Mystery of the 8,000 Terracotta Army Solved

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The grandiose burial complex of the first emperor to unite China is nothing more than a kind of reference for Heaven, a document confirming in detail the entire life of Qin Shi Huang.

45 years ago, on March 29, 1974, one of the largest archaeological discoveries in the 20th century was made. Chinese peasant Yang Ji Wang decided to drill an artesian well on his site. But instead of water, he found a full-length clay statue of a warrior with a spear in his hand. This is how the famous Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang was found.

It was to the east of Lishan Mountain, about 40 km. from the ancient capital of China, the city of Xi'an, which was chosen as their residence by 13 dynasties of this ancient country.

So at first it was not entirely clear to what period this clay peasant should be attributed, as well as his company, numbering 6,000 infantrymen, lined up in 11 corridors of the underground gallery. However, it soon became clear that under the first gallery there is a second one, where the clay command staff of the middle management is located. Twenty years later, in a completely different gallery, they found the higher command - the generals of clay blockheads, including the commander-in-chief in scaly armor, strewn with precious stones. And 7 years later, the imperial rear went - in 2001, the first terracotta statues of officials were found. Now the total number of clay dummies exceeds eight thousand.

In the process of discoveries, it became quite clear that this whole company accompanied Emperor Qin Shi Huang on the last journey, and not someone else. However, the real name of the deceased was still Ying Zheng, and Qin Shi Huangdi is something like an honorary nickname, to which China is so partial - let us recall the "Great Helmsman" Mao Zedong. Qin Shi Huang is translated quite similarly: "The Great Leader, the Founder of Qin." He lived in the III century BC and managed to lead the country out of the two-hundred-year period of the "Warring Kingdoms", becoming the first ruler of a united China in history.

To the domestic reader, familiar with the tales of Alexander Volkov about adventures in the vicinity of the Emerald City, all this Chinese archeology could not but recall the second work of the famous cycle about the Magic Land - "Urfin Deuce and His Wooden Soldiers." There, a carpenter obsessed with megalomania makes a series of platoons of wooden warriors-blockheads, revives them with the help of magic powder and sets off to conquer the world, at first very successfully.

Qin Shi Huang. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

Apparently, the childhood impressions of the adventures of Ellie, Totoshka, the Wise Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, saving the world from the combat wooden robots of a maniac carpenter, turned out to be very strong. So much so that for several generations of amateurs everywhere and everywhere to look for the "secret and unknown", sings the same song, making the ancient emperor some kind of afterlife Urfin Deuce. Their chorus is so strong that the song acquired the status of a respectable hypothesis and penetrated online encyclopedias: “According to the emperor's plan, the statues were supposed to accompany him after death, and, probably, provide him with the opportunity to satisfy his imperious ambitions in the other world in the same way as he did it is during life."

Basically, it would all look pretty slender. One could, if not believe, then at least accept it as a working hypothesis, if the emperor's burial complex were limited only and exclusively to clay blockheads.

But the trick is that this eight-thousandth army is only a small, one might say, insignificant element of that grand necropolis that Qin Shi Huang began to build for himself at the age of 13 and continued until his death. Constant archaeological research, lasting almost half a century, suggests that the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian, who described the burial of the emperor, did not embellish the reality as much as it was believed until now.

Here is what Sima Qian wrote: “In the ninth moon, Shihuang's ashes were buried near Lishan Mountain. Shihuang, when he first came to power, then began to build his own crypt. Having united the Celestial Empire, he sent over seven hundred thousand criminals from all the Celestial Empire. They went deep to the third waters, filled the walls with bronze and lowered the sarcophagus down. The crypt was filled with copies of palaces transported and dropped there, figures of officials of all ranks and soldiers of all ranks and positions, rare things and extraordinary jewelry. The craftsmen were ordered to make crossbow bows so that, installed there, they would shoot at those who try to dig a passage and get into the tomb. Large and small rivers and seas were made from mercury, and mercury spontaneously overflowed into them. On the ceiling they depicted a picture of the sky, on the floor - the outline of the earth, crossed by a hundred rivers, including the full-flowing Yangtze and the Yellow River, the channels of which are filled with mercury instead of water, like the sea-ocean that frames the empire from the east."

We repeat - all this splendor was considered a bike, a legend not worthy of attention. Until about thirty years ago, soil samples were taken from a section of the hill - approximately above the alleged Shihuangdi Underground Palace. Samples showed that in the center of the hill there is a relatively compact zone with an abnormally high content of mercury, the vapors of which have reached the surface.

In short, a huge map of a united China with mercury rivers and seas seems to exist. It is possible that there is also the rest of the splendor, so colorfully described by Sima Qian. This means that the option "the clay army is needed to satisfy the ambitions of power" is crumbling to dust. Because along with the model of the army, the emperor took with him to the grave the model of the China that she conquered.

Therefore, the question arises again - why is all this in the afterlife?

The answer may be prompted by relatively recent studies of the material from which the statues are made. In clay, even well-fired, there are always areas where the pollen of plants did not have time or could not burn out. Analysis of this very pollen showed that the statues were made in different parts of the huge united empire of Qin Shi Huang, and then they were taken to Mount Lishan along the roads that were paved according to the unyielding will of Qin Shi Huang.

In short, the solution is quite simple. Both the terracotta army and the entire grandiose burial complex were needed by the emperor as a kind of proof - a document confirming the earthly greatness of the "Son of Heaven", as the emperors were called in China. The sky - it sees everything, and therefore the main document of all life had to honestly prove that the Empire was created, has an impressive transport connection, and the subjects fulfill the will of the emperor as sacred. That is to say, a "weighty, visible, rough" argument before Heaven: "I, Qin Shi Huang, did not live my life in vain and managed to create Great China from scattered tribes."