Master Archaeologist

How many cultural relics are there in the newly discovered sacrificial pit No. [-]?

There are more than [-] pieces of numbered cultural relics alone!

They are stacked in layers in the pit, with various postures.

Standing next to the pit and looking down inside, all you can see is green, a color unique to bronzes!

"so much?!"

"It doesn't take a few years, I'm afraid it won't be cleaned up."

Seeing the situation in the pit, Chen Han and Zhuang Yunpeng immediately understood why Sanxingdui was only one and two sacrificial pits, but they could be dug for decades.

There are thousands of cultural relics in this pit, and they are stacked on top of each other. It is considered fast to clear out a few pieces in a day.

In addition, it needs to be repaired, researched and so on.

It is not too much to clean a pit for more than ten years.

The special burial techniques of the ancient Shu people created countless difficulties for the excavation of archaeologists.

All kinds of cultural relics are stacked together, which leads to the extraction of some cultural relics, which requires very complicated cleaning. Sometimes, they can't even be inserted by hand, and they have to be buckled bit by bit with tools.

To use a more figurative metaphor, it's like a mud pool full of pots and pans, and these pots and pans are stacked in a disorderly manner.

If you want to clean out one, you may need to clean up several other utensils and soil around it at the same time before you can move.

"Many tripods, statues, and pots all have obvious characteristics of the Shang Dynasty." Zhuang Yunpeng stared into the pit and said a little excitedly.

Lin Ya also said with some doubts: "This sacrificial pit is from the late Shang Dynasty, so there is no writing?"

The emergence of mature bronze wares such as bronze tripods and bronze statues has basically represented that a civilization has entered a very mature social stage.

In fact, the Sanxingdui civilization is indeed very mature.

The Sanxingdui site was the capital of the ancient Shu Kingdom, and its sphere of influence was extremely large, even extending to Hanzhong, Shaanxi.

Such a developed civilization must have a strict organizational structure.

Moreover, the Sanxingdui bronze technology is very developed, such as casting technology and welding technology are very superb, the gold content is very high, and various exquisite holes can be chiseled on the bronze ware, etc. Compared with the Shang Dynasty in the Central Plains at the same time, the bronze technology is not as good. inferior.

Such a mature civilization should have written words.

However, during the excavation of the Sanxingdui site, no systematic writings such as oracle bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions, and Warring States writings were found.

Only on the unearthed pottery, gold, jade and other cultural relics, seven irregular depiction symbols were found, and most of them were one symbol for each vessel.

As we all know, according to the three standards of civilization in the West, namely city, writing, and bronze (metallurgy), the presence or absence of writing is one of the key criteria for entering a civilized society.

Therefore, Westerners have always used the reason that Sanxingdui did not discover characters, and did not regard Sanxingdui civilization as a civilization, but only as a culture.

"Culture" refers to the ancient tribes of the Neolithic Age.

Such as Hemudu culture, such as Taosi culture, such as Longshan culture.

And "civilization" refers to a civilization that has a complete social system and constitutes a country, such as the Xia Dynasty, Shang Dynasty, and Zhou Dynasty.

...

In China, after continuous and in-depth archaeological research on Sanxingdui, Chinese scholars generally believe that Sanxingdui is a civilization, not a culture.

It can be determined that Sanxingdui is the early ancient Shu Kingdom, a country with social classes and a civilization.

But Westerners don't recognize it.

It is no longer a day or two for Westerners to play this game.

Anyway, in the view of Chinese scholars, no matter whether these characters in Sanxingdui are characters or not, it cannot be denied that the ancestors of Sanxingdui have entered the age of civilization.

However, if the text can be found, it is of course a more perfect situation.

Moreover, Huaxia scholars themselves do not think that writing has not yet appeared when the Sanxingdui civilization has developed so maturely.

Because, if there is no writing, how would the ancestors of Sanxingdui rule a huge territory, how to achieve accurate communication of information, how to accumulate superb bronze technology, and how do craftsmen work together?
It is almost impossible to solve these problems with language alone.

Therefore, from the perspective of social development logic, the ancestors of Sanxingdui should have a writing system.

Moreover, it is recorded in ancient documents that there were characters in the ancient Shu Kingdom.

"Huayang Guozhi" written by the Eastern Jin Dynasty historian Chang Zhu is very famous, and it is an important document for studying Sichuan's history, geography, customs and human relationships.

Chang Chu recorded on it: "Peng Zu was born in Shu, and he was the Taishi of Yin... It was known in the past. In the Zhou Dynasty, Qin and Ba were restricted. "

It means that Peng Zu was a native of Shu and later served as the official historian of the Yin and Shang dynasties.

It shows that some Shu people were proficient in the writing of the Shang Dynasty. The Zhou Dynasty looked down on the Shu people. Although they were required to obey the orders of the central government, they were not allowed to participate in the alliance of princes.

Apparently, at least during the Zhou Dynasty, the ancient Shu State had written characters, which were different from those of the Central Plains.

The ancient Shu Kingdom during the Zhou Dynasty certainly did not appear suddenly, but was a descendant of the Sanxingdui civilization.

Their writing, of course, cannot appear out of thin air, and it also inherits the writing of the Sanxingdui civilization.

The evolution of a language and writing cannot be completed in a few hundred years, it needs thousands of years of evolution.

Just like the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty, the development has been very mature, and it does not look like a relatively primitive text.

It is now widely believed in the academic circles that before the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty, there must have been an immature writing system evolving.

The Jiahu site where the bone flute was unearthed is likely to be the earliest birthplace of Chinese characters.

The Jiahu site belongs to the Peiligang culture earlier than the Yangshao culture, and ancient Jiahu ancestors lived here for thousands of years.

On some of the cultural relics unearthed at the Jiahu site, there are some symbols carved on bones. These carved symbols actually have similarities with oracle bone inscriptions, and may be the ancestors of oracle bone inscriptions.

As for the Yangshao culture, according to the current research conclusions, it is very likely that it is the source of the Xia culture, which is the embryonic form of the Yellow Emperor and Yandi tribes.

From the Peiligang Culture to the Yangshao Culture to the Taosi Culture to the undiscovered "Xia Dynasty" ruins, and finally to the Shang civilization, there is actually a system of continuation.

It's just that there is not enough archaeological evidence in the middle, and the most important "Xia" site has not been found, which makes this civilization chain unable to be proved.

But it has already been proved that the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty were definitely not developed by merchants in just one or two hundred years.

It must have inherited thousands of years of civilization experience before the mature oracle bone inscription system finally emerged.

And the civilization of the Shu people, the Sanxingdui civilization, is absolutely impossible without writing, but it has not been discovered yet!
Now in the No. [-] sacrificial pit, there are thousands of bronze wares, among which there are many tripods and zun wares that were often used to inscribe Zhong Ding Wen in the Shang Dynasty next door.

Would the people of Shu imitate the businessman next door and carve their own words on bronze vessels?

Master Archaeologist