"In September, the first emperor Li Shan was buried. The first emperor took the throne, wore the Li Mountain, and the world, the world sent more than 700,000 people, wore three springs, went down to the copper and gave the rafters, and the palace viewed the hundred officials and strange instruments and rare and strange migration. Let the craftsman make a crossbow arrow, and shoot it at those who are close. Mercury is used as a hundred rivers and seas, and the organic phase is instilled, with astronomy on the top and geography on the bottom. Take mermaid paste as a candle, and the degree of immortality will last a long time. --Sima Qian's "Records of History"
Antiparque from Phoenicia was a famous traveler who traveled most of the Mediterranean, including Rome, Greece, Rome and Babylon. Subsequently, the incredible grand buildings of the time were listed as the "Seven Wonders of the World", and this statement is still true to this day.
Among these miraculous grand buildings are not only the well-known Pyramid of Khufu and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but also the mysterious Mausoleum of King Mossolas.
Built in the 4th century BC in the southwestern Turkish port city of Bodrôme, the Mausoleum of The Mossolas is a rectangular building overlooking the Aegean Sea at the base, measuring 120 feet × 100 feet, reaching a staggering height of 45 meters, and the very top of the building is decorated with a magnificent statue of a chariot, moved by four six-meter-high horses.
The exquisite sculptures and decorations inside the mausoleum also add to this magnificent building. The reliefs not only depict scenes of ancient Greeks fighting with the Amazons, but also pictures of Rapti people and half-man, half-horse monsters fighting, which can be described as a treasure of civilization.
Marvel at the grandeur of the Mausoleum of King Mossolas, one of the "Seven Wonders of the World", and it is a pity that Antiparque never traveled beyond the Mediterranean.
More than two hundred years after his death, in the distant ancient country of the East, a larger and more mysterious imperial tomb than the tomb of King Mosolas appeared, this luxurious and huge mausoleum is located underground, and its owner is the Qin Shi Huang (YingZheng), who we are familiar with, who swept the Liuhe and looked at the crowd: pacified the world and completed the great unification.
This underground mausoleum is the Lishan Mausoleum. Nearly fifty years have passed since the discovery of this huge imperial tomb underground palace, for various reasons, we have not excavated this imperial tomb, modern advanced technology seems to be helpless to this imperial tomb, this mysterious mausoleum still hides many unsolved mysteries...
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="4" > Qin Shi Huang, see what you have repaired</h1>
The history of the construction of the mausoleum
When it comes to Qin Shi Huang, I believe that in addition to his great achievements as an "emperor through the ages", everyone will think of his notorious cruelty.
On the one hand, he not only achieved great unification, but also unified the system of weights and measures and rules and regulations, and laid the foundation for an authoritarian political system that lasted for more than two thousand years in Chinese history; on the other hand, during his reign, he was impatient in his administration and built a number of large-scale projects, including the Great Wall, Afang Palace, and the Lishan Mausoleum we are going to talk about today, which also made the people's servitude too heavy and miserable.
According to the "History of Qin Shi Huang Benji", the Lishan Mausoleum was built from 247 BC to 208 BC, which lasted 39 years, and even after the death of Qin Shi Huang, it was not completed. And the interesting thing is that Qin Shi Huang took the throne at the age of 13 to his death at the age of 50, and his reign was only 37 years, and the co-authors began to think about building their own graves when they first took the throne as teenagers.
The number of people repairing the tomb exceeded 700,000. Such a huge project of this scale can be said to be unique before Qin Shi Huang, and it should be known that the total population of the Qin Dynasty at that time was only 20 million.
The stone materials used in the repair of the tomb were taken from Zhongshan, Jun'e Mountain and other places in the north of the Weihe River, and were transported to Lintong by hand, and the hardship of the laborers can be imagined. Such an unprecedented act of "building tombs for the whole people" also greatly deepened the people's resentment against the tyranny of the Qin State, leading to the emergence of an uprising movement.
There is also an interesting story that Qin Shi Huang once sent Xu Fu to lead thousands of boys and girls to the east to seek the elixir of immortality. In the pursuit of immortality while overhauling his own mausoleum, Qin Shi Huang can be described as a model of "walking on two legs".
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="6" > huge imperial tomb dungeon</h1>
The first discovery of the imperial tomb
This magnificent Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin was first discovered in 1974 and is located in the area of Xiyang Village in the Lintong District of Xi'an City, Shaanxi Province. At that time, the villagers who dug the well to get water found pottery heads and human bodies in the ground, and later excavated by archaeologists, countless majestic soldier figurines with sharp armor and vivid life were found in the deep pit five meters below the ground.
This is the large-scale terracotta funerary pit that shocked the world. These Qin figurines, which have been buried underground for more than 2,000 years, also reveal the existence of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin.
These terracotta burial pits sit west to east, the three pits are arranged in the shape of "pin", and the total area of the first discovered no. 1 figurine pit has reached a staggering 14,260 square meters, with a depth of 5 meters, and the slope doorways on all four sides are connected with the no. 2 pit and the no. 3 pit. The category includes sergeant figurines, samurai figurines, standing archery figurines, cavalry figurines and horse figurines.
All the pottery figurines are made according to the Qin Army, colored and fired after the shape is processed, and then their respective weapons and equipment are added, and finally the positions are uniformly arranged according to the class and level. Historians speculate that the weapons of the figurines were hand-fired by tens of thousands of craftsmen, without using any molds. It's amazing.
These terracotta pits are located about 1,000 meters east of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin, and the more common saying is that these terracotta warriors are located on the outskirts of the imperial tomb and have the meaning of "shu wei mausoleum". The terracotta warrior burial pits on the periphery alone are enough to call it a miracle that shocked the world, and it is enough to glimpse the grand scale and exquisite layout of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang.
The size and special structure of the imperial tomb
The first comprehensive archaeological survey of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin was in 1962, and through the layout drawings drawn by archaeologists, we can see that the entire imperial tomb is divided into three parts: the inner city, the outer city and the underground palace, and the cemetery covers a total area of 56.25 square kilometers. The tomb is now 51 meters high, with a circumference of more than 1,700 meters at the bottom, and there are two rammed earth city walls inside and outside, which can be seen to be imitated according to the imperial city style of the imperial capital Xianyang.
The burial chamber is rectangular, located in the middle of the underground palace, fifteen meters high, almost the size of a football field. And on such a huge scale, the inside is naturally not empty. There are various palaces built in the Qin Tombs, and a large number of funerary pits and tombs of different forms are distributed around them.
As for the design of the tomb, it is also like the palace, which displays countless rare treasures, and even shows the appearance of a hundred officials in place. This is the case with the "Palace View Hundred Officials And Strange Artifacts Rare and Strange Migration Zang Manzhi" recorded in the "Records of History".
With so many rare treasures, Qin Shi Huang naturally did not want to be stolen by the tomb thieves, so he made many countermeasures. The first is the more common means, he ordered the craftsmen to set up many crossbows in the burial chamber that can be fired automatically ("let the craftsmen make crossbow arrows, and those who penetrate close to them shoot them").
There are also some less common means, such as he used a large amount of mercury to simulate the world's mountains, rivers, lakes and seas, and used mechanisms to make them flow like the real world ("mercury for a hundred rivers and seas, organic instilling, upper astronomy, lower geography"). Mercury has two characteristics of volatile and highly toxic, after volatilization, the mercury vapor in the tomb not only has an antiseptic effect on the corpse and funerary products, but also the highly toxic gas can also effectively resist tomb robbers.
Since the Qin Tombs are located deep underground, this special structure means that the burial chamber needs to be protected from groundwater. Archaeologists have found that there is indeed a huge barrier drainage canal in the ground around the Qinling Underground Palace, the bottom is made of 17 meters thick green paste mud, which is extremely waterproof, and the upper part is made of 84 meters wide loess, which is extremely large.
Such a drainage channel just blocks the infiltration of groundwater from high to low, effectively protecting the burial chamber from flooding. According to Duan Qingbo, the leader of the archaeological team of the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing today is only using this way to solve the problem of flooding, which makes people have to admire the wisdom of their predecessors.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="8" > so why haven't you excavated after so many years? </h1>
The next is the question that everyone is most concerned about, from the confirmation of the existence of the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum to today has been almost 50 years, why not carry out the excavation of the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum?
We may wish to answer this question from the historical lessons of the Ming Ding Mausoleum.
The tragedy of the Ming Tombs
Dingling Xuangong is the first and only imperial mausoleum excavated in the Ming Tombs, with a total area of 1195 square meters and more than 3,000 cultural relics. With the approval of the State Council, the trial excavation began in mid-May 1956 with the "trench exploration method", and two years later, in July 1958, the Ming Ding Mausoleum completed the clean-up work and began to open to the public in October of the following year.
This is a beautiful thing, but unfortunately the good times are not long. Due to the backwardness of technology, a large number of cultural relics unearthed cannot be preserved, especially cultural relics such as silk fabrics, which quickly harden and decay after contact with air in a large area. More than 3,000 precious cultural relics have been preserved, which can be described as a major loss in the history of world archaeology.
It is precisely because of this lesson that the Chinese archaeological community has a new rule: do not take the initiative to excavate the tombs of emperors.
The particularity of cultural relics and the limitations of science and technology
Since the discovery of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin, scholars have been arguing endlessly about whether to excavate or not. The excavation school believes that the Qinling Tombs are in the seismic zone, and timely excavation may be able to protect cultural relics from earthquake damage, and the Qinling Underground Palace is a tourism resource with extremely economic value;
The opposing side's view is more convincing, because the current level of science and technology cannot cope with such a huge scale of the Qinling Underground Palace, not only has the tragic lessons of the Ming Ding Mausoleum, but also has made many mistakes in the previous terracotta warriors.
When the Terracotta Warriors were first unearthed, they had a variety of bright colors, which were roughly divided into more than ten colors such as purple, black, red and green, of which "Han Zi" attracted the world's attention because of its bright color. However, after the excavation, less than five minutes after contact with the air, the color of the faience began to oxidize and fall off, and the large-scale faience figurines became the earth color we now know, which is really regrettable.
In the 2009 Sino-German cooperation "Painted Protection Technology" project, scientists successfully preserved the color of the unearthed figurines, but this technology can not be widely and quickly applied to multiple figurines, in the face of the still unexposed terracotta burial pits around the Qin Tomb and a large number of terracotta warriors, this technology is still inadequate.
In addition to the well-known terracotta warriors, there are certainly countless rare treasures in the imperial tomb that are difficult to preserve with modern technology. Metal objects such as jade and gold, silver and bronze can also have a certain resistance to oxygen, but cultural relics containing a lot of organic matter, such as iron, silk and paper, are highly susceptible.
And the most regrettable is the bamboo relics such as wood, because bamboo relics such as "Yunmeng Sleeping Tiger Land Qin Jian" have always been our first-hand materials for understanding the real history, and the handwriting on it will disappear after oxidation discoloration, and whether it is temperature, humidity and oxygen content changes, it will cause chemical reactions to cause oxidation.
Because of this, plain gauze tunics like those unearthed in the Mawang pile will appear precious, and the good closure of the storage location and the burial chamber will allow it to be preserved.
In such a large-scale Qinling Underground Palace, there must be thousands of similar silk fabrics, but because there is no good closure in the spatial structure, the modern technology of preserving cultural relics is far from catching up with the speed of oxidation of cultural relics, let alone the repairs behind.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" Data-track="10" What are the mysteries of the imperial tomb >? </h1>
There are still many unsolved mysteries in the vast Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, some of which are about qin shi huang himself in the main history and wild history, and some of which come from the structure of the imperial tomb itself, which also cast a mysterious color on the royal tomb.
Has the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin ever been stolen?
With the popularity of tomb robbery literature, film and television works in recent years, more and more people have begun to pay attention to this mysterious tomb of the Qin Emperor. The mausoleum is extremely anti-theft: the underground palace part of the mausoleum is not only located deep underground but also protected by layers of walls, and only two hidden burial passages with three heavy stone doors lead to the burial chamber, not to mention various mechanisms and deadly mercury.
But in both history and modern times, countless tomb robbers have robbed tombs out of the pursuit of money or fame. The large number of burglary holes found by archaeologists on the ground of the imperial tomb is a good proof.
Among these thieves, the most famous is Xiang Yu, the king of Western Chu, but his motivation may be more out of revenge for Qin Shi Huang.
According to Li Daoyuan in the "Notes on the Water Classics", "Xiang Yu entered the Guanfa Zhi, with 300,000 people, thirty days of transport can not be poor." Kanto thieves pin copper. According to the saying, Xiang Yu had brought 300,000 soldiers to excavate the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang and take away a large number of treasures. In the archaeological excavation of the Terracotta Pit in 2012, archaeologists did find a large number of traces of fire, flooding and knife splitting in the pit.
There are two different voices in the archaeological community, one view is that the tomb robbers led by Xiang Yu have only been in the above ground part of the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum from beginning to end, and the underground palace hidden deep underground has not been stolen and excavated from beginning to end, so Xiang Yu and others have not found a passage into the underground, but only excavated the above ground part and the terracotta warrior burial pit, on the grounds that the currently discovered robbery cave has not been excavated below the sealed mound, the soil structure is also intact, and the abnormal mercury content around the underground palace also indicates that there is a large amount of mercury underground. If stolen and excavated, mercury will volatilize.
The opposing side believes that the mercury content does not explain anything, even if the mercury content in the ground after the theft and excavation will still be very high, and the large-scale tomb robbery from ancient times to the present is still not a minority, and the hidden Yongdao may have been discovered long ago.
An astonishing number of martyrs
China's feudal history has always had the custom of human martyrdom, especially due to the feudal concept of male superiority and female inferiority at that time, which led to the emergence of female martyrdom, and the tragic "female burial" became very common.
When Qin Shi Huang unified the Six Kingdoms, he took the harem of the Six Kingdoms as his own, but his harem was not recorded too much after his death, so many people inferred that his harem was also buried together. In the excavation of the funeral pit, a large number of mass burial bones were indeed found, and the bones were mutilated and mostly young women.
Among the 188 funerary pits currently found in the Mausoleum of The First Emperor of Qin, the area with the largest concentration of graves is the small cemetery in the mausoleum, of which 99 are small tombs pointing to the sealing mound, and only more than a dozen of these small tombs have been excavated so far. These tragic and staggering numbers of female bones may be just the tip of the iceberg in the number of real martyrdoms.
Folklore
The complex and huge structure of the Qinling Underground Palace and countless rare treasures have aroused countless reverie, many of which sound mysterious and mysterious folklore, although there are obvious signs of re-creation leading to low credibility, but the source of these deeds is indeed relevant historical records.
Legend has it that when Xiang Yu excavated the imperial tomb, the soldiers opened the underground palace (although it has not been confirmed now), saw a golden goose flying out of it, and flew all the way south, and in the later records of the "Three Auxiliary Stories", this golden goose was found in vietnam during the Three Kingdoms period...
There are countless legends about the underground palace, and Sima Qian once recorded in the "Records of History" that the mountains, rivers, lakes and seas made of mercury in the underground palace mentioned that "with mermaid paste as a candle, the degree of immortality is long." "The unique lighting material "Mermaid Paste".
There have always been many different views on what mermaid paste is, some people think that the so-called mermaid paste is actually whale fat, some people think that mermaid paste is actually made of dead people, and even some people think that it comes from the unique creature "Fish Man" in the Zhiwei novel.
Although most of these folklore are created by people and have little credibility, they are enough to see that people are attracted by the mysterious color of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="12" ends ></h1>
The discovery of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin can be said to be one of the largest archaeological discoveries in the world in the last century, and the terracotta warriors and horses burial pits on the periphery alone are the wonders of the world that shocked China and foreign countries, and even if we imagine it, we can roughly understand the shock of people when the entire imperial tomb is displayed in front of the world.
The mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, especially the mysterious underground palace where countless mysteries are buried, has an immeasurable impact on archaeology after successful excavation.
However, in today's technical level is not enough to protect those precious cultural relics, if there is no guarantee that cultural relics can be better preserved than in the underground but rushed to excavate, then the ensuing result will be damage and destruction, the mistakes of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses and the Ming Ding Mausoleum always remind us of this. Perhaps it is also a good ending to let those mysteries of history sleep deep in the underground.