Art: The mummies at the Penn Museum say a lot about humanity's spread

Mummies fascinate, which is why the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has made them the marketing focus of a compelling exhibition of ancient cultural artifacts from western China called "Secrets of the Silk Road."

The show's two specimens, an adult woman and an infant, aren't mummies in the Egyptian sense - bodies ritually preserved for the afterlife. They're freeze-dried corpses, naturally preserved by a combination of dry climate, cold temperatures, and well-drained saline soil.

Digging up human remains and displaying them in museums has always struck me as macabre, not to mention disrespectful. Fortunately, science offers a redeeming rationale for grave desecration: These mummies and their burial goods - the material essence of "Silk Road" - offer some startling, profound insights into how modern humans spread across the Earth, and particularly how cultures interacted in central Asia over the centuries.

As the female mummy, dubbed "The Beauty of Xiaohe," indicates, the grave sites in China's Xinjiang province, once known as East Turkestan, contain the remains of Caucasians who lived along a portion of the famous Silk Road 4,000 years ago.

Moreover, according to Victor Mair - the Penn professor of Chinese language and literature who was instrumental in bringing the show to Penn - they came into the arid and isolated Tarim Basin, north of Tibet, from somewhere to the west.

The ethnicity of these "agro-pastoralists," as Mair describes them, and the specifics of their culture remain to be determined.

But just learning that they lived where they did, around the perimeter of the forbidding Taklamakan desert, represents what museum director Richard Hodges characterizes as one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.

The burial sites were found early in that century by Europeans looking for traces of Alexander the Great's trail of conquest, Mair explained. Chinese scholars didn't begin to excavate and study the sites until the late 1970s, after the death of Mao Tse-tung.

It quickly becomes clear that "Secrets of the Silk Road" isn't primarily about how that historical China-to-Rome trade corridor functioned, aside from the fact that the people in question lived astride it and perhaps were involved in its logistics. As for the show's "secrets," they aren't fully revealed. The excavations at a number of sites have exposed a large number of graves and artifacts - 135 in this show alone - but ultimately the exhibition raises more questions than it answers. In science, this isn't a negative outcome.

The artifacts, lent by several institutions in China's vast Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, do make clear, however, that there was considerable east-west culture-mixing going on in central Asia long before the Silk Road became established.

Hodges cautioned that "Silk Road" isn't an art exhibition. True enough, but not only does it contain a generous proportion of art, it's a splendid example of how aesthetic evidence can inspire or confirm scientific hypotheses.

Aside from "The Beauty of Xiahoe," with her reddish hair and lush eyelashes, and the swaddled infant with its wisps of brown hair peeking out from a brilliant blue bonnet, the exhibits of textiles, clothing, jewelry, coins, and utilitarian implements reveal (to the discerning eye) a piquant mix of cultural clues.

This is perhaps clearest in the proportionately large number of textiles, especially garments, which are as remarkably preserved as the mummies by their burial environment.

One of the more obvious examples of cultural cross-pollination is a piece of a woven wall hanging. One half of this diptych depicts the bust of a blue-eyed, Caucasoid warrior holding a spear; another Western image, a centaur, anchors the other half, surrounded by flowers that include a lotus, symbol of Buddhism.

The spectacular costume of "Yingpan Man" is another, more subtle, demonstration of how Western cultural markers migrated east. Yingpan Man is a masked mummy without the body, which is too fragile to exhibit.

When excavated, it measured 6 feet, 6 inches, an extraordinary height for the period. The man is clothed head to toe, mainly by a long red wool coat closely patterned with yellow motifs that include armed, naked putti.

The fabric itself is a clue to origin, because migrants into the Tarim Basin brought domestic sheep, an animal descended from wild animals indigenous to the Near East. The mummy is believed to have been a wealthy trader, perhaps of the Sogdian ethnic group, which originated in eastern Iran.

Similar clues to trade and settlement patterns pop up throughout the show, such as Chinese symbols on a painted coffin, wooden Buddhist figures, and a number of garments made of silk.

Turning again to the inevitable comparison with Egyptian displays, "Silk Road" isn't a collection of sparkling precious objects. The closest it comes to sumptuous ostentation is a mask made of gold foil inlaid with rubies, from the fifth or sixth century.

Instead, the installation evokes in diorama form the sandy necropolis where the Beauty of Xiahoe was found, including her slab-sided wooden coffin.

Because context is so important, visitors need to take time to read the texts and study the maps. The object labels aren't always adequate, but that isn't Penn's fault. The Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., which organized this traveling show, didn't allow these labels to be changed, according to a Penn staff member.

Because the material covers such a long time span - roughly three millennia - and involves so many cultural threads and object types, it can't be understood in a quick walk-through.

The mummies don't require much intellectualizing, which is perhaps why they are, in a strange way, so appealing. This is especially true of the infant, wrapped in a rich maroon blanket bound with red and blue cords ("Penn colors," someone quipped at the press viewing), with bluish stones covering its eyes.

The most puzzling secret involving "Silk Road" is why Chinese authorities delayed the show's opening with antiquities for two weeks, and are permitting only a truncated, time-ticketed viewing of them. The mummies will be removed after March 15, and the Jinjiang artifacts after March 28; what's left will be up till June 5, free with regular museum admission.

As if nothing untoward had happened, at the press opening two Chinese officials effusively - and seemingly without irony - congratulated the university and Victor Mair. But despite the smile that they and the museum have pasted on the show, losing nearly three-quarters of the full-scale display's scheduled run looks suspiciously like a debacle.

Whatever the initial problem, I can't think of a practical reason why the artifacts, safely installed in the museum's climate-controlled galleries, need to go home so soon. Perhaps a strong visitor turnout during the next few weeks might persuade the Chinese to reconsider.

The full version of "Secrets of the Silk Road" continues at the Penn Museum, 3260 South St., through March 15. The artifacts, without the two mummies, will be on view from March 17 to March 28. After that, timed ticketing ends and a display of artifact images and texts will run from April 2 to June 5. Extended exhibition hours through March 28 are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays and 10 to 9 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays through Sundays. Regular museum hours apply beginning April 2.

General admission timed-ticket prices through March 28 are $22.50, $18.50 for those 65 and older and military members, $16.50 for full-time students (with ID) and children 6 through 17, and $12.50 for Penn students and staff. Information: 215-745-6335 or www.penn.museum/ silkroad.

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