Chapter 8 Section 7 Burial of slave owners with a large number of bronze wares

The Bronze Age in ancient China was a society of slavery. The slave owners and nobles desperately oppressed and exploited the slaves during their lifetime, and they also asked the slaves to build huge tombs for them, and buried a large number of bronze utensils for their enjoyment after death.The tombs of the kings of the late Shang Dynasty are located in Houjiazhuang and Wuguan Village in the northwest of Xiaotun Village, Anyang, and 13 large tombs have been discovered.It can be divided into east and west districts.The plane of the tomb is sub-shaped or rectangular, with four, two or one tomb passages.The scale is huge.For example, the tomb of No. M1001 has a sub-shaped tomb opening, 18.9 meters long from north to south, 13.75 meters wide from east to west, and the depth of the tomb is 10.5 meters.In the tomb, a sub-shaped coffin chamber with a height of about 3 meters was built with wooden boards, and a wooden coffin was placed in the middle.There are four tomb passages in the east, south, west and north of the tomb chamber, and the total area of ​​the tomb chamber plus the tomb passage is 712.75 square meters.A large number of burials were found in the royal tombs.Taking the tomb of Wuguan Village in Anyang excavated in 1950 as an example, 45 martyrs were found in the tomb, which may be the attendants and concubines of the tomb owner during his lifetime; A human animal killed during a burial.There are a large number of items buried in the tombs of the royal family and nobles.Take the tomb of Fu Hao, the spouse of King Wuding of the Shang Dynasty, excavated in the northwest of Xiaotun Village, Anyang in 1976 as an example. There are more than 460 bronze wares, 755 jade wares, more than 560 bone wares, tooth wares, pottery, clam wares, etc. A total of 1,928 pieces, in addition to more than 6,800 seashells and two conch.Among the bronze wares, there are 210 ritual vessels, including 5 square tripods, 26 round tripods, 10 jars, 5 guis, 5 square yis, 10 statues, 4 pots, 2 you, 2 squares, and There are 12 pieces, 2 goblets, 53 goblets, 40 jue, 8 tongs, 6 gongs, 2 plates, and a group of 5 cymbals, etc.In the round tripod, there are three sets of two pieces in pairs, and two sets of six pieces in groups.On the whole, the wine vessels are the most; among the wine vessels, the drinking vessels Jue and Gu are the most, with a total of 93 pieces, accounting for 44.6% of all ritual vessels.This strongly indicates that wine vessels were the main ritual vessels in the Shang Dynasty, which is also concrete evidence of merchants' excessive drinking.

A large-scale sacrificial field was also discovered in the Mausoleum of Gangshang King in the northwest of Houjiazhuang, Anyang, with a width of about 250 meters from north to south and a length of about 450 meters from east to west.A total of more than 1,400 sacrificial pits have been excavated over the years, accounting for more than half of the total.Because these sacrificial pits are neatly arranged, they are also called row burial pits.Most of the pits buried people and animals, and a few buried horses, dogs or cars.Most of the pits for burying human and animal animals are rectangular, generally about 2 meters long and 1 meter wide, and most of them contain 10 people.Some of the human animals buried in the pit were full body, and some were headless.There is also a square pit with a length and width of 1.5 meters, which is specially used for burying human heads.According to research, this is the place where the kings of Shang offered sacrifices to their ancestors, and most of the human animals used were young and middle-aged prisoners of war, most of whom were Qiang people.At most, three or four hundred people will be killed in one sacrifice.The piles of dead bones vividly reflect the brutality and cruelty of slavery in the Shang Dynasty.The slave-owner aristocrats wantonly killed and destroyed the social labor force, which is also a proof that slavery in the Shang Dynasty has not yet been fully developed.

In the late Shang Dynasty, the cemeteries of small and medium-sized slave owners, aristocrats and commoners can be taken as a typical representative in the west area of ​​Yin Ruins centered on Xiaomin Village in Anyang.939 tombs were excavated in the 1970s.Most of them are small tombs, about two meters long and less than one meter wide, in which one person is buried, and there are wooden coffins and funerary objects.In addition, there are a few larger tombs with a small number of martyrs.These tombs are arranged in an orderly manner and can be divided into eight tomb areas, and each area can be divided into several groups.The burials in different districts are not only different in the types of burial objects, for example, some districts use more pottery girdles for burial, while others have few pottery girdles.Moreover, inscriptions of different clans were cast on the bronze vessels buried with them.This shows that each cemetery belongs to different clans.The discovery of this kind of "clan cemetery" of merchants reflects that merchants lived together in clans during their lifetime and were buried together with their clans after death, which shows that blood relationship and clan ties were still very strong in the Shang Dynasty and played a very important role in social life. effect.

As for the slaves, there is no need for burials. They were enslaved by slave owners like cattle and horses during their lifetime, and in the end they were either treated as martyrs, killed as human animals, or thrown away at will after death.In addition to the above-mentioned martyrs or sacrificed human animals found in the tombs of the nobles, the human bones that were often found in the garbage pits and even dismembered in the archaeological work are the portrayal of the tragic fate of slaves.