The custom of thick burials in Chinese history has a long history, and successive princes will spend manpower and financial resources to build mausoleums and underground palaces. In order to prevent their tombs from being invaded by tomb thieves, the ancients buried a lot of organs in the process of designing and building tombs, and filling the tombs with sand is a kind of anti-theft technique.
Jisha Tomb, also known as Jisha Tomb, is a tomb shape system in ancient China that used sand to fill the tomb with sand soil to prevent theft.
The Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology discovered a sand tomb from the Western Han Dynasty at the end of 2004 while cooperating with the capital construction in the southern suburbs of Xi'an. This ancient tomb of about 11 meters deep is a brick chamber tomb with a long slope tomb passage, which is east-west, facing east and back to the west, and the east tomb road is sloped, up to 23 meters long, with an ear chamber on its south side and two side chambers found on its north side. Around the 8-meter-long burial chamber, there is a sand wall about 2 meters wide and about 4 meters high, and the sand layer on the top of the burial chamber is 1.5 meters thick, and above the sand layer is also built a layer of rammed earth up to 7.4 meters thick.
Anti-theft principle of Jisha Tomb:
When the ancients built tombs, they generally excavated an underground space with a depth of more than ten meters and an area of tens or even hundreds of square meters, and after fixing the orientation and orientation of the coffin, what was backfilled was not the excavated soil, but the dry sand, and finally buried with mud to consolidate the surrounding areas of the tomb.
The sand used in the sand tomb is very exquisite, and it must be fried or exposed. Dry sand can keep the ground dry, the body is not easy to decompose; on the other hand, dry sand is like flowing water, extremely fluid, tomb robbers can not dig holes in this soil layer, fill in the fine sand with stones, but also increase the difficulty of tomb robbery.
When the grave robber digs the grave and goes deep into the tomb, the sand will flow from all sides to block the robbery hole, and the stone will be smashed down and the grave robber will be injured and killed.
Jisha tombs were popular from the Warring States to the early Western Han Dynasty, when the noble tombs of that time were reinforced with stones, charcoal was deposited to prevent moisture, sand was accumulated to prevent theft, and the tombs of the Warring States King of Wei in Hui County, Henan Province, and the tomb of Guo Zhuangchu in Shangcai County were all tombs of Jisha.
After the middle and late Western Han Dynasty, due to the gradual disappearance of the vertical cave soil and wood tombs, the sand tombs also gradually disappeared.