Asian Cultures
An introduction to Archaeoastronomy in Asia, with a detailed discussion of the Chinese Qin and Han mausoleums, of the temples of Angkor, and of the Borobodur temple complex.
- PDF / 1,354,424 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 60 Downloads / 201 Views
Asian Cultures
11.1
The Terracotta Army
The history of China is classified according to dynasties, starting from the second millennium BC. The history of imperial China formally begins, however, from the reign of the first emperor of Qin, Shi Huang, who succeeded in unifying the country in 221 BC. His name is famous worldwide due to his tomb, located in Lintong to the south-east of Xi’an, and to an astonishing archaeological discovery occurred there: the so-called Terracotta Army. It is a collection of thousands of terracotta statues of warriors (Fig. 11.1). Overall, there are more than 8000 soldiers, together with hundreds of chariots and horses, located in 3 huge underground pits. The statues are life-sized and made out choosing among several different possible faces, hairstyles, uniforms and so on, so that they practically look all different from each other. They were originally painted with bright colors, most of which have disappeared. The warriors are disposed in rows, ready for a battle or—at least in the view of many, including myself—for an official ceremony to which the Emperor must attend in the afterworld. There are indeed not only warriors’ pits: other excavations have revealed a rich—and sometimes puzzling—symbolic equipment for the emperor’s afterlife. First of all, a pit containing two half-sized bronze chariots, with all probability representing the emperor’s official procession. Further, a rectangular pit was found containing thousands of stone pieces which, when assembled, reveal to form stone (and therefore purely symbolic) armors, perhaps meant for the warriors in case of needs against the spirits. Yet another pit contains terracotta statues of acrobats and musicians. Last but not least, a small bronze lake surrounded by bronze water birds of different species has also been found (Zhewen 1993; Wu 2010). The tomb lies beneath a huge burial mound of rammed earth, which works as an unmistakable landmark denoting the funerary landscape of the Emperor. The burial chambers have not been excavated, but the Chinese historian Sima Qian describes © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 G. Magli, Archaeoastronomy, Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45147-9_11
245
246
11
Asian Cultures
Fig. 11.1 The terracotta warriors, Pit. n.1
them as a microcosm endowed with vaults representing the heavenly bodies and a miniature of the empire—including rivers made out of mercury—on the ground. The tomb was positioned near the sacred peak of Mt. Li, which dominated the Wei River from the south. The mound was itself referred to as a “mountain”, and was thus meant to be a replica of nature, over which the owner exerted his power and control. The base plan of the mound is however square and oriented to the cardinal points, as well as the pits of the terracotta warriors. We thus see in the project the symbolic importance of cardinal orientation on Earth, connected as it was with the “cosmic” order in the heavens, which formed the core organizing principles of the Chinese doctrine o
Data Loading...
