Late one night in February 1978, a telephone rang in the communication room of the Hubei Museum. Before the staff member who answered the phone spoke, there was only one word on the other end of the phone, so that Tan Wei, who was already the head of the archaeological work at the time, got up from the bed, and then asked all the archaeological team members to stop resting and leave immediately.
It turned out that the phone call came from the Xiangyang Museum of Culture and Museum, and the phone said: "There have been large ancient tombs on the outskirts of SuiXian that have not been mastered in the past." Speaking of which, this tomb was not discovered in 1978, it has been traced as early as five months ago, but it has not been taken seriously.
At that time, in order to expand the houses so that the soldiers could live better, the local garrison arranged for the radar repair station to level the hills to the east. Unexpectedly, when leveling the mountain, a brown soil layer was significantly different from the local surface soil. The other soldiers, though surprised, did not care very much, and continued to focus on construction as a matter of talking.
However, the deputy director does not look at it that way, although his cultural level is not too high, but he likes to read ancient books such as archaeology on weekdays, especially he is very interested in things such as archaeology. When he saw the brown soil layer, he immediately thought of the rammed earth that might be the ancient tomb, and immediately sent someone to report to the county's cultural protection department.
When the cultural experts saw these brown soil layers, they did not think so, and only treated them as ordinary conditions. Since the cultural experts have said this, the soldiers naturally continue to work. However, soon the soldiers reported that more and more rectangular bluestone slabs had been dug up in the area under construction, which was obviously a precursor to the excavation of the tomb.
However, something outrageous happened, and after the deputy director reported it again, he still got the same sentence: "Not an ancient tomb." In this way, construction continued to be carried out in a cross-cutting process of construction and shutdown until February 1978. This time, with the excavation of a rectangular bluestone slab with an area of more than 2 square meters, the deputy director immediately decided not to carry out the construction.
Fortunately, this time, the tomb was not destroyed, because the person who came was Wang Shizhen, the deputy director of the local cultural center. He carefully surveyed the soil quality of the construction site and found that it was 100% ancient tombs, and it was an extremely rare super tomb.
This is the phone call from the previous article, and the tomb also ushered in an archaeological team. After surveying, the ancient tomb covers an area of more than two hundred square meters, but between the north and south tombs there is a robbery cave that can make more than half a person high directly through the burial chamber.
When the team members walked to the depths of the cave entrance, they found that the burial chamber had already been scattered and there were puddles several meters deep. Could it be that the tomb has been hollowed out by tomb robbers?
Unexpectedly, the water in the burial chamber certainly destroyed the structure of the tomb, but the water several meters deep also protected many burial products from the poisonous hands of tomb robbers to a certain extent. These burial items actually reached more than 15,000 pieces, covering gold, jade, ceremonial utensils, musical instruments, terracotta and so on. Among them, a set of chimes can be called a rare treasure.
This set of 56 chimes, beautiful sound, wide range, three layers hanging on the wooden bell frame, on which is carved inscriptions, recording all kinds of musical events, is a rare instrument in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods.
So, how prominent should the owner of the tomb with so many burial items be?
In fact, from the bones of the tomb owner, there are as many as 300 pieces of gold and jade objects, which can be inferred that it should be the monarch of the princely state level. According to the research of experts, the owner of the tomb should be the Zengguo Monarch B in the Warring States period. And that set of rare chimes also has a name, which is now the famous "ZengHou Yi chimes".
However, to this day, many people are still thinking, why did two experts not be able to see the ancient tomb under such obvious evidence? This question has probably become an unsolved mystery.