Friday, August 21, 2020

China's Pompeii

 From National Geographic:

The most grisly discovery came underneath the city’s eastern wall: 80 human skulls clustered in six pits—with no skeletons attached. (The two pits closest to the East Gate, the city’s principal entrance, contained exactly 24 skulls each.) The skulls’ number and placement suggest a ritual beheading during the laying of the wall’s foundation—the earliest known example of human sacrifice in Chinese history. Forensic scientists determined that almost all of the victims were young girls, most likely prisoners who belonged to a rival group.

“The scale of ritual violence observed at Shimao was unprecedented in early China,” says Li Min, an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has visited and written extensively about Shimao. The skulls at Shimao foreshadowed the massive human sacrifice that became what Li calls “a defining attribute of Shang civilization” many centuries later (from around 1600 to 1046 B.C.) before succeeding dynasties put an end to the practice.

The skulls are just one indication that the East Gate marked the entrance to a different world. Anyone walking across the threshold—above the buried sacrificial pits—would have been awed by more immediately visible signs. Several stone blocks in the high terrace walls were carved with lozenge designs, making them appear like enormous eyes gazing down at the East Gate. Wedged into the stone walls at regular intervals were thousands of pieces of black and dark green jade, shimmering ornaments that served both to ward off evil and to project the power and wealth of Shimao elites. The abundance of jade artifacts suggests that Shimao, with no source of its own, imported large quantities from distant trading partners. (Read more.)


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