Because the recent new round of excavation of Sanxingdui has found a lot of epoch-making things, so the discussion on Sanxingdui has begun to become fierce, especially about the civilization of what period Sanxingdui belongs to, the discussion is even more intense, in many discussions, people have pushed Sanxingdui to the forefront.
With this opportunity, I also intend to study and discuss some problems about Sanxingdui with you, and perhaps analyzing these problems from a historical point of view will make people understand Sanxingdui from another perspective, and I think that will be a good thing.
The discovery of Sanxingdui
In the spring of 1929, Yan Daocheng, a farmer in Guanghan, Sichuan, accidentally found a large pit with more than 300 pieces of jade in it, which quickly attracted the attention of Dong Duyi, a British missionary in Guanghan at that time, who collected some jade and handed them to the West China University Museum for study after circulating in the market.
Ge Weihan, director of the West China University Museum, saw these jades and studied them carefully, and he was surprised to find that these jades were obviously different from the jades unearthed in the past, and there may be more stories behind these jades. In 1934, Ge Weihan specially organized an archaeological team to go to the place where Yan Daocheng found the jade to carry out archaeological excavations, and this excavation lasted a total of 10 days, because there was nothing valuable such as real money and silver, plus the excavation was too difficult, so they hurriedly ended. They finally excavated a huge tomb site, because in the ancient ruins, there are three loess mounds forming a triangular shape, which was named Sanxingdui by Ge Weihan and others.
The excavation ended and did not continue, as for the archaeological results at that time, the most important thing was to find the Sanxingdui and name it, and the rest of the results were too few. Sanxingdui slept silently in Guanghan for nearly three decades, until 1963, when Sanxingdui once again welcomed the arrival of the Chinese archaeological team.
This archaeological excavation did not stop so hastily, but continued for more than 20 years, until the end of the 1980s, of which archaeological discoveries are also very numerous, and thus aroused the heat of Sanxingdui and people's fierce discussion of ancient history and the origin of Chinese culture.
Curiously, since this archaeological excavation, there has been less news about Sanxingdui, and people seem to be deliberately avoiding this problem, and later the excavation of Sanxingdui seems to have stopped. In order to protect the Sanxingdui site, the state built a large-scale museum on sanxingdui, which is the Sanxingdui Museum we see now.
This museum is divided into an internal museum and an external enclosure for protection, of which the internal museum was completed and opened in 1997, and the external protection building was not officially completed until 2015, which shows the huge amount of its work.
Because Sanxingdui has been underground for many years and has not continued to excavate it, many people think that the excavation and archaeology of Sanxingdui may have stopped, and the discussion of Sanxingdui has gradually decreased, and even finally forgotten about Sanxingdui, the third round of excavation of Sanxingdui has quietly begun.
Just a few days ago, the results of the third round of excavations were displayed in front of the world, and the newly unearthed gold masks and bronze sacred trees and other things made people's understanding and interest in Sanxingdui rise again, which has always been considered to be the site of the ancient Shu Kingdom, why is there such a huge sacrifice pit? Why are these things unearthed less and less like the things in the ancient Shu culture?
What period of civilization does Sanxingdui belong to
With people's questions about Sanxingdui, we walk into the long river of history together, to answer it with everyone, according to the existing understanding, sanxingdui spanning the time period of about 2,000 years, the earliest can be traced back to the Xia Dynasty period, the latest can be traced back to the Han Dynasty period, such a huge span of Sanxingdui, in the end should belong to what era of civilization, it is worth us to study carefully.
In the first stage, we based on the time period where Sanxingdui is located and the location of Sichuan. It is inferred that Sanxingdui should belong to the ancient Shu state of Sichuan that followed King Wu of Zhou to destroy the Yin Shang in the Western Zhou Dynasty, because there is indeed a record of such a country in history, but with the appearance of some cultural relics unearthed in Sanxingdui, such as longitudinal people, bronze standing people, and gold masks, golden crutches, etc., we will find that these shapes belong to the images of large eyes, large mouths, and high nose bridges, which are different from our understanding of the ancients of the Chinese nation, and even to some extent similar to some of the ancient shapes unearthed in Egypt.
For this reason, we have a certain doubt about whether Sanxingdui belongs to the ancient Shu Kingdom or to other era civilizations, and then we continue to conduct in-depth research on Sanxingdui, and after we excavated the Tomb of Nühao, which is about 3200 years away from today, we found that the level of craftsmanship of those bronzes excavated in the Tomb of Nüxingdui is far inferior to that of the bronzes excavated in Sanxingdui.
To know that the history of Sanxingdui can be traced back to 4500 years ago, the bronze craftsmanship of this period is already more advanced than the women's good era more than a thousand years later, is there any secret behind this? Especially if the ancient Shu kingdom was so close to the Central Plains, would their technological level be more advanced than that of the more powerful Central Plains?
In other words, when the ancient Shu kingdom followed King Wu of Zhou to destroy the Yin shang, it is reasonable to say that the ancient Shu kingdom was a little brother who followed Zhou Tianzi, and the science and technology of the little brother has surpassed the big brother, and even the scale of the sacrifice pit Sanxingdui has exceeded the scale of the sacrifice pit in the Western Zhou.
With such a question, we continue to return to history, from the perspective of historical development, we will find that in fact, the scale of the sacrifice pit does not represent the level of civilization development, and it can even be said that to some extent, the development of civilization may also lead to the decline of sacrifice culture, for example, we will find that the sacrifice culture of the Yin Shang period is far more than the Western Zhou period, but to say that the degree of civilization development, the Yin Shang period is obviously not as good as the Western Zhou period.
Excessive sacrifice, to some extent, shows that people's understanding of civilization in that period was not enough, especially the use of living people to sacrifice in ancient times, which is a serious manifestation of backwardness and ignorance, and the more civilized the era, the less such a way will be adopted.
From this point of view, as the ancient Shu kingdom that followed King Wu of Zhou to destroy the Yin merchants, it can still be said that it is reasonable to have a sacrifice pit with a larger scale of sacrifice, but the level of craftsmanship of these bronzes in the sacrifice pit is also more advanced than that of the Western Zhou, why is this?
Obviously, this can only show that in the ancient Shu Kingdom, there was a certain degree of civilization integration, and this civilization integration did not come from the civilization integration of the Western Zhou Dynasty, but from the civilization integration of the rest of the times. We have explained the history of Sanxingdui at the beginning, the earliest can be traced back to about 2000 BC, just as we will find that the Shang Dynasty destroyed xia around 1700 BC, and the Xia Dynasty in history existed for about 500 years, that is to say, the history of Sanxingdui should be the earliest in the middle of the Xia Dynasty.
So what was the level of civilization in the middle of the Xia Dynasty or the Xia Dynasty? We can't answer this question for the time being, because the Xia Dynasty is just in a blank stage in the current history, and our cultural relics of the Xia Dynasty or the written records of the Xia Dynasty are relatively blank, that is to say, we do not understand the Xia Dynasty, nor have we unearthed cultural relics related to the Xia Dynasty, and even some people think that the Xia Dynasty does not exist.
From such a point in time and the scale of Sanxingdui, we can boldly speculate that perhaps Sanxingdui belongs to the civilization of the Xia Dynasty, or that the ancient Shu State is actually integrated with the civilization of the Xia Dynasty, as for what kind of coincidence of the fusion, I think it may be that when the Xia Dynasty was destroyed by the Shang Dynasty, some of the remnants of the Xia Dynasty went to the location of the Ancient Shu State and jointly created the country with the indigenous residents of the Ancient Shu State. They used the technology of the Xia Dynasty to create so many advanced bronzes, so it makes more sense.
So why was the technology of the Xia Dynasty more advanced than that of the Western Zhou Or Shang Dynasty? In fact, we may be able to find the answer to this question from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, which for a long time was thought to be actually a book of myths and stories, but after the strange coincidences between the people and the bronze sacred tree and the things described in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, people began to pay attention to this strange book.
In the book describes a lot of things in the Yellow Emperor, Yao Shun and even the Dayu period, these things are full of magic, and the technological advancement it has is far from our imagination, just dayu is actually the founder of the Xia Dynasty, so many advanced technologies in the Dayu period were passed down to the Xia Dynasty, which is a relatively normal historical development, as to why there will be a civilization in the later Yin Shang and Western Zhou Periods, we need to continue to explore slowly.
epilogue
Some people say that the civilization of Sanxingdui may be an alien civilization, in fact, this statement is obviously unreliable, in the ancient period described in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas", it seems to be more high-tech than the alien civilization, so it can be seen that what we can not explain with existing knowledge, may not be what an alien civilization, perhaps in the history of our Chinese civilization, there have long been some very civilized eras, and it has not been known!
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