The Zhou Yi revolutionary gua said: "The Tangwu revolution is in accordance with the heavens and the people. "The soup here is the shangtang of the first monarch of the Shang Dynasty. Because Xia Jie was absurd and unscrupulous, it provoked the revolt of the people of the whole country. Around 1600 BC, the Shang Tang raised an army, and after the Battle of Mingtiao, destroyed the Xia Dynasty and established the Shang Dynasty. The area of rule roughly included all of present-day Henan Province, Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui, Hubei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and part of Hebei.
In the 629 years before and after the Shang Dynasty (496 years), a total of thirty kings were experienced. The names of these kings are very strange: Tianyi, Waibing, Zhongren, Taijia, Wodin, and so on
This can't help but remind people of the Zhou Yi Sixty-Four Gua invented by emperor Fuxi, thus unveiling the mysterious sacrificial culture of the Shang Dynasty.
On April 12, at the chaizhuang site in Jiyuan, Henan, a large number of treasures from the Shang and Zhou dynasties were found, in addition to the pots, bowls, scoops, and pots (pottery, stone tools, bone tools, mussels, jade, primitive porcelain, and bones) of that era, there was also a rare "Kan" character-type human sacrifice bone.
It is a skeleton with separate heads, and the owner of the skeleton sits on his knees in a pit, as if to tell the traces of the merciless years, as if to accuse a brutal and mysterious era of human sacrifice. Since ancient times Chinese there has been a tradition of sacrifice, and people will slaughter pigs and sheep to worship the gods when they encounter major festivals or major events, and pray for the guidance of the gods.
For ancient merchants, however, the way they sacrificed was somewhat cruel—they would carry the living directly to the altar. At the site of Yin Ruins in Anyang, there are 2,500 sacrificial pits, and the remains of dead people are as many as 14,000.
The sacrifice of the living did not begin in the Shang Dynasty, nor did it stop in the Shang Dynasty, but it was particularly prevalent in the Shang Dynasty. In the Shang Dynasty, there were many ways of living sacrifice, including killing, beheading, burning, throwing water, cutting open the body, removing internal organs, and so on. Among them, the most cruel is to cut open the body and remove the internal organs, and the intestines of a large living person are cut open, and the bloody scene is heinous.
What is even more astonishing is that the objects of the shang dynasty's living sacrifices were carefully selected, and most of them sought pure babies and virgins. The aristocratic rulers were so cold-blooded and ruthless that they did not spare even children and women, which was eerie.
In 1984, a bronze urn was unearthed in the northwest gang sacrifice pit in the Wangling District of Yin Ruins, which is a kind of cooking kitchen utensil that appeared in the late Shang Dynasty, just like the steamer used now, with water underneath and a grate in the middle, and the grate is placed on top of the food that needs to be steamed. Surprisingly, there was a man's skull in this steamer. However, the researchers did not pay much attention to it, believing that the skull used for the sacrifice accidentally fell into the pot during the sacrifice of the merchant, so it was not specifically studied.
Later, in 1999, archaeologists excavated a bronze urn from Tomb No. 1046 of the Liujiazhuang Cemetery in Yin Ruins, which actually had a human skull in the same position. Experts immediately thought of the same bronze urn with a human head unearthed in 1984, is this a necessary phenomenon? What exactly is the connection between the two?
Through the determination of the calcium in the skulls of the two human beings, and the comparison of the calcium of the human bones in other ordinary sacrificial pits, it was found that a large amount of calcium loss occurred in the human skulls in the copper urns, which was basically determined to be caused by a long period of cooking. Further tests were then carried out on the human bone excavated in 1999. Judging by the physique analysis of the skull, as well as the growth and wear of the teeth, this is the head of a flower girl about fifteen years old. The slash marks on the neck indicate that it was cut off from the body and put into a copper urn to be steamed and used to sacrifice the skull.
The discovery completely shocked the researchers.
According to the records of the oracle bones of the late Shang Dynasty, both King Wu Yi and Emperor Yi of the Shang Dynasty carried out many large-scale battles with the human side. The fifteen-year-old girl mentioned above is likely to be the daughter of a leader or nobleman of the human side, who was captured because of the war and was cruelly sacrificed. Usually the captured civilian captives were used for mass slaughter sacrifices, and because of her aristocratic status, the maiden was used as a separate sacrifice, and was buried in the tomb after the sacrifice was completed.
So how did the bloody human sacrifice culture of the Shang Dynasty come into being?
Human sacrifice is roughly divided into the forms of" such as "she, she, altar, and kan".
Among them, the purpose of the "society" is to pray for the abundance of grain; the "show" is a kind of fertility worship; the object of the "altar" sacrifice is the sun; and the object of the "kan" sacrifice is the moon.
Let's talk about the sacrificial culture of the Shang Dynasty
In the early years of the Shang Dynasty, the country experienced severe drought for several consecutive years, the water source was depleted, the field particles were not harvested, and the people were deeply affected, and the Shang Wang Tang decided to personally pray for rain in order to alleviate the drought. So Shang Tang used a very extreme way of sacrifice, set the king + sacrifice + sacrifice three roles in one, Tang outside the royal city a named Sanglin as a sacrifice point, is the history of the famous "Tang Prayer Sanglin".
In the process of sacrifice, Shang Tang said that it is not only necessary to use cattle and sheep as sacrifices, but also to use people to sacrifice to the heavens. Shang Tang was reluctant to sacrifice with his own people, so he cut off his hair and nails, bathed and fasted, and let people surround him with firewood, ready to burn himself to the heavens.
As a result, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the sky was full of winds, lightning and thunder, and a heavy rain fell from the sky, and the people were no longer short of water, so they achieved a great harvest.
In the early and middle periods of the Shang Dynasty, such as the Shang Tang King and the Wuding King, there was a great reverence for the gods, and everything had to be sacrificed to obtain the will of the gods. According to the "History of Yin Benji", according to legend, the ancestor of the Shang Dynasty was born from the egg of Jian Di swallowing the bird, so the merchants used the bird as a totem.
Later, however, the Shi Ji Yin Benji records a Shang king named Wu Yi, who was killed alive by Tianlei because he wanted to get rid of the restrictions of the divine power on the king's power, so he used a bow and arrow to "shoot the sky" to insult the gods to show authority. It is believed that Wu Yi angered the gods, and was punished by heaven, so the fear of the gods deepened, and at the same time strengthened the intensity of the sacrifice of the living.
During the Shang Dynasty, the dynasty itself regarded "sacrifice" as an honor, so much so that the Shang people were cattle in fangguo, and they hand-picked Fang Guozhou to provide them with human sacrifices for the living. However, the Zhou Dynasty people did not think so, and the Zhou people rose up to resist the brutal rule of the merchants, and eventually in the belt of Jiang Ziya and King Wu of Zhou