Original title: The beauty of civilization looks at the East | Inventory of Chinese cultural relics is super dazzling Henan style, see what the earliest national granary looks like
No water is added at all: the underground cultural relics rank first in the country, the above-ground cultural relics rank second in the country, the collection of cultural relics accounts for one-eighth of the country, and the national key cultural relics protection units rank second in the country (420); 32 The top ten new archaeological discoveries in the country during the year are also the first (50 items); the Chinese civilization exploration project also started in Henan.
Henan cultural relics not only have an absolute advantage in quantity and quality, but also show a “stunning” side in terms of expression: there are both the earliest “archives” in ancient China and even human beings, and the best “refrigerator” in China; both There are musical instruments from 8,000 years ago that can fully play modern music, and there are ancient tombs with a relatively complete “anti-theft system”… Among the many “firsts” and “seconds”, the dazzling Henan of Chinese cultural relics flashes from time to time. wind.
The site of Yanshi Shangcheng, known as Xibo in ancient times, was the first capital of the Shang Dynasty. In 2019, in a new round of exploration in the northwest of the small town of the site, 23 circular building foundations were discovered, which are considered to be the earliest “national granary” granaries in China. The archaeologists calculated an account: if each warehouse is 3 meters high and can hold nearly 185 tons of millet, then 23 warehouses can store about 4,255 tons of millet. Considering that the area is nearly 40,000 square meters, nearly 100 warehouses can be built. If all the granaries were filled with food, it would be able to meet the annual ration of about 70,000 people.
China’s most powerful Warring States “refrigerator”, in the ancient city of Zhenghan
When “The Legend of Miyue” was on the air, you could see a scene like this: Empress Chu Wei and the princesses enjoyed the night pearl, and specially ordered someone to present the newly brewed iced glutinous rice wine and honeysuckle tea to drink with the princesses.
Is there any ice-cold glutinous rice wine in Chu? It is frozen with an ice jig. The so-called ice mirror is like a box. In 1978, the bronze tray of Zenghouyi unearthed from the tomb of Zenghouyi in Hubei (Chu State Tomb) is an ice mirror. Outside of Chu State, Qin State’s royal relatives can also drink iced drinks, and they have Lingyin, which is the place to hide ice. The Yongcheng site in Fengxiang County, Shaanxi Province is a Lingyin site. It is a semi-crypt-style building with buildings above and a cold room below.
Compared with Qin and Chu, South Korea is only a soy sauce role in “The Legend of Miyue”, but South Korea’s refrigeration technology is the best.
South Korea’s “refrigerator” is built in the luxurious “Royal Kitchen” of the 21-square-meter room. At the eastern end of its south wall, walk into a stepped walkway with a downward slope of 7.3 meters, you can find 5 wells lined up on a north-south line, with a diameter of 0.71 meters to 1 meter, and each well has 4 to 8 wells. In the well, fragments of containers and animal bones such as pigs and cattle were found. Obviously, this is the “refrigerator” of the Korean royal family. These “refrigerators” are built at a depth of three meters underground, with narrow corridors and hard rammed earth walls and supporting facilities, all of which are conducive to maintaining low temperature; moreover, it also adopts a lot of hygienic measures, such as wiping grass on the walls The bottom of mud and rammed earth walls and the ground are covered with grooved bricks, etc.
The Korean “refrigerator” is located on the ruins of the ancient city of Zhenghan, located in the north of Ge Laofen Village, Xinjian Road Sub-district Office, Xinzheng City.
The Great Wall of Chu: the father of the Great Wall of China, more than 300 years earlier than the Great Wall of Qin
In 1998, when the then US President Bill Clinton visited the Mutianyu Great Wall in Beijing during his visit to China, he curiously asked Dong Yaohui, secretary general of the Great Wall Society of China who accompanied him: “Is this the oldest Great Wall in China?” Dong Yaohui replied: “No, the oldest Great Wall in China is the Great Wall of Chu.”
The Great Wall of Chu was built in the 7th century BC, 300 years earlier than the Northern Great Wall built after Qin Shihuang unified the country. It starts from Zhuxi County, Hubei Province in the west, crosses the Han River to Dengzhou City in Henan Province, goes north through Neixiang County, then goes northeast through Lushan County, Nanzhao County, Ye County, crosses the Shahe River and goes directly to Biyang County. It runs through Zhenping County in the south and reaches Tongbai County and Xinyang area in the southeast, with a total length of more than 500 kilometers.
Jiahu Bone Flute: An 8000-year-old instrument can play modern music in its entirety
The Jiahu site discovered in Wuyang, Henan reproduces the scene of human life 8,000 years ago. It is considered to be the first cultural relic with a definite period in the long history of the Chinese nation, and it is “the first way for mankind to move from ignorance to civilization.” threshold”. The remains of artificially cultivated rice found in it prove that the Huanghuai River Basin is one of the origins of rice farming; the Qiqi symbols found here are likely to be the origin of Chinese characters, and the more than 30 Jiahu bone flutes unearthed here are The earliest and best-preserved wind instrument has been discovered in the world so far, advancing the history of human music by 3,000 years.
Amazingly, Jiahu Bone Flute has seven tones and eight tones, with two holes, five holes, six holes, seven holes and eight holes. One of the seven-hole bone flutes has been tested by musicians such as Huang Xiangpeng of the Central Chinese Orchestra, and it is known that it has a heptatonic scale and can play modern music completely.
(Photo by Elephant News reporters Yan Zidan and Wang Shaoqing)
Kaifeng City, a city on top of a city, with six cities stacked on top of each other
“The city of Kaifeng is a city on top of a city, and there are several cities buried underground.” This mysterious legend that has been circulating in Kaifeng folk has been confirmed by archaeology: at 3 meters to 12 meters underground, there are 6 cities stacked on top of each other, including 3 capitals of the country. , 2 provincial capitals and 1 important town in the Central Plains, which constitute the spectacle of “city stacking cities”. Among them, Kaifeng City in Qing Dynasty was about 3 meters deep, Kaifeng City in Ming Dynasty was about 5 or 6 meters deep, Jinbian Capital City was about 6 meters deep, Tokyo City in Northern Song Dynasty was 8 meters deep from the ground, Bianzhou City in Tang Dynasty was about 10 meters deep from the ground, and Daliang City in Wei Dynasty was about 10 meters deep. It is more than 10 meters below the ground.
Kaifeng City is like a bowl, with high sides and a low center, which can easily be submerged. Before the Northern Song Dynasty, the Yellow River entered the sea from Tianjin, which had little impact on Kaifeng. It was only submerged in the Northern Wei Dynasty. After the Yellow River was diverted to the south in the Jin Dynasty, it began to threaten the safety of Kaifeng. In more than 1,000 years, the Yellow River burst more than 300 times, and floods entered the city. Just got in 7 times.
Erlitou Ruins: Uncovering the “Earliest Chinese” Capital, Xiadu
The Erlitou site in Yanshi, Luoyang, Henan Province, dating back about 3800 to 3500 years ago, is the earliest relic of a wide-area royal state in the East Asian continent. The political system all originated here, and it is hailed as “the earliest China” by archaeologists. So far, palaces, residential areas, pottery workshops, copper casting workshops and other relics have been discovered at this site, revealing the mystery of the ancient “Xiadu”. Now it has become a consensus among scholars that the Erlitou site is the remains of the capital of the Xia Dynasty. The emergence of Erlitou culture and the Erlitou capital indicated that the society at that time had entered a period of wide-area monarchy state with a “starry moon” style from a situation where several competing political entities coexisted.
Yinxu oracle bone inscriptions: the earliest “archive library” in ancient China and even human beings
Anyang Yin Ruins is the capital of the late Shang Dynasty in China, and it is also the first capital site in Chinese history that can be verified by documents and confirmed by archaeology and oracle bone inscriptions. Its discovery reconstructed the framework of the early history of ancient China, established the scientific status of the Yin-Shang society as a believer in history, and was also rated as the first of the “100 major archaeological discoveries” in China in the 20th century.
The oracle bone inscriptions unearthed in Yin Ruins are the predecessor of Chinese characters and one of the three oldest writing systems in the world. It not only proves the independent origin of ancient Chinese characters, but also provides an independent rule of Chinese ancient Chinese character creation. Culture has a fundamental impact.
The oracle bone inscriptions found in the 150,000 oracle bones unearthed in the Yin Ruins not only brought forward the credible history of China’s written records to the Shang Dynasty, but also because of the rich content of the oracle bone inscriptions, involving all aspects of Yin and Shang politics, economy, culture, and ideology, it is very important to comprehensive It is of great significance to restore the social history of Yin and Shang, and it is called the earliest “archive library” in ancient China and even human beings.
(Elephant News reporter Chen Xiang/Photo)
The excavation of the Yangshao cultural site opens the prelude to modern Chinese archaeology
In October 1921, Swedish geologist Andersson and his Chinese colleagues, using modern archaeological methods, officially started excavation work on the land of Yangshao Village, which is also the “first shovel” in the history of modern Chinese archaeology. .
According to the unearthed cultural relics, it is confirmed that it is the remains of ancient Chinese culture. According to archaeological management, Andersen named the site “Yangshao Culture”. This is the first name of an archaeological culture to appear in the history of modern Chinese archaeology. Since then, the prelude of modern Chinese archaeology has been opened, the first page of archaeological research on primitive society in my country has been opened, and the gap in the development history of ancient Chinese culture has been filled. The discovery of Yangshao culture also completely bankrupted the theory of “China’s Stoneless Age”.
Guozhuang Chu Tomb in Shangcai County: A Chinese ancient tomb with a relatively complete “anti-theft system”
For more than 2000 years, after 22 robberies, sporadic artifacts were stolen, and more than 1,000 precious cultural relics were still unearthed. Guozhuang Chu Tomb can be described as an ancient tomb with a relatively complete “anti-theft system” in Chinese history. How does it do it?
The tomb is a ring of anti-theft. First of all, from the sealing soil, the remaining sealing soil is 0.7 meters to 2.5 meters thick, which is rammed earth, mostly composed of black lime soil from the site, which contains abundant pottery fragments and mussel shells, very similar to the rammed foundation of a building. The filling is 6.3 meters thick, giving the impression that it is a building site or a settlement living site, thinking that there is no ancient tomb underneath; secondly, two false coffins were designed more than 10 meters underground, confusing the tomb robbers to think they had dug to the bottom. A robbery in the Eastern Han Dynasty stopped here.
If the above measures are still ineffective, the most characteristic sand and stone in the tomb should show its power. Its fill layer has 11 meters of sand accumulation, estimated to be more than 3,000 cubic meters, with strong fluidity; more than 1,000 accumulated stones were also found in the sand accumulation layer, the largest weighing 165 kilograms. When the robbery hole is dug to this level, the sand and stones can fill it up or smash the robbery hole continuously. One of the robbery holes built an alleyway with wooden boards, which blocked the quicksand, but not the boulders. It was smashed by the boulders when it was about to succeed. Quicksand boulders, but still no success.
(Elephant News reporter Li Changxu/Photo)
Sanyangzhuang Ruins: Han Dynasty Village in “China’s Ancient Pompeii”
Sanyangzhuang Han Dynasty settlement site is the first large-scale Han Dynasty rural site with clear nature discovered by archaeology in my country. It is a historic discovery in Han Dynasty archaeology. It is the first panoramic view of the rural pastoral scene in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River in the Han Dynasty, and the living conditions and living environment of ordinary farmers in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River for the first time. Surrounded by ditches, or adjacent to ponds; there are wells in front and toilets in the back; the site also reveals for the first time the construction techniques and architectural art of ordinary dwellings in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, and for the first time reproduces the farming techniques and agricultural civilization in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. The site can be called “the ancient city of Pompeii in China”.Return to Sohu, see more