Archaeology is now very common, and we can also see and hear in various television platforms and various media reports, where so-and-so people's tombs have been excavated, and what artifacts have been found. Such reports have long been felt by today's audiences. However, what is found in this tomb today is not ordinary. Archaeologists found an unusual scene in the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, which was by no means a treasure, and even the well-informed experts could not believe it. What exactly is it? Let's move on.
In the entire Qin Gong Cemetery, the largest tomb found and only excavated is the Qin Gong Tomb, so people also call it: Qin Gong No. 1 Tomb.
In this ancient tomb, what is found is not the treasures we hear about every day, but the bones. This may cause the audience to wonder, what is the strange thing to find bones in the tomb? Indeed, there should be bones in the tomb, but the scene of hundreds of corpses and bones is not enough to see in the tomb! So why is there so many bones in this tomb? This brings us to the two funeral rituals of the Qin Dynasty, namely human martyrdom and human sacrifice.
According to records, human martyrdom refers to the burial of a dead clan leader, patriarch, slave owner or feudal lord with a living person. Most of the people who were martyred were close relatives, close subjects, close attendants, and prisoners of war, etc., and some of the martyrs were also voluntary, and their burial was to let the tomb owner still have someone to serve after death.
Of course, there were also slaves who were forced to participate in human martyrdom. Because under the concept of a slave society, slaves themselves are slave owners, even thinking of an object. Therefore, the concept of most people at that time was that if the slave master died, then it would be useless for them to live as slaves, so they would die together.
Moreover, in ancient times, there was also a concept that something was like death and life. That is to say, they believe that after death, people will still live in the same environment as in the yang. So the slave had to go to the funeral with his master.
In the era of class emergence, human martyrdom became a widely popular ancient funerary rite. This is the ugly custom of burying the living in ancient funerals, the product of class confrontation, and at the same time a cruel and barbaric religious act. Among them, there is no specific implementation standard for how many people are martyred at a time, but there is a rough idea. And Mozi also said that after the death of Tianzi, the number of martyrs was as many as hundreds, and the number of martyrs was as small as dozens, and the number of martyrs at the level of general doctor was as many as dozens and as few as a few.
After the discovery of the martyrdom of people with coffins, many human skeletons were found in the tombs, not only did not have a fixed burial style, some were also bound, and some of them were separated, many of them were buried with livestock, which is human animals.
According to records, human animals are gods who were sacrificed to their ancestors like cattle, sheep and pigs during sacrifices. Most of those killed were prisoners of war or slaves.
This ritual is the sacrifice of a person as a sacrifice, or a burial vessel in a tomb, which has appeared in many parts of the ancient world. At the end of primitive society and during the slave society, the killing of living people was sacrificed as sacrifices to ancestors (human ghosts), gods, or everything in nature. It was generally used prisoners of war, young men, women and children of the conquered tribes, or slaves formed from them. The number of human animals used at a time varies from one person to another, generally to several people, dozens of people, and sometimes more.
In this regard, Guo Moruo also wrote in "The Age of Slavery: The Lower Limit of Slavery in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States": "In the Bu Ci, people are often used as sacrifices, and used together with cattle, sheep and dogs... The martyrdoms, the sacrifices of men, and the multitudes or men who ploughed the fields as enumerated above were slaves of the officials. ”
After the excavation, the No. 1 tomb of Qin Gong occupies a total of five of the largest in the history of Chinese archaeology: it is the largest pre-Qin tomb excavated in China so far; the 186 martyrs in the tomb are the tombs that have been found in China since the Western Zhou Dynasty; the cypress wood "yellow intestine inscription" in the rafter room is the highest level of burial tools excavated in China so far in the Zhou and Qin dynasties; the wooden stele on the outside of the two walls of the chamber is the earliest tombstone in the history of Chinese tombs.
Among them, because the tomb has 186 martyrs, The First Tomb of Qin Gong has become the largest number of martyrs found in China since the Western Zhou Dynasty. In the three-story platform of the tomb, there are 166 martyrs, and 20 people and animals buried in the filled soil, so the number of people martyred and human animals is shocking, and it is no wonder that those knowledgeable experts will feel that they can't believe it.
The ancient concept of tombs as if they were alive, and the need for a large number of people to be martyred for this purpose, and the need for human animals as offerings in order to worship the gods, still feel too cruel, fortunately, such customs have not been passed down. I also hope that no more archaeological discoveries will be found that can break the record of the First Tomb of Qin Gong.