Posted on 07/25/2004 5:27:13 PM PDT by blam
Earliest palace city discovered in Henan
www.chinaview.cn 2004-07-25 09:57:20
The undated file photo shows part of the Erlitou site in Yanshi, central China's Henan Province. Archaeologists said that the palace city discovered last spring at the Erlitou site may be the earliest palace city ever discovered in China. (Xinhua Photo)
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The undated file photo shows part of the Erlitou site in Yanshi, central China's Henan Province. (Xinhua Photo)
The undated file photo shows relics unearthed from the Erlitou site in Yanshi, central China's Henan Province. (Xinhua Photo)
ZHENGZHOU, July 25 (Xinhuanet) -- Archaeologists said that the palace city discovered last spring at the Erlitou site in Yanshi City, central China's Henan Province, may be the earliest palace city ever discovered in China.
"The design of the city had erected a model for later dynasties in designing their capital," said Dr. Xu Hong, who leads the archaeological investigation team at the Erlitou site of the Institute of Archaeology, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The rectangular city is 300 meters wide from the east to the west, and 360 to 370 meters long from the north to the south.
Four roads, each 10 to 20 meters wide, are on each side of the palace area, forming a transportation network in the central region. The city wall was just built along the inner sides of the four roads.
According to Xu, so far, two groups of palaces were unearthed in the palace city.
"Either palace group has a clear central line as all large constructions and roads are distributed evenly at either side of the line," said Xu.
Before the discovery of the palace city at the Erlitou site, the earliest city site can be identified in China is the Yanshi Shang Town, which was built about 3,600 years ago.
The new discovery shows that many city construction rules in the later dynasties can be dated back to the time of the Erlitou site. This includes the crisscrossing roads, the rectangular palace city, construction distributed around a central line and constructions facing south, said Xu.
"So the Erlitou palace city can be regarded as the ancestors of China's ancient palace cities," said Xu. Enditem
GGG Ping.
Are those spindle whorls?
With all those people walking all over the country all this time you might think they would never lose something large as a city. It's good they found it, though.
Hm. I was kind of wondering what they might be.
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My SWAG would be drill weights and whorles. It looks as if there are beads over the top of each device. The are beautifully made if that is what they are.
Too bad the article couldn't have given some estimate as to the age of this, other than to state that it's older than the previous oldest find [3,600 years ago].
Looking closer and using depth perception, I see flat disks with a cam, then a vertical cylinder in the center and a hole through the cylinder making it a tube. Does this have to do with silk?
Have you set upon "GGG" as the new keyword?
Could be. It is frustrating to see photos without explaination but Arcaeologists are really good at such "snobery".
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"It is commonly held by Chinese scholars that the Erlitou culture is equivalent to the Xia dynasty, and that the Xia and Shang were state-level societies which constituted large centralized political systems throughout their reigns. In contrast, many western scholars have been sceptical about the reality of the Xia, and believe that a pristine state did not develop until the late Shang. The reason that the interpretations of the political organization in early Chinese civilization were so contradictory may relate to the data used in these studies. Most of the discussions by Western scholars are based on old archaeological information and on ancient texts including oracle-bone inscriptions. Oracle-bone inscriptions provide invaluable data on the late Shang, but little information on earlier periods. Most texts were written hundreds, if not thousands, of years after the Erlitou and early Shang periods. These interpretations, therefore, were inevitably modified by oral transmission and the court historians who made the records."
If I recall correctly, the Shang were also thought to be semi-mythical until ground-breaking discoveries in the twenties and thirties firmly established their existence (said discoveries also revealed the uncomfortable fact of their taste for human sacrifice...).
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