Cleaning up people who have died is not a good job.

At least psychologically, that's the case.

After all, we are now in a civilized society. When we talk about human sacrifice, words like "barbaric", "ignorant" and "cruel" come to mind.

Why is it that the Shang Dynasty, generally in the public mind, feels very separate from other Chinese dynasties?

It is because all concepts of right and wrong, moral values, cultural values, etc. in modern Chinese civilization were shaped by Zong Zhou.

The Shang Dynasty before Zong and Zhou Dynasty behaved in a completely different era from the Chinese civilization after Zhou Dynasty.

If the businessman has nothing to do, he will be buried. If he is in a good mood, he will kill someone to tell his ancestors. If he is in a bad mood, he will kill a small noble to relieve his mood.

When war is about to begin, kill a group of slaves and give them to your ancestors, hoping that your ancestors will bless you with victory.

After winning the battle, I captured many slaves from the enemy tribe, and I wanted to kill some of them and give them to my ancestors to thank them for their blessings.

If you lose the war, you will have to kill a group of slaves and beg your ancestors for forgiveness.

It rains, there is drought, the temperature drops, the temperature rises, babies are born...

Anyway, whenever something happens, you have to kill someone and tell your ancestors.

And this kind of behavior is done by everyone from the big nobles to the small and medium nobles.

Even a small nobleman, who may also be a candidate for burial in the hearts of middle-class nobles, may be selected to meet his ancestors at any time.

Similarly, middle-class nobles are also the best candidates for burials in the minds of big nobles. If something happens to the family, they can find a middle-class noble to kill them to worship their ancestors.

All in all, the entire Shang Dynasty had a system of human sacrifice.

According to the current excavations of the Middle and Late Shang Dynasties, the Shang Dynasty probably killed 8,000 to 10,000 people a year just for sacrificial purposes.

Among them, there are hostile forces, that is, the Qiang people, the merchants' great enemies, as well as the merchants themselves. It is not just outsiders who are used for sacrifices.

The "own people" here include ordinary freedmen, slaves, small nobles, and mid-level nobles.

Yes, merchant nobles also need to be sacrificed for burial. As long as the wizard predicts that the ancestors are short of manpower, or the King of Shang finds that a certain noble is very good in a certain way and is suitable to serve the ancestors, he will be killed for burial sacrifices.

Moreover, the nobles who were killed were very happy with it.

Because businessmen have been here for generations, and this is how they behave.

In the ruins of the Shang Dynasty, the most unearthed things are the bones of human beings, including those of children, adults, dwarfs, young and old, male and female.

Compared with the ruins of the Shang Dynasty, the ancient battlefield of the Battle of Changping is considered child's play.

In the tomb of a merchant or a minor noble, one hundred and eighty slaves must be buried with him.

And this kind of thing is indeed incomprehensible and unacceptable to contemporary Chinese people who have accepted the culture of "all schools of thought" and still use it to this day.

Today's Chinese people naturally have a sense of separation towards businessmen.

In particular, I personally visited some Shang Dynasty ruins.

I have seen with my own eyes the countless human bones buried in sacrifices, the wine vessels made of human heads, the "human boiling cauldron" left behind after cooking people in cauldrons, and the "acquaintances" in the cauldron.

Good guy, if modern people and businessmen can have a feeling of "this is my ancestor, this is Chinese civilization", then that is really a ghost.

Researchers at the Guangzhou Institute of Archeology are naturally not in a good mood when they are cleaning up the human remains in the west room.

On the other side, Kong Jianwen, who was responsible for cleaning up the back room, was in a very good mood!

The back storage room is not big, just a square storage room with a width of 1.8 meters from east to west and a length of 2 meters from north to south.

However, this room is an important warehouse for storing food and placing cooking utensils and storage containers!

There are so many funerary objects inside!

Most of the utensils such as tripods, mos, ovens, tubes, pans, basins, pottery urns, and pottery pots are stacked in the back storage room.

Generally, when placing funerary objects, similar utensils are stacked inside each other, which is called matryoshka dolls.

Put the smaller ones inside the bigger ones, and put the smaller ones inside the smaller ones.

The ancients were not stupid at all, they knew exactly how to make the best use of space.

Large utensils such as pottery urns, iron tripods, and copper tripods are mostly stacked in the front of the back room, which is directly opposite the door.

Because there were so many of these artifacts that they filled the entire room, leaving no room for them to stand, so we could only let one or two researchers stand in the corridor and clean them bit by bit.

This resulted in Kong Jianwen's archaeological team being the most relaxed. They had to work in a space that was 2 meters long and wide. They were divided into several shifts and only needed to clean for two or three hours a day.

Even so, their clearing speed is still the fastest among the three teams.

A large number of cooking utensils, tripods, cauldrons, steamers, and cooking utensils were first cleared out.

Among them, the most eye-catching ones are several large iron tripods and a large Vietnamese-style bronze tripod.

The number of ordinary bronze tripods unearthed in Chinese archeology is already very abundant, mainly in the Central Plains region, and there can be at least a thousand tripods.

However, tripods made of iron and Vietnamese-style copper tripods are relatively rare.

The first function of the tripod when it was manufactured was to cook food and eat it. It was a daily utensil, and later it gradually evolved into a ritual utensil.

But after the Han Dynasty, "ding" was basically used as a funerary object and rarely appeared in the tombs of nobles.

The Han Dynasty was the last glorious period of Ding.

At the same time, the Han Dynasty was also a key node for Chinese civilization to leap from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.

During this period, iron began to be used to make "kettle steamer" utensils, which were tools used for cooking rice and vegetables.

The iron tripod was conceived and born.

It's just that this thing has been used and existed for a relatively short time, so its existence is still very rare.

As the name suggests, the Yue-style tripod is the tripod in the Yue style.

The biggest difference between this thing and the tripods from the Central Plains countries is that the three tripod legs are very slender, a bit like crane legs, and the tripod body is mostly round.

This is a tripod unique to the Yue Kingdom, and only the Yue people can build and use it.

The Kingdom of Nanyue deserves the word "Nanyue" in its name. It is indeed somewhat related to the Kingdom of Yue. The king actually uses a Vietnamese-style tripod!

It is worth mentioning that all the cooking utensils and storage containers unearthed in the back room were used by the tomb owner during his lifetime.

On the bottoms of tripods, cauldrons and steamers, black marks left by long-term fires were found.

In fact, most of the bronze vessels used for burials, including ritual vessels, were mostly used by the tomb owner during his lifetime.

The so-called "bells ringing and cauldrons eating" describes the lives of these nobles during their lifetime.

The "Nine Cauldrons and Eight Gui" are not specially cast ritual vessels used only for burial.

The etiquette and system represented by these things were enjoyed by the tomb owners during their lifetime. They used these tripods and Gui to cook and eat, and they were their own exclusive cooking utensils.

And after they died, these bells and tripods would of course also be buried with them.

Ding and Gui, as representatives of Zong Zhou's important ritual culture, are not just used as ritual vessels.

Strictly speaking, their main function is as cookware for daily use.

It is only given the role of representing the etiquette system at the same time and cannot be put the cart before the horse.

The productivity at that time was not so luxurious as to cast a set of bronze gui and tripod. They were just used to show etiquette and then buried with them.
Chapter completed!