Did the Qin emperor need Western help? I don't think so.

Did the First Emperor of China import sculptors from classical Greece to help build the Terracotta Army? That’s the intriguing hypothesis explored in an entertaining BBC documentary called The Greatest Tomb on Earth, presented by Dan Snow, Alice Roberts and Albert Lin. (See also here.)

If it was true, it would revolutionize our view of the early history of China. It’s widely assumed that there was no significant, direct contact between China and the West until the time of Marco Polo (although you would not have guessed from this programme that diffusion of artifacts along trade routes happened much earlier, certainly in Roman times around the first century AD).

But I didn’t buy the story for a moment. It turned out to be a classic example of building up a case by an accumulation of weak, speculative evidence and then implying that somehow they add up to more than the sum of the parts. Look at each piece of evidence alone, and there’s virtually nothing there. But repeat often enough that they fit together into a convincing story and people might start to believe you.

Archaeologist Albert Lin adduced evidence of the ancient road that connected that ancient capital of present-day Xi’an, near the site of the mausoleum of the Qin emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, to the West, perhaps via Alexander’s empire in India. Well, at least, it was claimed that “there was probably a road reaching [from the tomb] at least to Lintao” on the borders of the Qin Empire. Buy what Lin actually found was a short section of undated track – it looked maybe a kilometre or so long – heading northwest through farmland within the confines of the tomb complex in Sha’anxi. Lintao is almost 400 km away. Later in the programme Dan Snow claimed that on this basis “We have evidence of an ancient road network that could have brought Westerners to China”. No, they really don’t. (And why do we need to find an ancient physical road anyway, given that it does seem clear that trade was happening all the way from the Mediterranean region to China at least in Roman times?)

Another strand of evidence was the notion that large-scale, lifelike figurines suddenly appeared in the Qin tomb, looking somewhat like those of classical Greece, when nothing like this had been seen before in China. How else could this artistic leap have been made, if not with the assistance of Greek sculptors imported by the emperor? That, at least, was the case argued by Lukas Nickel of the University of Vienna, based solely on asserted coincidences of artistic styles. We were offered no indication of how the Qin emperor – who, until he became ruler of “all” of China extending more or less to present-day Sichuan, was king of the state of Qin in the Wei valley – how this emperor somehow knew that there were barbarians nigh on 2000 miles further west across the Tibetan plateau who had advanced sculptural skills.

There were some puzzles, to be sure. To make some of their bronze castings, the Qin metalworkers seemed to have used something like the so-called “lost-wax technique”, using reinforcing rods, of which examples are known in ancient Egypt. “It’s clear this process is too complex to stumble on by accident”, said Snow. But obviously it was stumbled on by accident – how else was it ever invented anywhere? Given the known metallurgical skills of the ancient Chinese – bronze casting began in the Shang era, a millennium and a half before the Qin dynasty, and some of the Shang artifacts are exquisite – how can we know what they had achieved by the third century BC? Besides, I was left unsure what was so exciting about seeing a lost-wax method in the Qin artifacts, given that we already know this technique was known in China by the 6th century BC. Still, Snow concluded that “We now have strong evidence of Western metalworkers in China in the third century BC”. No, we don’t.

Then a skull from the mausoleum site, apparently of a sacrificed concubine of the emperor, was said to look unlike a typically East Asian skull. Like, perhaps, the more Caucasoid skull types of the minority races in what is today Xinjiang? That’s consistent with the data – the skull is certainly not Western in its proportions, said Alice. It could come from further afield too, on the basis of this data – but there’s absolutely no reason to suppose it did. Still, we were left with the hint that the emperor might have employed workers brought in from far outside the border of his empire. There was no support for that idea.

We were also introduced to an apparently recent paper reporting evidence of DNA of Western lineage in people from Xinjiang. Quite apart from the fact that this says nothing about the import of Western artistic techniques in China during the Qin dynasty, it was very odd to see it offered as a new discovery. The notion that there were people of Western, Caucasoid origin in Xinjiang long, long ago has been discussed for decades, ever since the discovery in the early twentieth century of mummified bodies of distinctly non-Chinese – indeed, virtually Celtic – appearance, with blond to red hair and “Europoid” body shapes in the Tarim basin of Xinjiang. The existence of a proto-European or Indo-European culture in this region from around 1800 BC has been particularly promoted since the 1990s by American sinologist Victor Mair. DNA testing from the early 2000s confirmed that the mummies seem to have had at least a partly European origin.

What is particularly odd about the neglect of the Tarim mummies in the context of this programme is that Mair and others have even suggested that this Indo-European culture may have brought Western metallurgical technology from west to east long before the Qin era, by the usual processes of cultural diffusion. They think that the bronze technology of the Shang era might have been stimulated this way. Others say that ironworking might have been transmitted via this culture around the tenth century BC, when it first appears in Xinjiang (see V. C. Piggott, The Archaeometallurgy of the Asian Old World, 1999).

I enjoyed the programme a lot. It identifies some interesting questions. But the idea of West-East cultural influence in the ancient world is not at all as new as was implied, and to my eye the evidence for direct import of Western “expertise” by Qin Shi Huangdi to make his army for the afterlife is extremely flimsy at this point. It would make a great story, but right now a story is all it is.

Incidentally, several folks on Twitter spoke about the popular idea that the Qin emperor’s mausoleum contains lakes of mercury. You can read more about that particular issue here.