The Mountains stretch like a dark screen under the northern sky, and in front of the mountains are flat yellow land, scattered with villages, farmland and orchards.
This is the place where the Zhou people lived before the destruction of the Shang, Zhou Yuan. It is located at the western end of the Guanzhong Basin, spanning qishan and Fufeng counties, where archaeologists have excavated a large number of late Shang and Western Zhou dynasty sites for decades, including many bronze heavy objects.
The homes of ancient historical figures rarely have the opportunity to be excavated by archaeology, or even if they are excavated, we lack corresponding records, such as the Excavation of Many Palace Sites in yin ruins, but it is impossible to determine which building the Shang kings lived in. Then to the Qin Emperor Han Wu and the Tang Emperor Song Zu, we cannot identify which hall they lived in at the archaeological site.
Only King Wen of Zhou is a special case, a legendary figure who was imprisoned by the King of Shang in ancient history and historical novels and deduced the sixty-four gua "Zhou Yi". In 1976, his mansion in Zhouyuan was completely excavated- the foundation site of fengchi village in Qishan County, which included a complex information far beyond the imagination of the author of "Fengshen Yanyi".
On a rainy day in early spring, the author and Professor Wang Xianghui of Shaanxi Normal University visited this residential house more than 3,000 years ago. It has not been shown for development and is locked deep in the red brick courtyard walls of the countryside.
This article is from B08-B09 of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's December 31 issue "I Dig for Antiquities in China: A Hundred Years of Chinese Archaeology".
Zhou Yuan unearthed oracle bones, the last of which has "Emperor Wu of Yi".
The patriarch's quadrangle
The base camp of the "Business Extermination Plan"
Like most palace buildings in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the Fengyan Village Group A building, the Wenwang Mansion, was also rammed with loess to form the entire courtyard foundation, the rammed earth platform foundation was about 1.3 meters thick, and the walls were also rammed earth, 0.6-1 meters thick.
Fengyan Village Group A Building - Restoration Section of King Wen's Mansion.
The courtyard as a whole is a two-into-four courtyard structure, sitting north and facing south, 32.5 meters wide from east to west, 45 meters long from north to south, with a total area of 1469 square meters, equivalent to three standard basketball courts juxtaposed. The entire group of buildings has three rows of houses, two courtyards and east and west wings, and there is a shadow wall outside the gate. The indoor floor, wall and roof are coated with 1 cm thick white ash mortar.
The first row to the south is the concierge, where the greeter and guard are housed. The doorway is 3 meters wide, barely allowing access to a carriage, but considering the shadow wall outside the gate, there should be very few carriage admissions. There is also a small door between the concierge and the east and west compartments to facilitate the family to enter and leave the hospital.
Entering the gate is the front yard, flanked by the box room, the courtyard three steps lead to the main hall, the main hall is the place where the patriarch usually discusses and receives guests, and many major events of the Zhou clan are planned here. The south-facing side of the main hall may have no walls, only wooden columns, forming an open hall, and when there are more people, they can gather in the front yard and listen to the patriarch standing under the eaves.
Behind the main hall, a corridor divides the east and west courtyards, and the north room (back room) and the east and west wing rooms surround the small courtyard, which is the living place of the patriarch's family.
On the east and west sides of the courtyard are two rows of boxes, each with 8 rooms, the depth is 2.6 meters, and the use area is between 11 and 16 square meters, which is not large. Both kitchens are in the east wing, one is in the south from the third, facing the front yard, one is in the north from the second, facing the backyard, and there is a stove pit about 1 meter wide in the kitchen.
There are sewer pipes in both the front yard and the back yard that lead to the outside of the yard to drain the rainwater. The front yard is made of 6 ceramic drainage pipes with a sleeve, which runs through the underground of the east gatehouse to the outside of the courtyard; the backyard is a stone sewer that runs through the underground of the east wing.
On the whole, this mansion is surrounded and closed on all sides, and there are shadow walls to block the outside line of sight, attach great importance to privacy, and there are inconspicuous east and west doors to facilitate access, low-key, prudent, private, convenient, these are called the model of Chinese residences in later generations.
The excavation site of the "Wenwang Mansion" is from south to north, and the mountainous area in the north is Qishan Mountain. The square columns of the excavation site are not ancient ruins, but rather partition beams reserved for viewing the formations.
The house seems to be very large, but when you look at it in person, you will feel that it is still a bit cramped, because most of the houses are relatively small. Considering that King Wen had at least a dozen sons, plus his daughters would have about thirty people, plus more than one wife and domestic servants, the mansion was difficult to accommodate, and adult children may have another place to live.
Scholars have different opinions on the time of the completion of the Group A building, and some people believe that it was built in the early Western Zhou Dynasty, when King Wen was naturally no longer alive. Carbon dating of the wooden components of the house shows that the construction time was about 1095 BC, half a century before the Zhou Dynasty, when King Wen was still young, he may have built this new family house for marriage, and the sons of King Wu of Zhou and the Duke of Zhou were born in this house.
In the generation of King Wen's grandfather, the Zhou people migrated from the mountains of northern Shaanxi, settled in Zhouyuan and submitted to the Shang Dynasty, and had been three generations by the time of King Wen. In King Wen's youth, Zhou was still only a small tribe in the central and western part of Guan, under the jurisdiction of the merchant prince Chongguo— the famous Chonghou Tiger Kingdom in the Fengshen Yanyi.
The capital of Chongguo is the site of Lao Niupo on the eastern outskirts of Xi'an, where the tombs have tragic martyrdom, some of which have as many as 10 martyrs, and the garbage pit next to the house is scattered with bones or dismembered human bones. Shang culture is cruel and murderous, and the Zhou people of King Wen should have personally experienced this.
Compared with the palace room in the Yin Ruins Palace Area, the Fengyan Village Group A building is very small, just a decent courtyard of a Western Tu chieftain, which is very much in line with the scale of the Zhou clan in the youth of King Wen. However, in the humble West Wing and the second room in the south, there are buried secrets that King Wen has been planning for a long time, and his idea of trying to destroy the Shang Dynasty may have been born here.
A secret stall in the cellar
King Wen of Zhou: I was also an accomplice of King Huan
Two cellars were dug under the walls of this compartment, the larger H11 was in the southeast corner of the room, with an opening area of 1.55 ×1 meters, but the bottom was enlarged, which was called a miniature cellar: 1.9 meters deep was dug down, and a hard rammed earth platform foundation of more than one meter thick was dug, and then it extended to the east and west sides, forming a flat bottle-shaped space with a bottom length of 3 meters, a width of 1 meter, and an upward collapse.
H11 pit plane and profile view.
The H11 miniature cellar should have a wooden ladder for people to climb up and down, and the entrance may be covered with wooden planks and other shelters. More than 17,000 pieces of oracle bones were unearthed in the cellar, although the number is large, but they are all small pieces of scattered pieces, the vast majority of which are broken turtle shells, of which 282 pieces are engraved.
This cellar is not only an oracle bone storage room, but also a secret studio, and a niche the size of a bedside table has been carved out of the earthen wall on the north side, 0.4 meters high from the bottom of the cellar, forming a simple workbench: put the oil lamp in the alcove, sit on the ground, and you can lie in the alcove to divinate and engrave the oracle bone script.
The second cave, H31, is close to the north wall, more hidden, and it was not found when it was first excavated, it is about 1 meter in diameter and about 1.6 meters deep, but it is only stored and cannot accommodate people. There are very few broken oracle bones preserved inside, and several of them have a few moments of prophecy.
Schematic of the position of the two cellars in the West (2) compartment.
Even more secretive and inexplicable than the cellar is the collection of oracle bones inside.
In the Shang Dynasty, basically only the Shang king or crown prince could carve the oracle bone on the divination oracle bone, which was the content and result of the prediction. On the fragments of the tortoiseshell in King Wen's cellar, there are various divination inscriptions, which is an extreme act of transgression.
King Wen's oracle bone inscription imitates the shang king's approach, but it is different. In Yindu, the Shang kings were divination inscriptions on the entire side of the ox shoulder blade and turtle armor, but in the two cellars of the Wen King's mansion, the carved oracle bones were small pieces, the text was extremely small, most of the words were only 1 mm square, as small as corn grains, the notches were thinner than the legs of mosquitoes, and on an oracle bone the size of a thumb cover, more than twenty words could be inscribed, and it was necessary to use at least five times the magnifying glass to distinguish, and the oracle bones of Yin Du were not so subtle.
At the time of the initial excavations, archaeologists did not identify the inscriptional oracle bones, believing that they were just fragments of bone mixed in the dirt. This kind of micro-carved text cannot be rubbed, so the Zhouyuan oracle bones are all enlarged photos, or copied by the organizers against the magnifying glass.
Why do you want to carve the words so nuancedly?
Some scholars have tried to find explanations from the format of the tortoiseshell inscription, but these are not problems in the Yindu oracle bones, and the answer should be found from the actual environment of King Wen.
What King Wen wanted to do was to secretly learn the Theosophical Divination Technique of the Shang King, and even use the divination to find a way to destroy the Shang Dynasty, which was a high-risk work, and once the conspiracy was leaked, not only was he himself doomed, but the entire Zhou clan would be buried with him. Therefore, King Wen had to go into the dark cellar of the West Wing and communicate with the gods in very subtle words. Engraving this kind of micro-carved text requires good vision and superb engraving technology, and we don't know whether it is King Wen himself or a special fortune-teller to do the engraving work.
King Wen paid close attention to the movements of the Shang King. An oracle bone inscription shows that the Shang King went to the "Shuai" land to hunt, and King Wen Buci asked: Is the Shang King's hunt smooth? Three lines of micro-carved small characters as thin as mosquito feet, from left to right, are:
Yi Wang Tian
As for the palate
Wang Yutian?
"Yi" is "Yin", which is also written in Yin's confession. However, the Shang King's own inscriptions were simply called "Wang", never "Yin Wang", which was from the perspective of King Wen of Zhou.
Zhou Yuan oracle bone H11: 3 photo.
The hunting King Yin was supposed to be the King of Shang at the same time as King Wen of Zhou, and as for the location of "Shuai", some researchers believe that in the town of Qiangbai in present-day Dali County, Shaanxi Province, it seems that King Huan had traveled to the Guanzhong region, and King Wen of Zhou paid close attention to the whereabouts of King Huan.
King Wen also once divined where to capture people, and the explanatory text is: "August Xin 卯布曰: His dream qi; to the west, to blame, to get his fifty people?" "The gist is: Divination on the day of August, dreaming of revelation, going to the West without calamity, can you capture fifty people?
Zhouyuan oracle bone H31.3.
Behind this message, there is a secret past of the Zhou state: they once captured the indigenous Qiang people of the Western Lands and paid tribute to the Shang Dynasty and offered sacrifices to the Shang King. This is the reason why the Zhou people were accepted as vassals of the Shang Dynasty and allowed to settle in Zhouyuan. Previous Shang kings, such as the 22nd King Wuding and the 27th King Wuyi, had personally conquered the Guanzhong region to hunt the local Qiang people as human animals, but later, the capture mission became more and more dependent on the vassal State of Zhou. In order to complete the task, King Wen felt very nervous and tried everything to find a means of prediction, even using the revelation of dreams and oracle bone divination.
"Zhou Fangbo"
King Wen of Zhou's "Underground Work"
King Wen of Zhou was once arrested by Shang, imprisoned in Qiuli for several years, and nearly died. However, he was once again appreciated by the King of Yin, and had a period of triumphant spring in Yindu, and the Records of the Zhou Benji records that he was named "Xibo".
The archaeology of Yin Ruins has not found an oracle bone record of Zhou Chang, but it has been found in the residence of King Wen of Zhou Yuan, and there are two pieces. The content of the bu ci is basically similar, to the effect that: (The King of Qiu) first sacrifices the first king, asking whether it should be "Zhou Fangbo"? The results of the divination show that all goes well and that the king will be blessed by the previous king.
Zhouyuan oracle bone H11.82 and H11.84.
H11.84 There is a word after the oracle bone "Zhou Fangbo", which the scholar Chen Quanfang interpreted as (pictured):
Its glyph is one hand grasping a woman, and underneath it is placed a basin of blood, as if it were a way of killing a woman and sacrificing it. Judging from these two pieces of oracle bones, the title given to King Wen by king Huan was "Zhou Fangbo", the hereditary leader of the Zhou state. As for the more advanced "Xi Bo", it may be the self-exaggeration and boasting of the Zhou people, which was later written by Sima Qian in the "Records of History".
In addition, this ceremony should be held in Yindu, so why did they appear in the "WenWang Mansion" in Zhou Yuan?
Some scholars speculate that it should be the envoys of the Shang Dynasty who brought them to Zhou Yuan, announced the decision to canonize them to the Zhou people, and then preserved them by the Zhou people. But this statement may be a bit problematic, because there is never a record of the Shang King giving the oracle bones after divination to his subordinates, and these two pieces are as small as the other oracle bones in King Wen's mansion, and this small character inscription is not only Yin but also not suitable for ceremonial purposes.
The content of these two pieces of oracle bones takes place in Yindu, but the production style is Zhou Yuan. It is likely that King Wen participated in the sacrifice and canonization ceremony in Yindu, witnessed the process of divination and engraving the divination, and King Wen has been trying to obtain the ability of the Shang King to divinate and communicate with the gods, dreaming that he can communicate with the gods and promote the cause of the merchants, so he firmly remembers the entire divination process. After returning to Zhou Yuan, he secretly imitated the whole process, including the engraving of the buci.
In the view of King Wen of Zhou, the complete reproduction of the entire process of sacrifice and divination has mastered the way the merchant communicates with the previous kings and gods, and from then on, he can contact the gods and the first kings of the Shang Dynasty alone. However, when imitating the Shang King's Bu Ci, in order to keep it secret, King Wen still used a very small micro-carved font.
A year before King Wen's death, he led the Zhou people to attack Chongguo and moved the capital to Fengdi (the western suburbs of Xi'an). A few years later, King Wu of Zhou destroyed the merchants and established the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the mansion of King Wen of Zhou had lost its residential function and had become a royal family temple and a memorial hall of King Wen of Zhou. By the end of the Western Zhou Dynasty, the entire building was destroyed by a fire, the collapsed earthen walls and roof fragments were all red bricks after the fire, and the broken oracle bones were kept in the cellar, and they escaped the fire.
The Wen family and the Shang Dynasty had a deep entanglement, and the information provided to us by archaeology is far beyond the scope of knowledge in the history books, which is a far more cruel and complex era than our descendants imagined, and there are still many secrets that have not yet been revealed.
King Wen's mansion did not use people to lay the foundation, nor did it have a killing pit or a randomly thrown bones, which is very different from the merchant site. The Zhou people have never had the custom of blood sacrifice, and the Zhou Dynasty they founded abolished human sacrifice and laid the foundation for the true meaning of Chinese civilization.
In the last episode of "List of Gods" (1990), the King of Lu was defeated, the people rebelled and left, and finally set himself on fire in Lutai. King Wen of Zhou had been plotting for many years to destroy the merchants, and finally his son King Wu had accomplished his great feat.
Author | Li Shuo
Edit | Qingqingzi Li Yang Li Yongbo
Proofreading | Xue Jingning Liu Jun