The title ‘Secrets of the Silk Road’, opening March 27-July 25, 2010 at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, sounds innocent enough.

I’ve spent enough years studying sexuality and fertility symbols to stop dead in my tracks, seeing this photo on the NYTimes website.

In the second paragraph of In a Desert in China, a Trove of 4,000-Year-Old-Mummies, we’re in agreement that you’re look at a 4,000 years-old phallic forest, whose inhabitants’bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.

In a sad and alarming story of the ‘usual’ ethnic tensions, Turkish-speaking Uighurs, joined in the last 50 years by Han settlers from China, men are fighting over the mummies, making historical identity claims and incumbent rights that somehow accompany historical origins.

Despite the political tensions over the mummies’ origin, the Chinese said in a report published last month in the journal BMC Biology that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China.

Let’s get out of political tensions for the moment.