We know that one of the sins of the King of Shangyi who was criticized by people was that he sacrificed with living people, but in the history of the Shang Dynasty, there are many records of the sacrifice of living people, and the King of Shangsu is still the least sacrificed among them. In the archaeological work of a place in the modern Yin Ruins, it was found that the shang dynasty living sacrifice can find a complete corpse is 3684 people, those who can not find the complete body is even more unable to restore, but the initial estimate is about 4,000 people, then the shang dynasty living sacrifice is really a norm? Or is it the habit of individual emperors?
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According to the data of dannian Yin Ruins archaeology, the entire Yin Ruins is only 36 square kilometers, and so many martyrs have appeared. At the same time, there are 1350 pieces of buci that record human sacrifices, 1992 bu ci, in the More famous Wuding period of the Shang Dynasty, there are 673 pieces of oracle bones that record the bu ci of human sacrifices alone, a total of 9021 people were sacrificed, which is not to mention that there are 531 times there is no record of specific numbers. During the Wuding period, more than 500 slaves were sacrificed at a time, and on average, 0.6 people were sent to sacrifice every day during the 42 years of Wuding's reign.
However, the custom of treating the living sacrifices has always been a decreasing trend, Wu Ding is considered to be the emperor of the early Yin Shang, and in the middle period, the number of people sacrificed with living people has been reduced to 1950 people, 189 times, and in the Shang Dynasty, 75 people were sacrificed with people and livestock, and in addition, there were 29 times without saying the specific number of sacrifices. This actually shows that the Shang Dynasty has actually been abandoning this bad habit, but it has not been abandoned, and even in the Zhou Dynasty, this situation is continuing, and many archaeological discoveries show that there are still people sacrificing during the Zhou Dynasty.
At this time, some people also proposed that the Shang Dynasty was not a dynasty established by the cannibals, otherwise how could there be so many slaves in the early Shang Dynasty. This kind of thinking is actually completely unnecessary, it is true that some places in later generations have the custom of cannibalism, such as in the "Mozi" that there is a country that eats people in the south of the Chu Kingdom, but this situation is more like an extension of witchcraft, they take the eldest son as the target, rather than the enemy or slave as the target, because they think that the blood of the eldest son is not clean, that is, that the eldest son is the reincarnation of the enemy, as long as you kill him, you can make the family grow better, which is to put it bluntly, it is a strange way of thinking in the ancient feudal superstition period.
In ancient times, there were indeed cannibals, but the most fundamental reason was that people lacked food in ancient times, and agricultural production was not something that everyone mastered, just like animals hunting each other, and people at that time were high-level animals that had not yet fully flowered. However, by the time of the Shang Dynasty, this situation had rarely existed, and even if there were any, it was as mentioned above, an activity carried out by some superstitious gods and spirit tribes, so the idea that the merchants were cannibals was very problematic.