Interpret the key to the rise and fall of Liangzhu civilization
—— "In Search of a Lost Civilization: An Archaeological Record of the Ancient City of Liangzhu" after reading
Author: Chen Yong (Famous archaeologist, consultant of the Research Center for Ancient Civilizations of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
In this sunny July, a new work focusing on the ancient city of Liangzhu may make the reader feel a little calm. It attempts to retrieve the lost civilization of a thousand years ago through the form of archaeological essays.
Maybe it's an opportunity, maybe it's a coincidence, But July is a special month for the author. Three years ago, in July 2019, Liu Bin, a professor at the School of Arts and Archaeology at Zhejiang University, witnessed the inscription of the ruins of the ancient city of Liangzhu in China on the World Heritage List in Baku, Azerbaijan. Fifteen years ago, in July 2007, this archaeologist, who had presided over and participated in the excavation of many major sites, discovered the ancient city of Liangzhu.
Also three years ago, the "Comprehensive Research Report on the Ruins of Liangzhu Ancient City", which was mainly written and organized by him, won the Qian Xuesen Gold Award selected by the Hangzhou International Center for Urban Studies in 2019. The "Comprehensive Research Report on liangzhu ancient city ruins" has become an important academic support for the declaration of liangzhu ancient city ruins as a world cultural heritage because it expounds the authenticity and integrity of the outstanding universal value of liangzhu ancient city ruins.
As a companion to the "Comprehensive Research Report on the Ruins of Liangzhu Ancient City", "In Search of a Lost Civilization" After the ruins of Liangzhu Ancient City became a world cultural heritage, the author Liu Bin used his own archaeological experience to tell readers about the process and heart of Liangzhu Ancient City from ruins to heritage. In the eloquent narrative, the author tells the value of Liangzhu archaeological heritage in a simple and in-depth manner, so that readers can clearly understand the irreplaceable role of archaeological heritage in exploring the origin of Chinese civilization.
It can be said that the concept of the book "In Search of a Lost Civilization" is very clever. Insert a "wedge" between the preface and the table of contents – my Liangzhu archaeological path. Among them, the author reviews the 40 years from the beginning of the study of archaeology in 1981 to the successful application of Liangzhu in 2019. During this period, the establishment of the Liangzhu Site Protection Expert Advisory Committee in 2002 and the preparation of the Liangzhu Site Protection Master Plan were divided into two 20 years. The author has the archaeological experience and thinking of the previous 20 years, and has the familiarity and love for the magical land of Liangzhu, from the living site of the Liangzhu people to the cemetery of the Liangzhu people, from the anti-mountain Liangzhu King Mausoleum to the ancient city of Liangzhu, step by step into the world of the Liangzhu people, into the 5,000-year-old Liangzhu Kingdom. He said affectionately: "Looking back at 5,000 years, this is my fate with Liangzhu and my mission. "On July 6, 2019, the night of the successful application for the liangzhu ancient city site, the excitement made him unable to sleep, so "Tonight I am in Baku" flowed out from under the keyboard, and tonight is destined to be eternal because of you/Liangzhu/Azerbaijan.
"In Search of a Lost Civilization" by Liu Bin, Zhejiang Ancient Books Publishing House
The red clay pot unearthed from Bian Jia Shan is selected from "In Search of a Lost Civilization"
In 2020, Liu Bin became a professor at the School of Art and Archaeology of Zhejiang University and the director of the Museum of Art and Archaeology of Zhejiang University, realizing the transformation of archaeologists into disseminators of cultural heritage – the follow-up to "My Liangzhu Archaeological Road".
The book is designed with ten chapters to tell the story of generations of archaeologists who discovered, studied, and protected the ruins of Liangzhu Ancient City from 1936 to 2021. The author adopts a double-line narrative method, one line narrates archaeological discoveries and thinking, one line describes archaeological research and understanding, one line describes the thoughts and feelings of archaeologists, the three lines are intertwined, narrative and cognition are interlocked, layer by layer, and the reader is brought to the archaeological situation by the author's emotional changes, thus deepening the correct understanding of archaeology.
In the 1920s, soon after the emergence of modern archaeology in China, Chinese scholars raised three questions related to origins: the origin of Chinese, the origin of Chinese culture, and the origin of Chinese civilization. In the past 100 years, Chinese archaeology has discovered and interpreted China's million-year human history, 10,000-year cultural history, and more than 5,000 years of civilization history. The Liangzhu civilization, 5300 years ago, provided one of the oldest sources for the continuity and pluralism of ancient Chinese civilization.
Mr. Zhang Zhongpei, an archaeologist, pointed out in the article "The Age of Liangzhu Culture and its Social Stage - An Example of China's Entry into Civilization in five thousand years" that Liangzhu culture has entered the threshold of civilization, and slave ownership is not the social form of Liangzhu culture that has entered the era of civilization, it has three basic characteristics: First, society is divided into magnates and basic residents, the former is the social master and accumulates wealth from the latter, but the latter is not the slave of the former; Second, the military (king) power and theocracy are equally important; Third, the entities in Liangzhu culture that are controlled by different groups of magnates and have the nature of a state may be called Fang Guo for the time being. Mr. Zhang mainly discussed the historical development stage of Liangzhu society from the aspects of social stratification and power status system, and borrowed the term "Fang Guo" to refer to a regional (Fang) country (state) that is not a "slave occupation system", which pointed out the direction for correctly understanding the nature of Liangzhu society.
According to This understanding of Mr. Zhang Zhongpei, I found that the ancient city of Liangzhu and its peripheral site groups became an early state, which had three basic characteristics: a political society organized by region, a complex social stratification, and a hierarchical system of power. The rotation of royal power and the system of officials constitute the main elements of this hierarchy of power (i.e., the bureaucracy). The early liangzhu state took the ancient city as the core, and the "well" shaped road network in the ancient city, the dual opposition between the palace and the cemetery in the central position, and the functional division of the city, guo and the suburbs and the wild, had the prototype of ancient Chinese urban planning. Large-scale water conservancy projects, rice production, and jade ware production represent the material living standards of Liangzhu society. Taxation, servitude, and etiquette constitute an important means of social control in Liangzhu. Primitive religion and plastic arts reflect the image of wu and the values of hierarchical society, and the hierarchical cosmology, which are the reflections of the existence of Liangzhu society. In this book, Liu Bin adopted what I said in "Interpreting Liangzhu Civilization: The Morphological Characteristics of Early Chinese States and Their Research Paths."
Strictly speaking, archaeology is an empirical discipline. Liu Bin wrote in "Flood Coming" that in the more than ten years of archaeology after the discovery of Liangzhu Ancient City, we gradually realized that around 4200 years ago, the land of more than 1,000 square kilometers where Hangzhou Yuhang was located, the flood was monstrous, and the turbid waves rolled over, so that the flood layer of more than one meter thick was generally left on this land. After the flood, this place is no longer suitable for human habitation, Liangzhu this magical land, in the flood has been sleeping for more than 2,000 years, but left the legend of Dayu Zhishui. If the flood of Yuhang 4200 years ago is understood as the flood of the Dayu era, then the large-scale water conservancy project built by the Liangzhu people 5,000 years ago can be understood as the water control of the Cang era.
Historical documents focus on the urban construction and water conservancy projects before Yu on The two projects are consistent in time. The literature records that the Cang barrier flood and the Yu Dao flood represent two different design concepts of water conservancy projects, which have appeared in history before and after. Documents such as the "Records of History" record the father-son relationship between Cang and Yu, which actually represents two successive periods in history. Liangzhu Ancient City peripheral water conservancy project is located in the north of the ancient city, its main role is to block the flood flowing down from the Dasha Mountain, to ensure the safety of the ancient city, belongs to the barrier type of water conservancy projects, nearly 1000 years earlier than the diversion type of water conservancy projects. Interestingly, the emergence of ancient Chinese civilization is always inseparable from water conservancy projects, and in the water conservancy projects represented by carp, the early civilization of Liangzhu appeared; In the water conservancy project represented by Yu, the Xia civilization appeared.
In October 1990, the Ninth Plenary Session of the International Council on Monuments and Sites adopted the Charter for the Protection and Administration of Archaeological Heritage in Lausanne, Switzerland, which aims to reflect the outstanding universal value of cultural heritage acquired through archaeological means. The document proposes that archaeological heritage is the part of the physical heritage that provides the main information on the basis of archaeological methods, including the various remains of human existence, consisting of sites related to various manifestations of human activity, abandoned structures, various remains (including underground and underwater sites) and various movable cultural materials related to the above. The document also proposes that policies for the protection of archaeological heritage should form an integral part of policies relating to land use, development and planning, as well as cultural environment and education; The active participation of the general public must form an integral part of the policy for the protection of archaeological heritage; The protection of archaeological heritage should be seen as a moral obligation of all humankind and as a collective responsibility of the people. "In Search of a Lost Civilization" uses popular and vivid texts, illustrations and two-dimensional code animations to interpret the heritage value of Liangzhu Ancient City to readers, and this book has made innovative contributions to popularizing scientific archaeological knowledge and cultivating the public's correct understanding of archaeological heritage.
Liu Bin said at the beginning of the last chapter that in the thousands of years after Liangzhu, although the appearance and carrier of culture have changed with the development of the times, the culture and spirit of the Liangzhu people have penetrated into the blood of Chinese civilization.
In his speech at the closing ceremony of the Fifth Annual Conference of the China Jade Culture Center, Mr. Zhang Zhongpei proposed that Chinese jade and jade culture should be examined in the context of Chinese culture as a whole. Based on this, Liu Bin used "The China of Loving Jade" as the end of the book. He started with the most characteristic jade of Liangzhu culture, and introduced more than 9,000 years of Neolithic jade, pre-Qin jade, and jade from the Qin and Han Dynasties, Sui and Tang Dynasties, and Song and Ming Dynasties. It can be considered that jade is an important representative and characteristic of ancient Chinese culture, and from the beginning of its production, it has been inseparably related to people's aesthetic consciousness and spiritual beliefs, so jade has condensed more humanistic and spiritual connotations. He believes that the inheritance and development of jade for more than 9,000 years provides a beautiful clue for us to understand the chinese cultural context.
Since the 1930s, generations of archaeologists have worked too hard to find and watch over the ancient Liangzhu civilization. Wandering in the rational and poetic text of "In Search of a Lost Civilization", I felt as if I were standing on the Chiyao Mountain, looking at the vast starry sky, and felt that 5,000 years was not far away.
Guangming Daily ( 2022.07.23 12 edition)
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily