Sometime in the 18th century, a group of Greeks from the island of Crete met a grisly end at a lake high in the Himalayas, over 5,000 feet above sea level. The small lake, known as Roopkund or Skeleton Lake, was already home to two scatters of deceased south Asian pilgrims, presumably Hindus, who had died there in the 8th and the 11th century CE. On one of the earlier pilgrimage parties, a southeast Asian, either from modern-day Thailand or northern Burma, had joined them in their unlucky fate. None of this was known from documentary sources, local legends or excavation. Only in the last four years have aDNA and strontium analysis - pioneered by the David Reich Lab at Harvard - been able to tell this story, unravelling the genomic signature of each individual and the diet they ate.
Roopkund Lake sits close to the Indian border with Nepal, and lies on a popular mountaineering trail for local guides and foreign tourists. The skeletons, scattered about the lake, some with hair and fingernails still intact, were known about for centuries but given the high altitude, no serious investigation had been done. The only local tale that offers an explanation tells of a party of devout Hindus, in the 8th century, journing along that route to reach the sacred mountain of Nanda Devi. During the pilgrimage, the group decided to engage in more than their fair share of reverely and silly antics, and as a result were punished from the heavens by a storm of golf-ball sized hailstones. Some of the older skeletons do seem to have fractures and depressions on their skulls caused by heavy round objects, so the tale might have a grain of truth. It is difficult to see why else Hindu pilgrims would end up around a remote lake, other than from a natural disaster interpreted as divine retribution.
However, this does not explain the two later groups, classified in the paper under Roopkund_B and Roopkund_A. It is possible that the lake, sitting between high mountains, is a natural conduit for hailstorms that form above their peaks. In that case the situation is similar to the Battle of the Frigidus, a showdown between the Roman emperor Theodosius II and the pagan usurper Eugenius in the Alps, where a local extreme wind phenomenon, known as the bora, suddenly struck and quite literally swept Eugenius' army away. Both groups, therefore, might just have been unlucky.
If all three groups, the 8th, 11th and 18th century party, where pummelled by extreme weather and later laid to rest around the lake, one question remains: what were the non-locals doing there? The researchers outlined a third category, Roopkund_C, for the individual who came from southeast Asia. Given he largely ate and drank the same water as the 8th and 11th century locals, it is likely he migrated to northern India in his youth, possibly as a convert to Hinduism. The reigning dynasty between these areas was the Pala Empire, a polyethnic and multi-religious state, open to various travellers from across the continent, which ushered in a golden age of religious devotion and literature. In this context, Roopkund_C is not so out of the ordinary.
The real mystery lies in the 18th-century Greeks. Strontium-isotope analysis determined they largely had eaten a Mediterranean diet of cattle, wheat, barley and millet right until their last days. The radiocarbon dates suggest a death date either side of 1800. Such a recent date would usually mean there would be a document, register or passing mention connected with the event, if only indirectly. Surprisingly, there is nothing of the sort, which is even stranger considering that Europeans already had a vested interest in documenting events in the exotic east, the world of Ali Baba and the Mughal rajas. A large group of ethnic Cretans converting to Hinduism and perishing from a deadly hailstorm would have been at every diarist and poet's lips, if they had known.
One course of events is possible. During political upheavals in the Ottoman empire in the late 1760 and early 1770s, a group of ethnic orthodox Cretans revolted under the leadership of the shipbuilder Ioannis Vlachos, who were hoping to recieve reinforcements from the Russian admiral Count Orlov from the Aegean. The reinforcements never arrived, unfortunately, and the 'Orlov Revolt' disintegrated. The regime reprisals were certaintly heavy - Vlachos was tortured and skinned alive - but it is unknown how many people were punished. Deporation was the Ottoman tactic of choice for political dissidents elsewhere, so therefore the ethnic Cretans who supported Vlachos may have been deported to a faraway corner of the empire, possibly Egypt or northern Mesopotamia.
Once in the near East, the deportees might have encountered Hindu or Jain travellers; northern Mesopotamia, especially, was a religiously diverse place, with Assyrian christians, Jews and Muslims living side-by-side. The travellers might have been culturally Romani, the ethnic group who had originally been Hindu and had originated from northwest India as refugees fleeing religious upheaval. The sacred mountain of Namda Devi would have, even if as a vague concept, been known to them. Attracted by the pilgrim lifestyle, and a promise of eternal blessing, the Greeks could well have chosen to leave their presumably squalid conditions as deported migrants and sought to find paradise in the mountains. The date of the skeletons - around 1800 - indicates that the Cretans may have stayed in the Ottoman empire for a while, deciding only after years of deliberation to make the holy journey. A journey that, sadly for them, did not reach its destination.
There are other possibilities. The Cretans could have been simply wealthy travellers looking for the mythical kingdom of Shangri-La, land of eternal life, which they connected with Nanda Devi. Russians, Brits and Americans tried to do the same in the following centuries. Even Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's Agriculture Secretary, in the late 1930s, sent an expedition there. The fact that the Cretans had followed a Mediterranean diet right until their death implies they had pack animals and ample means to buy and store grains, which goes against the idea of an all-or-nothing ascetic pilgrimage.
Whatever the truth of Roopkund Lake - killer of pilgrims or burial site for devotees near and far - it really is a lake that keeps on giving. The lake itself has not even been investigated, and there is a suspicious, apparently, that organic human remains and clothing might be buried at the lake bottom, which would solve the mystery once and for all.
References:
Harney, É., Nayak, A., Patterson, N., Joglekar, P., Mushrif-Tripathy, V., Mallick, S., ... & Rai, N. (2019). Ancient DNA from the skeletons of Roopkund Lake reveals Mediterranean migrants in India. Nature communications, 10(1), 1-10.
Pant, A. B. Roopkund Mystery “Pathology Reveals Head Injury behind the Casualties”. | |
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