Boat coffin burial is an ancient burial custom distributed in southern my country.

Its basic feature is to put the body of the deceased into a coffin shaped like a boat and then bury it.

There are different ways to bury boat coffins, including hanging them in caves, setting them up on trees, and burying them in the soil.

In Chen Han's hometown of Fujian, there are many boat coffin burials hanging in caves.

In his memory, when he was a child and passing by on a relatively remote and mountainous road, he saw artificially dug caves on the surrounding mountain walls, with some wooden coffins placed inside.

Later, these hanging burials were gradually properly transferred by the local archaeological department and reburied.

The earliest boat coffins discovered so far are two coffins taken from Guanyin Rock and Baiyan in Wuyi Mountain. They were both made of intact nanmu and are basically the same shape as the fishing boats used in southern Fujian and other places.

Carbon dating shows that the two coffins were made more than 3,500 years ago, around the Xia and Shang dynasties, and some estimate that they were made during the Shang and Zhou dynasties.

However, here in Fujian, most people are buried in the air, with caves dug into cliffs or mountain walls.

This kind of boat coffins, used as burial tools, are mostly unearthed in Sichuan.

A boat is also in the shape of a canoe, but the earliest one is no later than the middle of the Warring States Period, about 2,500 years ago.

However, why did the ancients use boats as coffins? How did this custom come into being? What are the concepts embedded in this custom? Why did the ancients use boats as coffins?

To this day, this remains a mystery.

Among the boat coffin burials in Shu, the most famous ones are the Ba people’s boat coffin burials.

In 1954, many bronze wares were discovered when the Chongqing No. 1 Machine-made Brick and Tile Factory was digging the foundation to build a factory. Therefore, the Southwest Museum conducted a large-scale archaeological excavation here and unearthed a large number of tombs from the Warring States Period.

Among all kinds of tombs, only the Ba people’s boat coffin burials are unique.

Seventeen tombs are arranged quite neatly and densely, with their heads facing the Yangtze River.

The tombs are vertical earth pits that can only accommodate a boat. The burial objects are about 5 meters long and about one meter in diameter. They are cut into boat-shaped coffins.

The upper part is approximately semi-circular, the bottom is slightly flattened, and the bottoms at both ends are beveled to tilt it up into a boat shape. A large hole is drilled at both ends for tying ropes for burial.

There are two types of boat shapes, one is a simpler canoe, and the other is a small coffin built inside, like an inner coffin and an outer coffin, with the other end forming a foot compartment.

The use of the Ba people's boat coffins shows that the Ba people are a tribe that lives by the water and is familiar with water. They build boats, sail, fish, or engage in water battles. They are buried in similar boat coffins after death.

This is of great significance to the study of life, funeral and other customs in Chengdu and even Sichuan at that time.

The Ba people are actually the minority political power that emerged in Shu after the Sanxingdui Civilization.

At that time, there was a Ba people and a Shu people, and they were both called Bashu.

Later, Shu and Ba were successively annexed by Qin, and the fertile Sichuan Basin became Qin's large granary, which gave Qin the capital to unify the six countries.

According to current archaeological findings, ship coffin burials first existed in the Western Zhou Dynasty.

Since the 1950s, boat coffins have been unearthed frequently in the Three Gorges and eastern Sichuan, which was the territory of the Ba Kingdom during the pre-Qin period. Boat coffins were once considered a unique burial method of the Ba people.

However, with the deepening of archeology, the unearthed boat coffins in Chengdu Commercial Street in 2000 showed that the Shu people also used boat coffins for burials.

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At that time, experts generally believed that the specific time when Shu people used boat coffins for burial was during the Warring States Period, not earlier than the Warring States Period.

In other words, the ship burial culture should have only appeared after the Western Zhou Dynasty.

Then, this guess was overturned again.

The Jinsha ruins, which had been dormant for more than 3,000 years, "shocked the world when it woke up." The most shocking thing was not the tens of thousands of ivory, exquisite gold, jade, and bronze unearthed.

Instead, boat coffin burials were discovered again in the tomb area of ​​the Jinsha site.

The appearance of boat coffins in the tomb area of ​​the Jinsha site proves that boat coffins were used for burials in Chengdu as early as the middle of the Western Zhou Dynasty.

This advances the "birth time" of Shu people's boat coffins by 500 years!

Even more than the Ba people, indicating that boat coffin burials actually originated from the Shu people!

The discovery and excavation of Sanxingdui and Jinsha ruins have gradually made the development of the ancient Shu Kingdom clear.

How similar are the two ruins?

Jinsha ruins and Sanxingdui ruins share the same sacrificial culture and have developed to some extent.

The styles and artistic styles of the artifacts unearthed from the two sites are very similar. The unearthed artifacts show that the ancient Shu people in Sanxingdui and the ancient Shu people in Jinsha shared common beliefs and worship, such as the worship of big trees and the worship of the sun.

A large number of artifacts highly similar to Sanxingdui were unearthed from the Jinsha site!

The two sites are not far apart. From the religious beliefs, city layout and time continuation, it can be seen that the Jinsha site is the inheritance and development of Sanxingdui culture. It is another political, cultural and economic center of the ancient Shu Kingdom after Sanxingdui.

The beginning of Chengdu city!

It advances the history of Chengdu's founding to about 3,000 years ago!

When the Jinsha ruins reached a later stage of development, the transfer of its cultural center to the center of Chengdu today accumulated and created the urban history of Chengdu.

It can be said that the ancient Shu civilization represented by Sanxingdui and Jinsha ruins gave birth to Chengdu’s urban culture.

Now it can basically be confirmed that the Sichuan area passed through the earliest prehistoric ancient city sites in the Chengdu Plain, then to the Sanxingdui site, to the Jinsha site, and finally to the Warring States ship coffin tombs!

These four cultures jointly constructed the four different stages of the development and evolution of ancient Shu civilization!

From the early prehistoric tribes, to the earliest Sanxingdui civilization in the same period as the Xia and Shang Dynasties, and then to the pre-Qin period, spanning from the late Shang Dynasty to the Jinsha ruins of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, and finally to the Ba Kingdom and Shu Kingdom during the Warring States Period, and then were annexed by the Qin Kingdom

.

Relying on this inconspicuous "ship coffin burial", the inheritance of Shu culture has been smoothed out!

It is worth mentioning that due to the age, there is actually no actual ship coffin left in the tomb area of ​​the Jinsha site. However, through the boat-shaped wooden remains, they can still conclude that the ship coffin was a commonly used funeral instrument at that time.

The so-called "boat-shaped wooden remains" are a section of soil that is darker in color and shows "long strips" of traces.

The shape and appearance are almost exactly the same as the one found in the Sanxingdui ruins in Moon Bay.

It is said to be a "wooden boat", but in fact there is only a pile of soil left. It's just that the soil turned into after the wood rotted is darker than the surrounding soil.

The discovery of tombs suspected to be ship-coffin burials in Moon Bay is definitely a great discovery.

Of course, judging from the depth of this exploration, there is a high probability that these ship coffin burials are not from the Sanxingdui Civilization period, but from a later period, maybe the Western Zhou Dynasty, or maybe the Warring States Period.

However, the discovery of ship coffin burials within the Sanxingdui civilization is of great significance.
Chapter completed!