The Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses are a major miracle in the history of Chinese archaeology, which makes the Qin State appear in front of the world for the first time in the image of a specific physical object.
Terracotta Warriors
After the advent of the Qin Terracotta Warriors, the archaeological community had more curiosity about the Qin State, which in turn set off a wave of searching for Qin tombs.
The Qin Terracotta Warriors appeared in Shaanxi, which was also the main residence of the Qin people, so the scope of ancient tombs was still concentrated in Shaanxi Province.
In 1976, with the help of villagers, the archaeological team finally discovered an area where the tomb was suspected to be located. After a series of explorations, the team was shocked.
In front of the archaeological team is a huge ancient tomb belonging to the Qin State. The identity of the owner of the tomb is extremely noble, and his coffin even uses the rare "yellow intestine inscription".
Yellow intestines are asked
In addition to the rare coffins, 186 accompanying people appear in the tomb. Such a large number of martyrs cannot but be shocking.
Who is the owner of this giant tomb? What is his identity to have such a large number of funerals? What does "yellow intestine" mean? Next, let's lift the mystery of this giant tomb together.
The tomb first appeared
In 1975, a year after the advent of the Terracotta Warriors, an archaeological team from the Shaanxi Archaeological Research Institute came to Fengxiang County, Shaanxi Province. Fengxiang County was once part of Yongcheng, one of the capitals of the Qin state.
The State of Qin was founded in Xigouqiu, and after investigation by archaeologists, Xigouqiu should belong to today's Gansu Province. Gansu Province was definitely not a rich region at that time, on the contrary, the environment was harsh, the wind and sand were full of sand, and from time to time it was possible to be invaded by foreigners, so the life of the Qin people there could be described as very difficult.
Graph source network
The State of Qin was initially a vassal state of the Zhou Dynasty, so it was always subject to the constraints of the Zhou Dynasty. It was not until the time of King Zhou Ping that the dynasty declined and king Zhou Ping moved the capital to Luoyang, and the Qin state moved the capital with the Zhou Dynasty, and finally came to Yongcheng in present-day Shaanxi Province.
The environment of Yongcheng is much better than that of The West Dog Hill, and the Qin people can finally thrive on this land.
The State of Qin experienced thirteen monarchs in Yongcheng, and even qin shi huang, who is familiar to us, also performed the coronation ceremony in Yongcheng, thus opening his own dynasty.
Therefore, if you want to find the Qin tomb, Shaanxi is an absolutely unavoidable place.
The shaanxi research institute archaeology team searched in Fengxiang County for nearly a year, but there was no effective harvest. Just when they were a little discouraged, someone from Nanzhi Village came to provide clues.
It turned out that there had always been a very strange piece of land in the south command village. The soil on this land is hard, and if you use ordinary agricultural tools to cultivate, it will not be long before the farm tools will be damaged. Even if the seeds are successfully sown, it is difficult to have a good harvest.
The villagers of Nanzhi Village also tried many ways to make the land suitable for cultivation, but they have not been successful. Over time, the land in Nanzhi Village was shelved.
The news that the archaeological team was looking for ancient tombs in Fengxiang County was not a secret, so the villagers of Nanzhi Village also knew the news.
The development of the Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses has driven the local economy, so the villagers of Nanzhi Village also hope to have such an ancient tomb worth developing in their village. With this in mind, they also actively began to search in the village of Nandi. Soon, they set their sights on the hard and unsuitable soil.
The villagers of Nanzhi Village reported the news to the archaeological team, and the archaeological team quickly arrived at Nanzhi Village.
The archaeologists took out professional equipment and sampled the soil of the land. After the first shovel of soil was shoveled up, the archaeologists immediately found the clue.
It turned out that this hard soil turned out to be rammed earth, and what was even more peculiar was that there were faintly visible blood marks in the soil.
Rammed earth
The five-flower rammed earth is a kind of artificial mature soil formed by manual ramming, which generally appears near the ruins of tombs or city walls, so archaeologists can easily identify it.
The rammed earth and blood stains appear here, so the ancient tomb that the archaeological team is looking for must be nearby.
Archaeologists have further explored the surrounding soil, the coverage of the five-flower rammed earth is very wide, such a vast area, such a solid soil, by no means a few people can complete, so the ancient tomb buried under this land must not be an ordinary ancient tomb.
The archaeologists stationed themselves on the land with excitement.
After a period of surveying, the archaeologists roughly determined the scope of the underground tomb, and the area of this tomb was greatly unexpected by them.
After detection, this ancient tomb as a whole has the shape of the word "Zhong", and its area is about 5300 square meters! 5,300 square meters looks like just a number, but it is equivalent to 15 Mawangdui No. 1 Tombs, 13 Hai xiahou tombs or 12 standard basketball courts!
Qinjing Cemetery
Such an area is almost equivalent to a small city in ancient times, but such a huge area is only an ancient tomb. The archaeologists couldn't help but start to look forward to what kind of surprises this ancient tomb would bring them.
In 1976, the archaeological tools were still very rudimentary, and the archaeologists could only take the most ordinary shovels and start a little excavation of this huge tomb.
This digging is ten years.
Probe mining
From 1976 to 1986, the archaeologists worked tirelessly to develop the tombs, but in the process of developing them, they found 240 robbery holes.
Robbery hole
These robbery caves cover almost the entire tomb, and according to the habits of tomb robbers, most of the funerary items in this tomb have long been stolen by them.
These 240 holes hit the confidence of the archaeologists hard, but their profession made them refuse to give up easily. There are always some large cultural relics that the tomb robbers can't transport, so this giant tomb is still very necessary to continue to develop.
With the unremitting efforts of the archaeologists, this ancient tomb was finally displayed in front of the world little by little.
The tomb as a whole is nearly 24 meters high, divided into three layers in the shape of an inverted pyramid, and has a two-story platform at a distance of more than ten meters.
It was at the site of this second platform that the archaeologists found a skull.
The owner of this skull should have been very frightened before he died, his mouth was wide open, and the fear that arose from his imminent death seemed to be fully revealed through the skull a thousand years later.
The archaeological team soon found many new human bones around the skull, some arms, some thighs, some bones intact, some bones were brutally broken.
The archaeological team made a puzzle of all the bones dug up nearby, and on this two-story platform, there were exactly 20 human bones.
They had no coffins, not even straw mats to wrap the bodies in. Some of them did not resist and were easily killed, and some of them resisted, so they were cut off their hands and feet and then killed.
Human life is really cheap here.
After the bones were dug up, the blood marks found by the previous archaeological team in the soil were also explained. It was the blood of these tragically dead people, the last struggle they left for the world.
The team continued to dig downwards, soon digging to the lowest level. Here, archaeologists found 166 bones in different coffins.
These bones belonged to people of different ages and genders, some of them were close to the tomb owner, some were the servants of the tomb owner, but they all faced the tomb owner without exception, bowed their heads, and bowed their knees in a bowed manner, in order to show their devotion and respect for the tomb owner.
These people did not voluntarily kneel here and wait for death before they died.
Archaeologists have found large amounts of mercury in their hair. Because mercury is a highly toxic substance, it can be inferred that these people were either voluntarily or forced to take poison during their lifetime, and were artificially placed in a kneeling posture after death.
Bones are buried in the tomb
The "treatment" of the 166 bones is also not exactly the same. The outermost 94 coffins belong to low-status slaves, whose coffins are small and thin, and the archaeological community calls such people "box martyrdom". The 72 coffins on the inside near the main coffin are larger and thicker, and the coffins are buried with the concubines or close subjects of the tomb owner. This category is called "box martyrdom".
Ironically, however, the archaeologists found a dog in the coffin of the box martyrdom. Those who were buried on the periphery were no more than a dog.
It is not difficult to see from the two names of "box martyrdom" and "box martyrdom" that these 166 corpses belong to martyrdom. Although these people also lost their lives, also died in an involuntary way, and were even forcibly divided into three, six, and nine, they still had a higher status than the 20 human bones found on the second floor.
Box martyrdom
The 20 human bones on the second floor did not even have a coffin, and after they died, they were hastily thrown into the dirt, and after turning into white bones, it was difficult to maintain a normal human skeleton, these 20 people, known as "human animals".
As the name suggests, human animals are replaced by livestock. The worshippers of the tomb owner believed that chickens, ducks, cattle and sheep could not satisfy the dead, so they specially prepared a group of people for him to replace the livestock.
Most of the animals were slaves or prisoners of war before they died, and their treatment before they died was not good, and they could not be at peace after death.
Archaeologists found a total of 186 people buried in this huge tomb. In an era when the population was not very large, this number was still shocking.
The system of burial by people was already very popular during the Shang Dynasty. At that time, people thought that martyrdom was a very ordinary thing, and although everyone did not want to be the one forced to be martyred, it did not prevent them from pushing others to be martyred.
The burial of the living
The system of martyrdom rose and fell several times during the feudal dynasty, and was not gradually abolished until the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty.
For the owner of this ancient tomb, the more people are martyred, the more they can prove his status, but in the eyes of modern people, they can only feel cruel.
After 166 coffins, the main coffin was placed, and the archaeologists spent ten years finally arriving in front of the main coffin, the owner of the tomb was close at hand, and his identity was finally to be revealed.
Look for the owner of the tomb
The main coffin is huge, covering an area of 90 square meters alone. The cleaning of the main coffin took a long time for the archaeologists.
The coffin is equivalent to the residence of the owner of the tomb after death, so it is very delicate. The coffin is actually mainly composed of two parts, the outer part is called the rafter, and the inner part is called the coffin. The first thing the archaeologists cleared was the mud around the rafters.
As the millennia of dirt was gradually stripped away, archaeologists found a tombstone with inscriptions on the outer wall of the rafters. Although the information of the owner of the tomb could not be found from this tombstone, it is undeniable that this is definitely the earliest tombstone found in China.
The archaeologists were pleasantly surprised and excited to continue cleaning the main coffin.
As the archaeologists cleaned up, their doubts about the main coffin grew. This huge coffin did not use a single nail, it was all fixed by mortise and mortise, and if you smelled it carefully, you could even smell a hint of fragrance.
After the research of archaeologists, this coffin turned out to be a very rare "yellow intestine inscription"!
Illustration of the yellow intestine
The "Yellow Intestine" requires the best yellow-hearted cypress wood, and only hard wooden cores can be used. In the production, it can only be used with a mortise and tenon structure, and it is necessary to achieve that there is no slightest gap in the connection. This kind of coffin is very challenging to the skills of the workers, and it is usually used by the royal family of the Zhou Dynasty. And even in the tomb of the Zhou Dynasty royal family, it is difficult to see the shadow of the yellow intestine inscription.
Could it be that the owner of this tomb was not a Qin national, but a royal family of the Zhou Dynasty?
With this doubt, the archaeologists finally opened the main coffin. However, to their great disappointment, the tomb robbers did not even let go of this place, and only a section of femur was left in the tomb.
The archaeologists did not give up on this, and they conducted further investigation of the main coffin. This time they found some stone fragments at the bottom of the main coffin.
After research, archaeologists found that these stone fragments are an ancient musical instrument called "stone rock". They put the stone pieces together and were pleasantly surprised to find that the rock was inscribed with an inscription.
Stone Rock
There is a great possibility that the identity of the owner of the tomb can be deciphered.
Experts began cracking the text. Eventually they believed that the inscription recorded a banquet, and that the owner of the tomb was the initiator of the banquet.
In this inscription, the words "Gonghuan is the heir" appear, and it is these four words that unlock the identity of the owner of the tomb.
The meaning of "Gonghuan is the heir" roughly means that the owner of the tomb is the heir of Gonggong and Huangong, and this heir has only one in history, that is, Qin Jinggong. Therefore, it is no accident that the owner of the tomb is this Qin Jinggong.
Qin Jinggong was the 14th monarch of the Qin State, and at this time the national strength of the Qin State was already increasingly prosperous, and judging from the fact that Qin Jinggong actually used the yellow intestine inscription that could only be used by the Zhou Dynasty royal family, the Qin State already had the ambition to replace it at this time.
Statue of Qin Jinggong
At this point, the archaeologists finally have a relatively comprehensive understanding of this giant ancient tomb in Shaanxi.
After a long period of research and conservation, in 1998 the tomb was finally built as a museum for all to visit.
In order to show his status, Qin Jinggong did not hesitate to let 186 people accompany him to the funeral, and even used the yellow intestine inscription that is still rare, which can be imagined how precious his original funeral products should be. However, after a thousand years, all that was left to him was an empty tomb after the frequent invasion of tomb robbers.
Instead of pursuing luxury after death, it is better to enjoy the beauty of life.