160 square meters of rare tombs!
An unheard of tomb appeared in Jing'an, Jiangxi, and 46 young girls were buried naked en masse, and an unknown green "cauliflower" grew on the top of their heads.
Who is the owner of the tomb? What happened to these teenage girls?
What kind of amazing scenes are there in the tomb?
In 2006, a villager in Jing'an, Jiangxi Province, stumbled upon a robbery hole in the mountain and immediately called the police.
The police rushed to the scene after receiving the alarm call, who could have imagined that this investigation would accidentally dig out a huge tomb that shocked the world.
The local police immediately contacted the relevant departments, and then an archaeological team came to the location of the robbery cave, and the archaeologists found some residual wood chips and dirt around the robbery cave, and according to these clues, it was judged that there should be something underneath!
At the same time, the police here are going all out to hunt down the tomb robbers, and after several days of hard work, they have successfully captured three tomb robbers and recovered the cultural relics they stolen.
According to the identification of these recovered cultural relics, archaeologists should be an ancient tomb of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, which has a history of more than 2,000 years.
Considering that the tomb had long been stolen, and that thousands of years had passed, it was not known what had been destroyed inside, the archaeological team applied to its superiors to excavate the tomb.
In 2007, the superiors finally approved the application of the archaeological team, and the archaeologists immediately began to prepare for the excavation, and in the process of excavation, they found that the tomb was far from being as simple as they thought.
The hole that was discovered had been drilled down to 8 meters deep, and it was close to the height of the burial chamber, so before the excavation, archaeologists were very worried that the burial chamber had been destroyed.
According to the detector's detection, this tomb turned out to be a large tomb, and it was still a tomb far beyond normal specifications, with an area of 168 square meters.
Many of the tombs of the ancients were very small, in addition to the imperial tombs, the tombs of many princes and nobles were only a dozen squares, and such a huge tomb as more than 100 square meters was still unheard of.
Who is buried in the tomb?
Originally, it was thought that with the progress of excavation, people could gradually unveil the mystery of the owner of the tomb, but the more they dug down, the more mysteries they would be.
Because before digging into the burial chamber, it was found that the top of the tomb was covered with wooden planks, and the more than 160 square beds were full.
After the tomb cleaning work was basically completed, the scene of the tomb was finally fully presented to everyone.
The entire tomb is perpendicular to the four walls, and the wall surface is also smeared with a layer of green mud, and the tomb is very wide, from the tomb to the bottom of the tomb, it is 4 meters deep.
Some celadon ware and some bronze dings were found in the tomb, and according to the identification of these cultural relics, it was confirmed that this was a tomb in the middle and late Spring and Autumn period.
Just from the specifications of this tomb, it can be known that the identity of the tomb owner is not ordinary, because even if it is the tomb of Zhou Tianzi, it has never seen such a big battle.
When people marveled at who the owner of the tomb really was, in the next excavation process, they found that the surprises and frights for people were far more than that!
An unconventional coffin
The coffin found at the scene frightened the people at the scene.
It is reasonable to say that archaeologists should be accustomed to seeing coffins, why does the discovery of coffins in tombs make archaeologists have such a big reaction?
It turned out that the number of coffins found in the tomb was so large that there were 47 coffins densely packed!
So many coffins have been unearthed in one tomb, which is the first time in the entire history of archaeology that they have been discovered.
More importantly, the archaeologists also have to distinguish whether the owner of the tomb is in these 47 coffins, and if the owner of the tomb is not in it, where did he go?
These 47 coffins look no different at first glance, and it is impossible to distinguish which is the main coffin, and everyone can only choose to find some details from the 47 coffins.
Archaeologists began to clean up the first coffin one by one, carefully distinguishing the clues on the coffin.
Finally, a staff member found some differences when he cleaned up a coffin, which was slightly larger than the others, and could not be seen without looking closely.
Curiously, however, the coffin was not placed in the middle, nor was it placed according to any rank, but was placed on the tomb opening.
During the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, the hierarchy was clear, and the situation in this burial chamber was obviously somewhat uncivilized, and the people at the scene were more curious about the identity of the tomb owner.
After cleaning up the dust on the coffin, some ornaments were found on the side of the coffin, which turned out to be gold and were engraved with a dragon-shaped pattern.
In ancient times, only the Son of Heaven was eligible to use dragon-related motifs, and others were never afraid to use them, so we can get two messages from this ornament alone:
First, this may be the main coffin
Second, the identity of the owner of the tomb is not ordinary, is he a son of heaven?
With such doubts, the archaeologists intend to open the coffin to view.
The tomb has been underground for more than 2,000 years, the coffin is still well preserved, archaeologists carefully opened the coffin, originally full of expectations, but the scene in the coffin was unexpected.
It was no surprise that the coffin was covered with silt, and after the archaeologists cleaned up the silt, they only found a jade pendant inside, and nothing else.
This scene made everyone look at each other, thinking about it was unreasonable, but thinking that there was a robbery hole on the top of this tomb, archaeologists could only speculate that this tomb had been stolen by tomb robbers.
The coffin did not find any useful information, and it was impossible to determine the identity of the owner of the tomb by relying on this jade pendant alone, and in order to get more information, archaeologists could only check other coffins.
Soon, the archaeologists opened a coffin next to it, and found a bamboo fan inside, the coffin was still covered with a lot of silt, and when the archaeologists cleared the silt, they finally saw the exposed skeletons.
However, during the cleanup, archaeologists found a strange phenomenon:
I saw that on a skeleton, a green crystal was found at the top of the head, which was like a cauliflower, and even emitted a brilliant green light.
And when the rest of the coffins were opened next, it was found that many of the skeletons had successively appeared this green crystal, which was scattered in various parts of the skeleton, knees, teeth, and even the inside of the bone cavity.
Archaeologists identified the green crystal and found it to be a substance called ferrous phosphate.
Subsequently, the archaeologists made an appraisal of the bones of these people, but finally they were surprised to find that these were all girls between the ages of 15 and 25.
46 teenage girls who were forced to be buried naked
What is even more surprising is that no textile residue was found around these skeletons, that is, they were all buried naked!
This strange thing has impacted the brains of archaeologists and made everyone puzzled.
In order to unravel the mystery, archaeologists once again started from the 47 coffins to conduct more in-depth research, and this research did have new discoveries.
The found of melon seeds in the skeleton of one of the coffins indicates that the girl had just finished eating the melon when she was dying, and had not yet had time to digest it, which had basically determined that 46 young women were forced to accompany the funeral.
Although this tomb is very large and there are so many women buried with it, there are no cultural relics that can represent the identity of the Son of Heaven.
Although some bronzes have also been excavated, there is nothing too special about these bronzes, and according to the information obtained so far, archaeologists have deduced that this should be the tomb of Xu Guojun.
The 46 girls were buried naked, most likely a kind of funeral system at that time, and the green crystal objects found on their bones should be because they were poisoned before they died.
Over thousands of years, those poisons underwent chemical changes and eventually turned into ferrous phosphate salts.
As for whether they were buried naked, it can only be explained that the status of these 46 women is very low.
At first, archaeologists speculated that these were most likely the concubines favored by Xu Guojun during his lifetime, but soon everyone overturned this argument.
In the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, it was impossible for a woman with a slight status to be buried naked, and even a concubine who was forced to be buried could not be so undignified.
Because no male skeleton was found in the main coffin, it can be speculated that this is only a funerary tomb, and the main tomb of Xu Guojun should still be elsewhere.
With this in mind, archaeologists probed the surrounding terrain, but unfortunately did not detect any traces of tombs.
Just the funeral tombs have such specifications, so it can be basically speculated that the tomb of the real Xu Guojun should also be a very rare specification.
Although archaeologists have painstakingly excavated the tombs, no information has been found that can represent the identity of the owner of the tomb.
As for these currently discovered situations, it can only be speculated that whether the facts are as everyone thinks is, and it will not be confirmed until the real main tomb is found.
More than a decade has passed since the discovery of this tomb, but people have still not found the truth, and the mystery of the tomb will continue to be explored.
This tomb is by far the earliest found in the mainland, the state of preservation is relatively intact, and the most funerary coffin tombs have been found.
The current discoveries have great research value for mainland archaeology, and I believe that in the near future, people will gradually discover more mysteries buried deep in the ground with the advancement of science and technology!