Zheng He's Tomb Found in Nanjing

A recently excavated tomb in Nanjing has been confirmed to be the grave of Zheng He, a eunuch from the early Ming Dynasty who led historic voyages to Southeast Asia and eastern Africa. The tomb was discovered accidentally on June 18th by workers at a construction site near Zutang Mountain that also holds the tombs of many other Ming Dynasty eunuchs, the Yangtse Evening News reported.

The tomb was 8.5 meters long and 4 meters wide and was built with blue bricks, which archaeologists said were only used in structures belonging to dignitaries during the time of Zheng He.

But experts believed his remains were not placed in the tomb because of the long distance between Nanjing and India, where he died during a visit in 1433.

Born in 1371, Zheng He was an excellent navigator and diplomat in the Ming Dynasty. He led the royal fleet to southwest Asia and east Africa on seven occasions from 1405 to 1433, nearly a century before Christopher Columbus discovered the American continent in 1492.

A lot of these are dead links. :')

Chinatown, 1000 B.C.
by Jocelyn Selim
Mike Xu, a linguist at Texas Christian University... has spent years analyzing jade, stone, and pottery relics from the Olmec, an ancient people that inhabited the American Southwest and Central America 3,000 years ago. He was struck by how closely the symbols on the artifacts resembled Chinese inscriptions from the Shang dynasty in China. "There are hundreds of these symbols that occur again and again, throughout the entire Olmec territory," Xu says. The Shang writings date from 1600 to 1100 b.c. Traces of the Olmec civilization abruptly appear during this span, around 1200 to 1100 B.C. Olmec and Shang artistic styles look much alike, and the two cultures followed related religious practices. For instance, both used cinnabar, a red pigment, to decorate ceremonial objects, and both put jade beads in the mouths of the dead to ward off evil. "The similarities are just too striking to be a coincidence," he says.
The Olmec and the Shang
by Claire Liu
tr. by Robert Taylor
Last year, in a book entitled Origin of the Olmec Civilization, Professor Mike Xu, a Chinese who teaches in the foreign languages department at the University of Central Oklahoma, proposed a hypothesis which aroused a storm of controversy in archeological circles. In Xu's view, the first complex culture in Mesoamerica may have come into existence with the help of a group of Chinese who fled across the seas as refugees at the end of the Shang dynasty. The Olmec civilization arose around 1200 BC, which coincides with the time when King Wu of Zhou attacked and defeated King Zhou, the last Shang ruler, bringing his dynasty to a close.
A tale of two cultures
by Charles Fenyvesi
The Smithsonian's Meggers says that Chen's analysis of the colors "makes sense. But his reading of the text is the clincher. Writing systems are too arbitrary and complex. They cannot be independently reinvented."
2,500 Years Before Columbus
by Patrick Huyghe
[W]hen the last Shang king was defeated and killed by rivals in 1122 B.C., his loyalists were forced to flee to the "East Ocean" or Pacific, notes Xu in his new book, Origin of the Olmec Civilization (University of Central Oklahoma Press, 1996)... Numerous notable Chinese scholars have confirmed Xu's readings of the Olmec inscriptions, including Han Ping Chen, a scholar of ancient Chinese from the Historical Research Institute at the China Social Science Academy. After examining 146 characters and symbols from the Olmec culture, Chen reported: "These symbols, if found or excavated in China (except rock art and carving), would certainly be regarded as prehistoric Chinese characters or symbols. Of 146 symbols, many are 100 percent identical to ancient Chinese characters. Some, I am afraid, can be easily recognized by Chinese first graders in elementary schools..." ...William Boltz of the University of Washington and Robert Bagley of Princeton dismissed as "rubbish" the notion that the characters could be Chinese. The criticism infuriates Xu -- and rightly so, we might add. "Most experts in Olmec studies do not have any idea about ancient Chinese writings and Asian cultures or tradition," says Xu, who was educated in both China and the United States. "How on Earth could they comment on top Chinese scholars reading Chinese as 'rubbish'?"
America's earliest written language uncovered
Friday 6th December 2002
Carvings believed to be the earliest form of written language in the Americas have been found in Mexico. Symbols dating back to 650BC were found by archaeologists in the San Andreas region of Tabasco state, near the Gulf of Mexico. They were found on chips from a stone plaque and on a cylinder stone used for printing that were unearthed in a dig at the site of an ancient Olmec city near La Venta. The symbols are 350 years older than the oldest previously discovered American writings... The carvings were interpreted to mean "king" and "3 Ajaw", which researchers believe was the name of a ruler. The Olmec's system of carvings for dates and names was adopted by the Mayas, who then developed it into a highly sophisticated language over the next 1,000 years.
'Earliest writing' found in China
by Paul Rincon
Signs carved into 8,600-year-old tortoise shells found in China may be the earliest written words, say archaeologists... They predate the earliest recorded writings from Mesopotamia - in what is now Iraq - by more than 2,000 years. The archaeologists say they bear similarities to written characters used thousands of years later during the Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1700-1100 BC... The archaeologists have identified 11 separate symbols inscribed on the tortoise shells. The shells were found buried with human remains in 24 Neolithic graves unearthed at Jiahu in Henan province, western China. The site has been radiocarbon dated to between 6,600 and 6,200 BC. The research was carried out by Dr Garman Harbottle, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US, and a team of archaeologists at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Anhui province... Dr Harbottle points to the persistence of sign use at different sites along the Yellow River throughout the Neolithic and up to the Shang period, when a complex writing system appears. He emphasised that he was not suggesting the Neolithic symbols had the same meanings as Shang characters they resembled... The shells come from graves where, in 1999, the researchers unearthed ancient bone flutes. These flutes are the earliest musical instruments known to date.
Sites of Shang and Zhou Dynasties unearthed at construction site in Jiangxi
People's Daily Online
December 12, 2008
Recently, reporters learned from Pengze County, Jiangxi that a construction unit of the Pengze-Hukou Expressway recently unearthed a large number of stoneware including stone axes, stone chisels and net sinkers, and ceramic ware such as kettles, pots, dings, spinning wheels and wrist straps, as well as a few cultural relics in the form of bronze spears while working in Mashan Village in Langxi Town of Pengze County.

To date, archeologists have already excavated over 80 square trial pits each covering an area of 25 square meters, with the total excavation area exceeding 2,000 square meters. According to excavation findings and verification by archeologists, this site was in existence during the late Shang Dynasty and early Zhou Dynasty, and is identified as the "Taimashan Site."

During the excavation, the archeologists discovered for the first time large-sized highland habitation sites of ancient humans, which prove that whole tribes existed around the Pengze basin in the south of the Yangtze River during the Shang and Zhou Dynasties.
Ancient ruins of salt-making from Shang and Zhou Dynasties found in Shouguang
People's Daily Online
December 15, 2008
Recently, archeologists from the China Academy of Social Sciences and School of Archaeology and Museology from Peking University and Shandong Province visited and inspected archeological sites of salt-making at the Shuangwangcheng reservoir in Shouguang, Shandong Province. All the experts agree that the relics can be dated back to the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, and preliminarily examinations conclude that these are important ancient ruins connected to the salt industry.

With over 80 sites covering 30 square kilometers the discovery of such densely distributed ancient ruins connected to salt-making is the first of its kind in China's archaeological history.

The ancient ruins found in this archaeological exploration are relatively intact and the cultural relics unearthed have been mainly helmet-shaped potteries, with most of them belonging to the Shang and Zhou Dynasties.

The excavation has provided important information for the study of the ancient salt industry and ancient social life.

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