Tocharians

From TinWiki.org

Tocharians were a culture that existed in the Tarim Basin of the Gobi Desert in China. They are best known for leaving behind red-haired mummies and an impressive Buddhist library which included several previously unknown languages and scripts.

1 Mummies
2 Historical record
3 Significance
4 See also
5 Notes
6 External sources

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Mummies

The dryness of the desert and its salt deposits have preserved many Tocharian corpses in remarkable condition.

The "Cherchen Family", named for the region where they were discovered, is perhaps the best known. "Cherchen Man" is 6'6" and has facial tattoos. "Cherchen Woman" presumably his wife, is also over 6 feet tall and also has tattoos. Both were burried with an abundance of clothing; Cherchen Man had 10 hats. Along with them was a young infant, with stones placed over its eyes and yarn in its nostrils. [1]

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Historical record

The Tocharians appear in the Mahabharata and were also known to the Romans. The Mahabharata records them to be fierce warriors who fought alongside the Kauravas in the Mahabharata War.

Pliny the Elder recorded that they were merchants who exceeded normal human height and spoke in very harsh sounds, not having a language of their own.

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Significance

The discovery of the Tocharians may prove important to many studies of history in a variety of ways. Study of them could potentially have bearing on theories including The Tower of Babel, Ancient Indian Civilization, and many others relating to ancient civilizations, including those of a conspiracy-related nature.

The reasons they are important to those theories and others are many. For one, their language is Indo-European, and is the Easternmost member of that family yet discovered. Not only that but it split off from from Proto-Indo-European before other language groups within that family began to differentiate, meaning that Tocharian could hold important clues as to what very early languages were like and when they developed.

Their inclusion in the Mahabharata (and the extent to which that description proves historically accurate) would have great bearing on the age and literal accuracy of that epic.

Their physical stature may of course cause some to link them to theories involving Nephilim.

Also, they provide an important link between East and West which may hold the key to sorting out some historical controversies regarding separate cultural evolution and who made certain discoveries first, and when.

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