessilep kücheytish bilen bir waqitta yene, 2007- yili 1- iyundin bashlap uni éghir jismaniy emgekke sélishni qarar qilghan. Netijide, Yüsüpjan Yasin ependi mexsus bir ademning nazaret qilishi astida, 130 giktardin ashidighan mektep qorusi ichide uninggha mas kelmeydighan we ziyalilarni xorlaydighan her türlük éghir jismaniy emgeklerga sélinmaktiken.

Xitay hökümiti 21-esirdimu, özining siyasiy tarixida wehshiy adetke aylanghan waste arqiliq, kultur we medeniyet jinayiti peyda qilip, Uyghur ziyalilirining öz tarixi we medeniyiti heqqidiki ilmiy izdinishlirini, döletka qarshi jinayet dep békitip, ularga qarita rohiy we Jismaniy ziyankeshlik qilishni barghanche ghaljirliq bilen kücheytmektiken.

Xewerni Teyyarlighuchi : Korash Atahan

Oyghan!

Aptori : Abduxaliq Uyghuri



Hey, péqir uyghur, oyghan, uyqung yéter,
Sende mal yoq, emdi ketse jan kéter.
Bu ölümdin özengni qutqazmisang,
Ah, séning haling xeter, haling xeter.

Qop! dédim, béshing köter, uyqungni ach!
Reqibning bishini kes, qanini chach!
Köz échip etrapqa obdan baqmisang,
Ölisen armanda, bir kün yoq ilaj.

Hélimu jansizgha oxshaydu téning,
Shunga yoqmu anche ölümdin ghéming?
Chaqirsam qimirlimayla yatisen,
Oyghanmay ölmekchimu sen shu péting?

Közüngni yoghan échip etrapqa baq,
Öz istiqbaling heqqide oylan uzaq.
Ketse qoldin bu ghenimet, pursiti,
Kilechek ishing chataq, ishing chataq.

Échinar könglüm sanga, hey uyghurum,
Sebdishim, qirindishim, bir tuqqunum.
Köyünüp halinggha oyghatsam séni,
Anglimaysen zadi, néme bolghining?!

Kélidu bir kün pushayman qilisen,
Tektige gepning shu chaghda yétisen.
"Xep" déseng shu chaghda ülgürmey qalur,
Shunda, uyghur, sözige ten bérisen.

1921-yili Turfan

Sogdian Influences Seen on Turkic Stone Statues Focusing on the Fingers Representations

Toshio Qayashi1

Introduction

Sogdian influences penetrated through various aspects of the Turk Khaghanate. In the aspect of politics and diplomacy they played an active part as the persons close to the khaghans and in the aspect of economy they developed the so-called silk-horse barter trade. And in the cultural aspect the Sogdian language and letters had been adopted officially during the early times of the Turk Khaghanate.
We can find the Sogdian influences also on the Turkic stone statues. A costume with turn-down collar, and a hemispherical type of cups might have been introduced by the Sogdians (Kubarev 1984: 29, 35). In this paper I would like to pay an attention to the other Sogdian influences on the statues, the fingers representations, and to study the route of the penetration of the influences.

Fingers Representations
Ya.A. Sher is one of the first authors who had systematically studied the origin, the classification, the chronology and the semantics of the Turkic stone statues (Sher 1966). His book titled "The Stone Statues of Semirech'e" basically deals with the statues of Semirech'e, Southeastern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, but taking consideration into those of Southern Siberia and Mongolia, too. So I would like to evaluate it as a general work of the statues of the Eurasian steppes.
He classifies the statues into two types: type I - the statues holding a vessel in one (mostly right) hand2; type II - the statues holding a vessel in both hands (Sher 1966: 29). There are several forms of vessels: a goblet-like cup with a stand, a cup with a round bottom, a bottle with a little round handle, and so on. The manners of holding a goblet and a round-bottomed cup of the type I statues show stylistic characteristics. Some of them hold a goblet stand (or sometimes a round bottom) with a thumb and a forefinger (and sometimes a middle finger) (Figs. 1, 2, 3) [manner I], others hold a round bottom on a palm of a hand (Fig.4) [manner II], and the rest hold a body of a vessel [manner III].
Concerning such characteristic manners of holding, A.N. Bernshtam, who investigated the statues around the lake Issyk, was the first to point out the genealogical relations from the manner of fingers representations of the Sogdian and Eastern Turkestan art (Bernshtam 1952: 81). Ya.A. Sher thought that "a sculptor intended to represent a kind of aristocratism3 of a portrayed person by the softness of lines and the somewhat elaborate curve [of fingers ----- H. T.]" (Sher 1966: 67). Furthermore, following Bernshtam, Ya.A. Sher judged that those elaborate representations were "not characteristic for the Turkic art and those roots are traced to the Sogdian and Buddhist art of Central and Inner Asia" (Sher 1966: 68).
Ya.A. Sher gave several examples in evidence: mural paintings of Bamiyan (Godard, A. et Y., Hackin 1928: pl.XX, a-3), two panel paintings from Dandan Uiliq near Khotan (Stein 1907: pl.LXI, LXIV), and mural paintings of Pendzhikent and Balalyk-tepe (D'yakonov 1954; Belenitskij 1959; Al'baum 1960). Now I would like to examine these cited evidences.
First, the manner of holing a round-bottomed cup of a sitting figure (a-3) in the dome of the 35 meters-high Buddha statue resembles a little to the manner II. Except this, we can see many Buddha images which show a kind of mudra joining two fingers tips (Fig.5) on the mural paintings of Bamiyan and Kakrak in Afghanistan (Bussagli 1978: 38-39). This pose bears somewhat resemblance to the manner I. However, it is a mudra, but not a holding manner4.
Secondly, the holding manner of pl. LXI of Dandan Uiliq (Fig.6) has not a resemblance to the manner I. On the other hand, the seated four-armed figure of pl. LXIV (Fig.7) holds something in one left hand, of which fingers representations look like the manner I at first sight. M. Bussagli also interpreted that the figure has "the cup" in one left hand (Bussagli 1978: 61). But when we look at it in detail, we discern that it shows an elongated vajra or mystic thunderbolt (Stein 1907: 280, 299). The figure does not hold a cup on the hand, but grasps a vajra in the hand.

There can be seen the figures of the manner II on the mural paintings of Qizil caves in Eastern Turkestan (Fig.8) (Zhongguo waiwen chubanshe 1981: pl.53).
As a result, we cannot find the directly related evidences of the manner I in Afghanistan and Eastern Turkestan, but find only the evidences of the manner II in Eastern Turkestan.
On the other hand, we can find many examples of the manner I in Western Turkestan. On the banquet scene of Balalyk-tepe5 in Tokaristan there are depicted 22 banqueters, of which nine are holding a small stand of cup with right fingers (Fig.9), ten are holding a stand with left fingers, one is holding a flat bottom with left fingers, one is grasping a body of vessel with right hand, and one is grasping a body of vessel with left hand (Al'baum 1960: ris.96, 105, 112, 121). So 20 of 22 are holding a stand (or a bottom) like the manner I.

In Sogdiana, the manner I representations can be seen on the banquet scene of Pendzhikent (Fig.10) (Belenizki 1980: 42, Abb.39). One figure is holding a miniature model of a winged camel6 with the manner I (Fig.11) (Belenizki 1980: Abb.52). The Manner I representations are also on the mural painting of Varakhsha (Fig.12) (Shishkin 1963: tabl.XIV).

The manner I representations can be seen on the Sasanian and Post-Sasanian silver vessels, too. A seated couple (a bridegroom and a bride) is depicted on the silver bowl probably found in Perm', the Urals. A bridegroom holds a small stand of a cup with two fingers of his right hand and a bride holds something7 with two fingers of her right hand like a man (Fig.13). According to B.I. Marshak, this bowl was dated to the almost same age as Balalyk-tepe, the end of 6th – first half of 7th century, and made probably in Northern Tokharistan or Southern Sogdiana (Tokyo National Museum 1985: commentary of No.127 by B.I. Marshak; Marschak 1986: 428).

We can see the manner I representations also on the painted pottery from Merv, Margiana. A bride holds a flower in her left hand and something missing, maybe a vessel, with two fingers of her right hand (Fig.14). V.G. Lukonin dates this vase to the 6th (or possibly the 7th) century (Lukonin 1986: 142).
The dancers on the gilted silver bottle from Limarovka, Khar'kov, hold a flower, a fruits bowl and a ossuari-shaped box with two fingers of their right and left hands (Fig.15). K.V. Trever and V.G. Lukonin date it to the 5th – 6th century (Trever, Lukonin 1987: 112).

A woman in the medallion of silver bowl owned by the Iran Bastan Museum holds a flower with two fingers (Fig.16). The same representation (but of a man) is depicted in the medallion of silver bowl from Mtskheta (Fig.17). These two bowls are dated to the second half of the 3rd - the first half of the 4th century (Harper 1981: 24; Trever, Lukonin 1987: 53).
Summing up the above-mentioned examples, the representation of the manner I of holding a vessel or something is not an influence from the mudra of Buddhism, but has a close relation with the Iranian art tradition and probably originated in the ancient Orient, Assyrian and

Achaemenid art tradition.
The representation of the manner II might have been also possibly related with the ancient Orient art tradition. However, Present Mongolians in fact hold a cup (ayaga in Mongolian) on an open palm just like the manner II. The manner II of holding is not so strange but natural. So I cannot judge the origin of the manner II now.

Contacts between the Turks and the Sogdians
When and through what route did the representation of the manner I enter the territory of the Turk Khaghanate? Ya.A. Sher noticed the difference of frequency of statues holding a goblet-type cup with a stand between Semirech'e and Southern Siberia. In Semirech'e and the Tienshan, 57 of 136 statues hold a goblet, while only 9 of 79 statues hold a goblet in Southern Siberia (Tuva and Northwestern Mongolia). Considering that goblet-type cups were brought from Persia, probably from Sogdiana, he concluded that this difference might have been caused by the closer relations between Semirech'e and the settled farmers of Western Turkestan (Sher 1966: 43-44). If we accept his view, the manner I of holding a goblet also came from Iran, Sogdiana through Semirech'e to Mongolia.
After the publication of Sher's book, the general situations of the Turkic statues in Russian Altai, the northern part of Xinjiang Uigur District (Eastern Turkestan) and Mongolia have been clearer gradually.
V.D. Kubarev published 256 statues in Russian Altai, 94 of which hold a vessel (Kubarev 1984: 33). He did not distinguish a cup with a stand from a cup without a stand. Anyway he counted 14 statues with a cup, 7 or 8 of which seems a cup with a stand. This proportion of the statues with a goblet-type cup to the total of the stattues with a vessel is near to that of Southern Siberia.
The statues in Xinjiang were compiled by Wang B. and Qi X. (Wang, Qi 1996). I have discerned about 10 of the manner I representation, 10 of the manner II, and 6 of the manner III. The proportion of the manner I is very high like Semirech'e.
I compiled the statues in Mongolia (Hayashi 1996). The manner I representation is counted about 10, while the manner II is counted 36 and the manner III is counted 15.　The proportion of the manner I is very low in Mongolia. But many statues were worn out. Above all, I regret to say that the elaborate statues of Bilge khaghan, Kyol Tegin, Tonyuquq and the ruling class of the Khaghanate are so much damaged artificially to discern the manner of holding. So the proportion might have been higher than now. At the same time I would like to point out that the elaborate statues made of marble often hold a goblet in Mongolia (Fig.18).

Anyway the proportion of the manner I representation in Semirech'e and Northern Xinjiang is certainly higher. This fact might have been related to that trade route ran through these regions and that the Sogdians themselves resided at the cities in these regions: Ak-Beshim, Kostobe, Kyrktobe (Kyzlasov 1959; Baipakov 1992).

Moving east, it is well known that a Sogdian colony was built in Dunhuang (Ikeda 1965). How about further east? In Ningxia Province there have been found several Iranian goods, for example, the silver vase from Li Xian's tomb (constructed in 569) in Guyuan Prefecture (Marshak, Anazawa 1989). And one more interesting tomb was excavated on the eastern bank of the river Qingshui in Guyuan (Guyuanxian 1984).

From the Guyuan tomb there was found a lacquered painted coffin, on which are depicted various motifs: the Chinese motif of legendary "Dongwangfu (Eastern King)" and "Xiwangmu (Western Queen)", the Bodhisattva images, the western motif of palmette ornament, and the interesting motif of banquet scene (Fig.19). A seated man holds a flower-like object8 in his left hand and a round-bottomed cup with two fingers of his right hand just like the manner I. A standing woman on the left side also holds a cup with the manner I. A silver coin of Sasanian king Peroz (r.457-483) was discovered from this tomb. This tomb is dated to Taihe era (477-499) on the basis of the resemblance to the mural paintings of No.125 and 126 caves of Dunhuang which were constructed in the eleventh year of Taihe era (487). So I suppose that this tomb was constructed under the influence of the Sogdians at the end of the 5th century.

Literary sources also show that the Sogdians came to the present Gansu Province for the commercial purpose in the 5th century. When Northern Wei conquered Northern Liang in 439, many merchants who had come from the Sute state to the territory of Liang were captured by the Wei troops (Weishu 102: 2270). F. Hirth identified the Sute state with Sughdag in the Crimea (Hirth 1900: 256-261), but it has become clear that the Sute state should be identified with Sogdiana, as Shiratori K. pointed out in detail in 1924 (Shiratori 1971: 65-68).

According to Beishi 92, An Tugen, whose great-grandfather had come from Anxi to Northern Wei and whose family had resided at Jiuquan in Gansu, frequently went to the Ruanruan (Rouran=Juan-juan) as an envoy and an intelligencer of Eastern Wei in 530s-540s and died in 577 (Beishi 92: 3047).
In the Chinese histories Anxi means Arsacid Parthia (247 B.C. to A.D. 224), but in the 5th – 6th century they often confused Anxi with An state (Bukhara). Therefore the ancestor of An Tugen must have been a Bukharan Sogdian (Kuwabara 1968: 315).

Judging from that An Tugen was in activity in 530s-540s and died in 577, he must have been born approximately in 500-510. If that is the case, his great-grandfather must have entered Northern Wei before 450, possibly at the end of 430s when Wei conquered Liang and sent the envoys to invite the missions from Central Asian states. Consequently the Sogdians had resided Northwestern China since the middle of the 5th century and some of them had had contacts with the northern nomads in the first half of the 6th century.

When An Tugen was in activity, the Tuque=Turks appeared for the first time in the stage of history. It was the 11th year of Datong era of Western Wei, A.D. 545. Their leader, Tumen who was under the control of the Ruanruan but would soon become the first khaghan, sent the mission for trade on the border, and wished to enter into diplomatic relations with China. In response to their wish, in 545 Yuwen Tai, who held the real power of Western Wei, sent a hu (Sogdian or Persian) named An Nuopantuo, who resided at Jiuquan, as an envoy. All the people of the Tuque state were pleased and said, "Now an envoy came from a great country. This shows that our state will rise." (Zhoushu 50: 908)

The envoy must have been Bukharan Sogdian, because his surname was An. Consequently the Sogdian whom the Tuque met first resided in the Gansu region and played a diplomatic role for the Chinese court. And after that the Sogdians would make inroads into the Tuque and would have influence on the political, economic and cultural aspects of the Tuque.

Another interesting tomb was excavated in the old capital, Xi'an in 2000 (Shaanxi 2001). The buried man was named An Jia whose home town was Guzang (Wuwei in the Gansu), and played a role of Northern Zhou's sabao, the general leader of the Sogdians in China9. In the tomb chamber there was found a long stone screen bed. The internal side of the screen shows in relief twelve scenes of traveling, hunting, feast, dancing and everyday life of the Sogdians. On the feast scenes we can see the representations of the manner I and II (Fig.20, 21). An Jia died in 579, just 27 years after the foundation of the Turk Khaghanate. Analogous on is now kept in the MIHO Museum, Shiga Prefecture, Japan (Fig.22) (Sugimura 1997).

Conclusion
We have confirmed the following points: 1) the unique manner of holding a cup of the Turkic stone statues originated from Iranian and Central Asian art tradition; 2) in the 5th – 6th centuries a lot of the Sogdians resided in the cities along the Silk Road of Western China and also in the capital; 3) they brought Iranian and Central Asian objects of art and constructed their tombs in the mixed style of Chinese and Sogdian traditions; 4) the Sogdians whom the Tuque=Turks met for the first time were the Sogdians who resided in the Gansu region.

Summing up these four points, we will be able to conclude that the Turkic statues with the unique fingers representations appeared after the Turks had a contact with the Sogdians who resided in the Gansu region.
However, here is a serious problem before us. There are no statues in the earliest Turkic memorial sites of Mongolia: Bugut and Deed-Tsetuuh10. The former was constructed for the late Tatpar khaghan who died in 581 (Vojtov 1996: 28; Yoshida, Moriyasu 1999: 123). The latter might have been constructed just before the former. Based on this, V.E. Vojtov concluded that there were no stone statues during the First Turk Khaghanate (Vojtov 1996: 107).

Here is another serious problem. There is the earliest Turkic statue in Zhaosu, the Ili district, Xinjiang (Hayashi 2001: 227). On this statue there can be read a Sogdian inscription dated to the second half of the 6th century (Fig.23), according to the Japanese Iranist, Yoshida Y. (Yoshida 1991: 76)
If the dating is right, there is a possibility that the Turks moving westward were influenced by the Sogdians who resided in the colonies along the northern slope of the

Tengritagh
So I am very sorry to confess that we cannot decide whether the statues appeared during the First Khaghanate or nor, and from where the fingers representations were influenced: from the Gansu Sogdians or the Tienshan Sogdians.
There are various complicated problems about the Turkic stone statues: their date, meaning, relations with stone enclosures and balbals, relations with Kypchak and Mongolian statues, and so on. I hope future investigations, especially in Mongolia and Xinjiang where archaeological surveys have not yet progressed so much.

Illustrations
Fig. 1. Statue found in Vannovka, Tyul'kubas, Chimkent. Kept in Almaty Museum.
Fig. 2. Statue found in sovkhoz «Michurinskij», Zajsan, Eastern Kazakhstan.
Fig. 3. Statue found in Kegety, Chu Valley. Kept in State Museum of Ethnography, St. Petersburg.
Fig. 4. Statue in Bishkek Museum.
Fig. 5. Buddha image on mural painting at Kakrak (Bussagli 1978)
Fig. 6. Bodhisattva image on wooden panel from Dandan Uiliq, Xinjiang (Stein 1907).
Fig. 7. Bodhisattva image on wooden panel from Dandan Uiliq, Xinjiang (Bussagli 1978).
Fig. 8. Buddha image on mural painting at Qizil, Xinjiang (Zhongguo waiwen chubanshe 1981).
Fig. 9. Mural painting at Balalyk-tepe, Uzbekistan (Al'baum 1960).
Fig. 10. Mural painting at Pendzhikent (Tokyo National Museum 1985).
Fig. 11. Mural painting at Pendzhikent (Belenizki 1980).
Fig. 12. Mural painting at Varakhsha, kept in Bukhara Museum.
Fig. 13. Silver bowl probably found in Perm', the Urals (Marshak 1986).
Fig. 14. Painted pottery from Merv, kept in Ashgabad Museum.
Fig. 15. Silver bottle from Limarkova, Khar'kov (Trever, Lukonin 1987).
Fig. 16. Medalion of silver bowl from Gilan.
Fig. 17. Medallion of silver bowl from Mtskheta, Georgia (Harper 1981).
Fig. 18. Statue in Dadgyn Khoshoot, Arkhangai, Mongolia.
Fig. 19. Painting on coffin from Guyuan, Ningxia (Higashiyama 1992).
Fig. 20. Stone screen from Xi'an Shaanxi (Shaanxi 2001).
Fig. 21. Stone screen found in Xi'an Shaanxi (Shaanxi 2001).
Fig. 22. Stone screen kept in MIHO MUSEUM, Shiga, Japan (Sugimura 1997).
Fig. 23. Statue in Zhaosu, Ili, Xinjiang.
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Notes
1 Prof. of Soka UniversityThis paper is a revised version of "Tokketsu no sekijin ni mirareru Sogudo no eikyou," Soka Daigaku Jinbun Ronsyu 4 (1992), pp.27-44.
2 He includes also the statues only with the face representation and the statues with a bird in the right hand in type I.
3 Ya.A. Sher thinks that the statues with a vessel on the right hand and with a weapon incarnate "a nomadic military aristocrat", and the statues with a vessel on the right hand but without a weapon represent "a bureaucratic aristocrat" (Sher 1966: 57-58).
4 Ya.A. Sher used an unspecialized word "gesture" (Sher 1966: 68), but V.D. Kubarev, who followed Sher, used a Buddhism word "mudra" (Kubarev 1984: 100-101).
5 At first L.I. Al'baum dated the site of Balalyk-tepe to the 5th-6th centuries, but now most of scholars date the paintings of Balalyk-tepe to the end of the 6th or beginning of the 7th century (Belenitskij, Marshak 1979: 35; Azarpay 1981: 49, 88; Litvinsky 1996: 152)
6 Tanabe K. considers this model as a rhyton (Tanabe 1982: 54).
7 L.I. Al'baum considered this object as a mirror (Al'baum 1960: 177), but this seems like a flower.
8 The interpreter of the exhibition catalogue considers it as a fan (Higashiyama 1992: 95).
9 The various problems about sabao were recently discussed by A. Forte (Forte 1999).
10 V.E. Vojtov names this site "Ider" (Vojtov 1996). But in fact it lies on the bank of Deed-Tsetuuh, a tributary of the river Ider.
© The Author/s
Actualizado el 24/07/2004

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