Mantra

Chapter 267 The Feast of Death
What Wang Hou showed me with a fluorescent lighting stick was a large stone table.

On the table, there are many strange-shaped "pots and pans". Perhaps because the air is dry and cold, those copper and iron clay pots have no traces of rust and dust. Baba's unknown ingredients.

The dry, cold air dehydrates all organic matter, which in turn preserves it.

In the air-dried mirror image, the weirdest thing was that around the food, I saw at least seven or eight people sitting around the table, as if they were eating.

There is nothing more 'refreshing' to me than a sight like this.

If I didn’t have Wang Hou’s vaccination, I would probably jump up from the ground or scream a few times, but Wang Hou told me before that there are many dead people here, so I also understood that these are all dead people, yes. People who died at the dinner table.

I turned my head, looked at the early arrival king and shouted: "How many, do you know?"

Wang Hou shook his head, and he could only give me a general answer: "Ten or twenty, very old, you are a cook, Hongye is an expert, you two, let's see what kind of 'zombies' this dynasty is."

Xian Hongye and I nodded, and after adjusting our mentality, we followed Wang Hou's flashlight and walked towards the banquet where the dead people were sitting.

The stone table was very long, and it was all made of stalactites. It was a seamless one, and it was definitely formed naturally, but it must have been artificially polished later to make it extremely smooth.

There are many utensils on the table, but most of them are "food utensils" that I have never seen before. Except for bowls and tripods, I can't name the other weird-shaped things.

Surrounding the dazzling array of food utensils, various mummified corpses sat on stone chairs.Some had fallen into heaps of debris, and many remained as they were when they died.

These people all wore hair buns before the Ming Dynasty, and their clothes were very simple. Although the color of their clothes and bodies had turned dark brown like tree bark due to the long drying time, they could still be judged from their appearance and hair. It can be seen that they are all very old, and all of them are bearded men.

Some of these dead people of various shapes seemed to be sleeping soundly lying on the table, while others closed their eyes tightly and opened their mouths to raise their heads.Some of them were still holding wine glasses and tableware in their hands when they died, as if they were going to toast with vegetables.Some of them frowned and looked pained, crawling on the table to vomit.

I looked at these people who had been dead for hundreds of years, and suddenly felt a sense of heaviness in my heart.

It is conceivable that these people gathered in such a huge stone cave, had a banquet, and then were killed instantly by some unknown force.

The whole process was so fast that they were still in the process of feasting, and they might just feel some pain before they died.

Other than that, I really can't see anything else coming.

So, I turned my head and asked Xian Hongye: "Yezi, do you know what era these people are from?"

Xian Hongye nodded and said: "I guess they are people from the middle of Ming Dynasty, because some of these people have 'net scarves' on their heads, and net scarves are unique to men in Ming Dynasty."

I nodded and continued to ask: "Is there anything else that can be seen?"

Xian Hongye is a student of literature and history, and she is very clear about some materials and cultural relics in Chinese history. After staring at the table for a long time, she suddenly said: "These tableware are extremely abnormal. It seems to be the standard of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty!"

"Eastern Zhou?" I asked in amazement, "Didn't you say that these people belonged to the Ming Dynasty? How could they eat with Zhou Dynasty's utensils?"

Although I don't understand literature and history, I also know that there is a difference of 2000 years between the Eastern Zhou Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty, and the dining utensils in the Ming Dynasty are almost completely consistent with the modern ones. Even in remote mountainous areas, no one will use this increasingly cumbersome "ancient" tableware.

Faced with such a strange "cultural" transition phenomenon, Xian Hongye also shook her head helplessly, and she instructed: "I don't know why, but the tableware used by these dead people are all very old things, let alone In modern times, even in the Song and Ming Dynasties 800 years ago, almost all of them have been eliminated. But these Ming Dynasty people, why do they come to eat and drink?"

Xian Hongye told me that before the Zhou Dynasty, Chinese tableware was very different from what it is now. The pots and pans we eat in modern times have not yet fully evolved at that time.Even the chopsticks we use most often are not called chopsticks, but "chopsticks".

At that time, due to the feudal system of the Zhou Dynasty, the requirements for food and utensils were very strict, and certain utensils could only be used by people with specific identities, such as the familiar Ding, Zun, You and other utensils, which could only be used by Zhou Tianzi and princes , while the common people of the lower class mostly use very low-level food utensils such as pots, pots, and plates to eat.

Also because of the existence of ranks, those food utensils are made very complicated, and more often than not, they are not used for eating at all, but ritual utensils used for sacrifice or symbolizing royal power.

Also because of this cumbersomeness, since the Zhou Dynasty, these strange-shaped table utensils have been gradually abandoned by the times. With the advancement of cooking technology, people only use more simplified pots and pans. Food utensils are gradually thrown into the dust of history. Except for symbolic ritual utensils such as tripods, these old antiques are no longer seen on the dining table.

After Xian Hongye finished these basic understandings, she turned around and pointed to the big table in front of us and said, "Look, what the old man with the white beard is holding is a pottery pot, which is used to heat wine. The one next to him is A bronze bean, which is usually used to hold cold dishes. Next to the man without a head is a 'fou', which is used to keep warm. Also."

With the introduction of Xian Hongye, more utensils that ordinary people have never heard of are displayed in front of me one by one.

On that table, Guangxian Hongye and as far as I know, there are more than a dozen kinds of food utensils that often appeared before the Zhou Dynasty, such as tripod, gui, 甗, gou, bean, zhu, 卣, tired, bu, cup, 卮, etc. in front of us.Not to mention that there are many oddly shaped things stacked together that we have never seen before.

Facing these discoveries, Xian Hongye and I really seem to have entered an exhibition hall about ancient food, and we have seen the ancient food culture and extensive and profound food rituals of our ancestors, but at the same time we are so inexplicable
Xian Hongye approached those dead people and strange-shaped food utensils, picked up a cup with some trepidation, and sighed: "These ancients may know the correct usage of these things. Their collective death is a great loss to the archaeological world. If they are alive, If descendants can be left behind, it may be able to fill in many archaeological gaps."

Xian Hongye is a girl with a literary character, but Wang Hou and I don't have the leisure and elegance to complain.

Wang Hou even looked around and said, "What gap can it fill! I look at this place as eerie, and these pots and pans are so weird, it's not like a place to eat, but more like a drug manufacturing workshop."

"Drug production workshop?!" Wang Hou's words suddenly gave me a flash of inspiration!
(End of this chapter)