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On January 26, archaeologists announced that Tomb 1 of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang had made another major discovery.
The No. 1 tomb in the west of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang is the largest, highest level and best-preserved large-scale tomb of the Qin Dynasty that has been excavated, so it has the most achievements.
Since 1983, when the country decided to excavate the tomb of the first emperor of the ages, the secrets of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang have been dug up more and more, and various discussions around this tomb have also come and gone.
What secrets does this mausoleum, which took 39 years to build, and what did archaeologists find in Tomb No. 1? Let's take a look.
The tomb of Qin Shi Huang was discovered
There is an unwritten rule in the archaeological world that the tombs of emperors cannot be dug up casually.
Because the existing excavation technology is not mature, many cultural relics are rapidly oxidized at the first moment of seeing the day, and its exquisiteness can only be seen by archaeologists, so many imperial tombs are rescue excavations, and the only active excavation of the imperial tombs at present is only the Ming God Zong Ding Mausoleum excavated in 1956, this excavation did not get much archaeological information, but lost many cultural relics.
The discovery of the tomb of Qin Shi Huang was purely accidental.
On March 29, 1974, when a farmer in Lintong, Shaanxi Province, was digging a well in his house, he dug out a pottery human head from the ground, as well as many copper arrowheads and crossbow machines. The villagers also did not know where these things came from, and they reported them to the government.
Soon, people from the Cultural Relics Bureau came, and after digging for a while, they realized that these artifacts might not be ordinary funerary goods.
In July, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage sent people to continue the excavation of the tombs, and a total of four grave pits were found, which contained more than 6,000 brightly colored terracotta figurines and two copper carriages.
The archaeological team members were stunned, in addition to the huge number, these terracotta figurines are restored according to the ratio of real people to one, such a huge scale of cost investment, the tomb owner must not be an ordinary person.
Soon, archaeologists determined the identity of the owner of the tomb based on the unearthed artifacts, and the owner of these burial objects was none other than --- Yingzheng, the first emperor of China.
The determination of the location of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang exploded in the society at that time, because according to the "Historical Records", Qin Shi Huang placed many rare treasures in the tomb, so, do these things exist?
Archaeologists combined historical records and on-site exploration to basically determine that the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang is mainly composed of two parts: ground buildings and underground buildings, and the mausoleum site as a whole is a rectangular layout that is long from north to south and narrow from east to west. The ground buildings are some ruins of castles and various palaces at that time. The underground buildings mainly include underground palaces, various figurine pits and drainage systems.
At present, the archaeological work on the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang is only the above-ground construction, and the newly discovered Tomb No. 1 by archaeologists is only the tip of the iceberg in the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang.
Since the beginning of the excavation, there are 180 known burial pits of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang alone. Of these, 77 are inside the cemetery walls and 104 are scattered outside the walls. Some of these burial pits are very large, and the largest is even 14,000 square meters.
Because what Qin Shi Huang really wanted to build was a huge underground palace.
The underground palace that has been waiting to be excavated
According to the "Records of the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty", after the completion of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty, the craftsmen followed the order to "use mercury as a hundred rivers and seas, and instill the machine". Qin Shi Huang wanted to use this mercury for this huge underground palace
Rivers and lakes, do these mercury exist?
In November 2002, in order to detect whether there was really mercury in the underground palace, the China Geological Survey and the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology began to work together, and the investigation team used boreholes to extract air from the underground palace.
After analyzing the composition of the air, the experts were thrilled to find that there was indeed a 12,000-square-meter high-mercury zone in the 126,000-square-meter underground palace, so although the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang had been discovered for more than 50 years, the secrets of the underground palace have not been truly revealed to the world.
A mound that looks like a pyramid
If you look closely at the perimeter of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, you will see that it is not an ordinary mausoleum built on a mountain.
At the beginning of the discovery of the mausoleum, it was obvious that the entire mountain was a flat-topped square conical platform. As a result of two large-scale leveling, new loess profiles can now be seen around the mountain.
How high the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang was when it was built, even experts cannot give a definitive conclusion.
According to the "Book of Han", the tomb of the first emperor is "more than 50 zhang high", according to the weight and measures of the Qin State, the real height of the mausoleum should be 115 meters, but the current mound is far from so high.
If this problem can be solved, it may be possible to prove that the ancients more than 2,000 years ago were able to make such large mausoleums like the Egyptians.
Two-stage drainage system
The excavation of Tomb No. 1 of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang began in 2013, and new discoveries have continued in recent years.
First of all, the overall drainage system of the mausoleum is very delicate.
The ancient drainage system was so stretched that Europe failed to invent an underground drainage system in the Middle Ages, and all kinds of waste water and sewage and even feces flowed along the roads in the city.
As a result, European cities at that time were poorly managed and had frequent sanitation problems. It wasn't until the Black Death swept through Europe that underground drainage systems began to be perfected.
And as early as more than 2,000 years, our ancestors were able to apply this underground drainage technology in tombs.
Through excavation, it was found that in the south and east and west of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, there is a river deeper than the foundation of the underground palace. The entire river is in a U-shape, which is the secret of the tomb's ability to stay dry for a long time.
Once all kinds of groundwater is poured into the imperial tomb due to the rainy season, this river can play a blocking role. The total length of the whole river is 778 meters, tightly enclosed around the whole mausoleum, the widest part of the river is on the south side, the whole is a section with a width at the top and a narrow section at the bottom, the width of the top can reach 84 meters, the width of the bottom is 9.4 meters, and the depth can reach 39.4 meters.
The second section of the drainage channel has a total length of 525 meters, and there are both open wells in the ground and buried canals, and the culverts of the two drainage channels are connected.
12 Sontao
In a grave pit in the southwest corner of the inner city of the cemetery, 12 terracotta figurines were found in a standing position.
The 12 figurines are all of a high level of costume and are not ordinary terracotta figurines, and 8 of them have ring-headed knives on their belts.
Before Cai Lun improved papermaking in the Eastern Han Dynasty, many nobles used silk to transmit information, but because silk was too expensive, it could not be popularized. At that time, bamboo slips were the most common writing carriers, so many high-ranking officials were equipped with spatulas on their clothing to facilitate correction when writing.
This information can determine that these 12 terracotta figurines are not ordinary horse-raising terracotta figurines, but represent a group of literati officials.
Tomb No. 1 was discovered
Tomb No. 1 is the largest, highest-ranking and best-preserved tomb group that has been excavated in the entire Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum. The whole is located at 440 meters on the west side of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, which is in the shape of "middle", and there are three burial pits in total.
To the south and west are encircled moats. On the east side, the remains of an ancient riverbed were found, which flowed from southeast to northwest. The tomb sits in the south and faces north, a total of more than 100 meters, the entire tomb area is more than 1900 square meters, the tomb is 15.6 meters deep, and there are 3 steps around it.
The burial chamber is rectangular, with a large mouth and a small bottom, with an upper mouth 29 meters long from north to south, 28 meters wide from east to west, and 12.2 meters long at the bottom.
It is 9.5 meters wide, with a two-story platform and a height of 3.8 meters. The bottom of the tomb is covered with charcoal, and the skids are placed on top, and the skids are laid with planks.
The coffin is placed on the board. The coffin is located in the middle of the tomb to the south, surrounded by a cloister, and many exquisite pottery pieces have been newly found in the tomb, such as cocoon-shaped pots, reeds, pots, pots, etc. There are also many bronze ritual utensils such as various tripods, beans, francium, pots and spoons, plates, retorts, kettles, washes, lamps, etc.
These daily utensils should be some utensils commonly used by Qin Shi Huang during his lifetime, and there are many bells in the tomb, which shows that Qin Shi Huang thought about it and designed the mausoleum after death in accordance with the regulations of his life.
The remains of the craftsman in the pit
To the northeast of the Terracotta Warriors, archaeologists have also found many scattered remains.
The remains were identified as human bones, and the pit was 76 square meters in size. The remains at the site were reassembled and found to be the skeletons of 121 different human beings. The remains are estimated to be between 15 and 45 years old according to archaeological biology and are believed to be the Xingtu craftsmen who were responsible for the construction of the mausoleum at that time.
epilogue
Before the cultural relics of the No. 1 pit came out, our impression of Qin Shi Huang can only be known from various historical books, claiming to be "emperor", unifying the six countries, unifying writing, unifying weights and measures, unifying road traffic, and "burning books and pit Confucianism", the daily utensils of this ancient emperor, preferences and dislikes are not known, and now his mausoleum is reappearing in the world little by little, and various secrets about the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang will be revealed one by one.
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