The Warring States Policy and the Chronicle of History are very famous in history, and there are almost no historical works of the same period that can be compared with them. However, in 1973, archaeologists unearthed a Han Dynasty book in Mawangdui, which was actually a lost "Warring States Zhonghengjia Book", and sima Qian had not read most of the contents of this book. Do you know what's going on? Xiaobian this will reveal the secret for you:
The "Mawangdui Han Tomb" is located in Mawangdui Township, next to the Liuyang River in the eastern suburbs of Changsha, Hunan Province. In historical records, this is the burial place of the nobles in the Western Han Dynasty, and since 1951, archaeologists have been archaeologists in the local area. They only found the remains of the tomb here, and after continuous investigation, they found a large Han Dynasty tomb group here, which alarmed the experts of the Academy of Sciences, but unfortunately the productivity at that time was backward, and they did not have the confidence to excavate the cultural relics in its entirety and protect it. In 1971, there was another construction team building an underground hospital nearby, I did not expect that with the digging depth getting deeper and deeper, the last shovel went down, actually dug out a black hole, the black hole even released a gas, some workers just threw a cigarette butt, the gas ignited a blue fluorescent fire, it looked crazy, the workers talked about it, thinking that this was a "ghost fire", after the news went out, the local archaeological team rushed to come, they understood that this is not a "ghost fire", but an underground tomb. Later, the Hunan Provincial Museum named this Han tomb Mawangdui No. 1 Tomb, and another sealed tomb was named Mawangdui No. 2 Tomb.
From 1972 to 1974, the archaeological team conducted three more archaeological excavations here. They dug up the dark and damp catacombs and found three rectangular vertical caves, the chambers in the tomb were filled with charcoal and white paste mud, and the second tomb was the tomb of Hou Licang, the chancellor of Changsha in the early Han Dynasty. Next to tomb No. 1 is Li Cang's wife, and Tomb No. 3 is Li Cang's son. During the excavation, the archaeological team, although covered in filth, even drilled out with a look of excitement and reported: "We found a well-preserved female corpse!" In addition, in the Mawangdui Mausoleum, a large number of Western Han coffins, silk fabrics, paintings, lacquerware, And Chinese herbal relics of more than 3,000 cultural relics were also found, which completely shocked the archaeological community, and the excavated books were even more subverted by historians' cognition, which was surprising.
Archaeologists have sorted out the contents of the book, including a "Warring States Family Book". I saw that the whole book consisted of twenty-seven chapters, three hundred and twenty-five lines, and more than eleven thousand words. Originally, there was no chapter name, but for the convenience of reading, the later collation team added the chapter name before the interpretation of each chapter. Among them, there are eleven chapters of the Warring States Policy and the Records of History, and the other sixteen chapters are long lost books, not even the Warring States Policy and the Records of History. Therefore, the excavated books can supplement the deficiencies of books such as "Warring States Policy" and "History", and can also correct some of the errors in these books, and I am afraid that Sima Qian will be happy to see them.
This book has given us more history and culture, and has been inspired by the wisdom of power. I hope that with the hard work of archaeologists, more lost ancient books can be discovered, so that the culture of our Chinese civilization can be carried forward.
Wen xiucai, editor-in-chief of Wenlan Hairun Studio, this article is written by: Special history writer: Feng Doudou