The author | cold research author team - Pi Lan read history
Word count: 4076, Reading time: about 8 minutes
Editor's note: Jingo Iron Horse, Pillow Ge Waiting Dan, Reverse Strike... We can often see the shadow of "Ge" in the idioms and idioms related to war, and even the word "Gango" is used to refer to war, which also shows on one side that the weapon "Ge" has a long impact on China's ancient cold weapon war. However, despite this, Ge's glory did not last long, at the latest at the end of the Warring States period, Ge's core position in melee weapons was completely replaced by other weapons, and even the blades such as halberds and hooks evolved from Ge also declined in the following years and gradually became honor guards, so why is this?
To understand this process, it is necessary to tell a detailed account of the evolution of Gough.
The earliest Go can be traced back to the Neolithic Age, when the Go was stony, but due to the oversimplification of the structure, it can only be regarded as an early form. In the Bronze Age, Ge began to come to life, and archaeologists unearthed more than 710 Pieces of Ge at the site of Yin Ruins alone. The oldest surviving bronze ge are two bronze artifacts excavated from the Yanshi Erlitou site in Henan, divided by type, one is a 26 cm long straight nei wu hu ge, and the other is a 32.5 cm long Qu Nei wu hu ge.
"Qu Nei", "Wu Hu", and "Straight Nei" are descriptions of the Go-shape system. According to the appearance, Ge can be roughly divided into 8 categories, namely straight inner no beard, straight inner beard, qu nei no beard, qu inner hu, short brass without hu, short brass with hu, pipe brass without hu, pipe brass with hu eight kinds.
"Ge Yuan" is the blade of the Vertical Extension of the Go Handle, generally speaking, the upper and lower edges need to be opened, coupled with the "front" protruding from the front end, so that Go can peck or push the enemy. Compared with the attack method of the hook peck, "pushing" seems to be somewhat different, but there is "take the one who comes out of it, to push it", and the "Eleventh Year of Zuo Chuan Wengong" also records that "the rich father's nephew chun his throat is to go to the throat and kill it", so it can be seen that pushing is indeed one of the attack methods of Ge.
As opposed to Goyuan, it is the so-called Gone, which mainly plays the role of binding and fixing, making the connection between the Body and the wooden coffin more secure, which is mainly done through the hollow on the metal handle called "wearing". Later, in order to further fix it, a structure called "diaphragm" was added between the aid and the inner, and the upper part of the joint was called the upper appendix and the lower end was the lower appendix.
The lowest end of the aid, known as Hu, at first this part of the role is similar to Gone, through the processing of Go through the binding rope to improve the firmness, to prevent the hook from falling off, but after the Western Zhou, this part of the metal also has to be bladed, can improve the overall lethality of Go, improve the distance of cutting.
As for the "copper", it seems to be a design that was abandoned, the Shang Dynasty and the Zhou Dynasty once appeared for a period of time, the caster casts a round sleeve in the Gone part, and when it is used, the wooden coffin can be directly attached to it, but this installation method is not perfect, the firmness when pushing and pecking at the enemy is still quite acceptable, but once the action of hooking and killing is used, then the Goli and the Go blade are easy to disengage. In actual combat, this is almost fatal.
▲ There is Hu Ge in the bronze excavated from the Guojiazhuang Shang Tomb in Anyang, Henan
The two early bronze goats excavated from the Erlitou Phase III site belong to the "No Hu Ge". The structure is relatively simple, in fact, not only Erlitou, until the early Shang Dynasty, the excavated bronze ge belong to the "no hu ge", that is to say, the ge at this stage due to the lack of hu blade, and the blade and the go handle between the right angle, can not use the lethal killing action, only pecking and pushing two ways of attack. Therefore, although the Ge in this period also belonged to the army's standing weapons, it did not become the standard for most warriors as in the Shang, Zhou, and even in the Spring and Autumn Period, but together with weapons such as spears, axes, and axes, it became a juxtaposed option in combat.
The change in Ge's status occurred in the Shang Dynasty. At this stage, chariots began to appear on the battlefield, "Lü Shi Chunqiu JianXuan": "Cheng Tang with a good car seventy multiplied, will die five thousand people", of course, Lü Buwei's era is several centuries away from the Shang Tang extinction of Xia, if it is only his family's words, the credibility is doubtful, but the "Sima Fa" also mentions many times that the Xia Dynasty is a kind of chariot chariot. In the Shang Dynasty, there were physical chariots unearthed in the shape of a two-horse system, and the number of chariots was directly written into the "Pastoral Oath" when the King of Wu was cutting down the silk.
The author of "A Brief Explanation of the Ge and Field Warfare Methods in the Xia and Shang Periods" believes that with the emergence and maturity of chariots, primitive and chaotic walking melee battles were replaced by more test formations and coordination of vehicle warfare, and the ge, which was conducive to slashing, became the most important melee weapon of the Shang Dynasty.
However, the biggest problem with this speculation is that so far, archaeologists have not been able to excavate any Shang Dynasty long-handled go or Shang Dynasty spear suitable for car warfare, and even many of the early Ge are 80cm, one-handed axes. The length of the long-handled weapon unearthed in the Shang Dynasty is typical of the 140cm spear blade excavated in 1952 in the village of Dasikong in YinXu, which is only 155cm long even after the spearhead is installed, which is slightly higher than the longest bronze gordon excavated in the same period, and this length, used for the common chariot staggered hurdle warfare in the Spring and Autumn Period, seems to be a bit of a child's play. Therefore, most of these bronze ge, which are no more than 150 cm in length, can they really prevail because of car battles, and then affect the ownership of bronze ge in the Shang Dynasty? It is difficult to give a definitive answer to this. On the contrary, in places such as Baoji Zhuyuangou and Beijing Liulihe, among the Zhou Dynasty bronze artifacts unearthed, there are many chariot spears more than 400 cm long. This form also further confirms the statement in the "Record of Examination Workers" that "the chief spear is often four feet, and the spear is three times found".
Even if the speculation that the car war led to the popularity of Ge is not reasonable, it is a fact that from the excavated Bronze Relics of the Shang Dynasty, the frequency of bronze Ge is indeed much higher than that of bronze spears. Leaving aside the tomb of the Shang King, who seems to have a paranoid love for spears in the northwest of Yin Ruins, the number of Ge is at least 40% more than that of spears among the Bronze Weapons of the Zhou Dynasty unearthed today.
This may be related to the increasingly formal and professional way of infantry warfare. The combat methods of the Shang Dynasty army changed compared with the Xia Dynasty, and they were more professional in terms of equipment configuration and training. In 1976, archaeologists excavated a closed Shang Dynasty bronze cellar in the northwest of Xiaozuka Village, Su Village, Baoshan Town, Chenggu County, Shaanxi Province, which speculated that it may have stored military equipment equipped with a Shang Dynasty Hundred, including a large number of bronze masks and shields in addition to 95 Pieces of Ge and its Variants, and 282 Pieces of Copper Bubbles that could be used to mount on leather breastplates to improve protection. From the reverse analysis of the number of shields and helmets, it is speculated that this hundred-man squad needs to be arranged in a dense combat formation during combat in order to play the protective role of these armors. That is to say, the merchants at this time have begun to rely on dense arrays to fight against the enemy.
In this dense array, the bronze goblet, which is slightly longer than the length of the axe and sword, can play its greatest role. Shielded, they use bronze pecks and pushes at enemies, forcing them to reveal their flaws. Before the Warring States, joining the army was a right, and only nobles and people in the inner circle could enter the army to participate in the war. This means that most of these soldiers who participated in the war were well-trained elites, and in their hands, the all-round weapon of the Bronze Gordon could reveal its hideous face. However, during the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, although it was the peak of the development of Go-class weapons, behind this strength, we should also note that Ge was also adapting to the changes of the times.
▲ Long Beard Blade Nego excavated from the Chu Tomb of Yutai Mountain in Gangneung
Taking the Shang Dynasty as an example, as we said earlier, the early bronze Godot was designed for no beard, although it can be pecked and pushed, but it is not conducive to hooking, in order to increase the harm of the hook killing action, the bronze Ge in the late Shang Dynasty and even the Western Zhou Dynasty gradually developed towards the middle Hu and more wear, on the one hand, to increase the lethality of the hook killing action, while reducing the possibility of the gohead falling off when the hook was killed. This is undoubtedly a huge improvement in the effectiveness of bronze ge, especially for those trained professional soldiers, their hooking action is not two parts, but a force, using the angle of Ge Feng and Hu Bu to drive the horizontal force to cut through human tissue or close leather armor - the damage caused by this cutting is undoubtedly devastating for armorless and leather armor targets.
In addition, although the Shang Dynasty did not unearth a long-handled ge with a length of more than two meters, in the late Spring and Autumn Period, the tomb of the Chu state of Liucheng Bridge in Changsha was excavated, and in the Warring States period, a wooden handle copper gordon with a length of about 1.4 meters was also unearthed. Judging from some excavated bronze illustrations, this kind of go is a more powerful and more aggressive infantry two-handed goat. It can be seen that at least by the Spring and Autumn Period, Ge had already divided two different classifications: car warfare and infantry warfare. It is worth noting that a 91 cm long copper goat has also been excavated from the Chu State Tomb in Liucheng Bridge, Changsha, which shows that those short goats with a length of about 60 to 90 cm have not been eliminated, but continue to exert their power in the way of shield and ge cooperation.
In order to enhance the actual combat effect of Go, the original part of Gone that was not used to fix the blade was also polished to open the blade, so that in battle, even if the target is changed, the soldier can kill and injure the enemy with the gone blade without turning the gone blade. This form of Go is also known as the Long Beard Blade Inner Go, which is also the style of the Go's weapon after it was finalized. But unfortunately, with the increasing popularity of vehicle warfare in the Spring and Autumn Period, the handover of chariots and short soldiers became a norm, in order to seize the opportunity to attack instantaneously when the wrong hub, people began to pay more attention to the length advantage of vehicle warfare weapons, at this point, Ge has never been able to compare with the spear.
Weapons must take into account the problem of flexibility, so their length cannot be increased indefinitely, mainly taking into account the weight of the metal blade on the user's physical limitations. Because of this, the development potential of the spear in length is much higher than that of Go. After all, compared to the spearhead with a simple structure, goo no matter how simplified the structure, its go blade is much heavier, if go and the spear want to make the same length, then its wielding flexibility can not be guaranteed, which is undoubtedly a fatal flaw in car warfare. More importantly, although the attack methods such as slashing and cutting are amazingly lethal to unarmored targets, the lethality of bronze armor and iron armor has always been insufficient, and when people entered the Iron Age from the Bronze Age, the gap in this lethality has not decreased, but has increased day by day. In the face of the lethality gap caused by this structural difference, it is difficult for people to optimize the decline of Go.
▲Guangdong Provincial Museum collection of hun casting halberds
In addition to these changes, Go also spawned a number of variants of weapons. As we are familiar with the "halberd", is also a weapon made of the combination of Ge and spear, in the way of attack, it retains the slashing function of Ge and the stabbing function of the spear, such a combination seems to make the long halberd have the advantages of both weapons of the spear, but in fact, although the halberd gradually replaced the Ge after maturity, and became one of the five soldiers of the Han Dynasty, it did not replace the spear as people expected.
In the late Warring States period, when iron was prevalent, the iron halberd began to eliminate the bronze halberd column army, and one of the biggest features of this new material-made brass-type warrior was its right-angled horizontal branch that was very suitable for hooking and killing the enemy. However, in the face of increasingly protective armor, the attack action of hooking and killing is the same as slashing, and the damage can be caused by weaker and weaker, even if you choose to stab, the horizontal branch of the word may lead to a card blade. So that later, the kind of Bu Zi Ji that was at a ninety degree angle with the spear thorn was gradually replaced by a modified Bu Zi Ji that was upturned by a horizontal branch.
This situation is the same embarrassment that Ge and Ji also face, and the defensive power of protective weapons exceeds the upper limit of the former's attack, so that in the face of these tin cans, these former weapon masters are not as reliable as those seemingly ordinary spears. In a sense, the gradual decline of Ge and Ji is really a "non-war crime".
bibliography:
1. Illustrated Catalogue of Ancient Chinese Combat Weapons
2. Zhang Yanglizheng, "From the Combination of Unearthed Bronze Weapons to the Shang, the Army Equipment and Combat Methods in the Western Zhou Dynasty and Their Evolution"
3. Shi Xiaoting and Tao Weina, "A Brief Explanation of ge and field warfare methods in the Xia Shang period"
4. Zhong Shaoyi, "Jinge Iron Halberd- The History and Tradition of Ancient Chinese Weapons"
This article is the original manuscript of the Cold Weapons Research Institute, the editor-in-chief of the original outline, the author Pi Lan reading history, any media or public account without written authorization shall not be reprinted, violators will be investigated for legal responsibility. Some of the image sources are online, if you have copyright questions, please contact us.