Posted on 07/13/2005 7:21:21 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Archeologists shake up history
NEW EVIDENCE: Artifacts found at a building site and the subsequent discovery of a lost civilization have forced historians to rethink Chinese history as a whole
AFP , JINSHA, CHINA
Wednesday, Jul 13, 2005,Page 4
 A worker stands on a stack of bags of cement before a huge billboard featuring the famous ''bronze human head figure with gold mask,'' one of the treasures of the Sanxingdui Museum in Guanghan, Sichuan Province in this photo from May. Recent archeological finds from previously unknown civilizations such as the Sanxingdui and the Jinsha are dealing shattering blows to traditional views of Chinese history. PHOTO: AFP |
Day after sweltering day on the banks of the Modi stream, archeologists are dealing shattering blows to traditional views of Chinese history as they work their way through the parched, yellow earth.
One of the world's great cities once flourished here at Jinsha village in China's southwest, the 1000BC equivalent of New York or Paris, and then inexplicably vanished, leaving no trace behind in the historical records.
Until recently, locals had no idea they were living on top of a great lost bronze-age civilization.
"Of course, people get excited when they hear that their home area has such a long history, such an advanced culture, and such refined art," said Jiang Zhanghua, deputy head of the Institute of Archeology in nearby Chengdu City.
The discovery of the site was entirely fortuitous, reflecting how much of the patchy record of the pre-historic past has come together merely by chance.
On a winter day in early 2001, excavation teams sent to the site by a property developer unearthed large numbers of ivory and jade artifacts that clearly suggested a major find.
If the company had decided to just carry on its work, covering the site in concrete as is believed by archeologists to be quite common, the Jinsha civilization might have been forgotten forever. But they called in authorities.
Weird masks
In and by themselves, the artifacts are striking in their weirdness -- masks with strangely protruding eyes, cult statues frozen in poses of unknown, but likely religious, significance.
More importantly, the spectacular discovery in Jinsha has added to the mass of evidence forcing historians to rethink Chinese history as a whole.
It is now clear that Chinese culture had multiple origins and did not, as previous generations of historians confidently believed, follow a simple path from just one single source.
It is a popular idea that the cradle of Chinese civilization is in the Yellow River valley about 1,000km northeast of Chengdu, and matured there before gradually spreading southward.
If nothing else, this traditional concept of history is supported by ancient myths about the Yellow Emperor and other early rulers, held dear by many Chinese.
But historians have long suspected this cannot be right. Ever since, that is, the discovery of the Sanxingdui civilization, about 50km from the Jinsha excavation site.
Here archeologists have been unearthing artifacts for most of the 20th century, discovering what now is confirmed as one of the world's major pre-historic civilizations.
The Sanxingdui culture, which blossomed from 5000BC to 3000BC, is characterized by the same radical strangeness as that unearthed at Jinsha.
Masks with oversized eyes and eyebrows, with some of them covered with gold leaf, are among its hallmarks.
But even as they display unique features, both Sanxingdui and Jinsha also show remarkable parallels with other ancient cultures.
Sacred sun and trees
"Sun worship was practiced here at the same time as it formed a central part of ancient Egyptian cults," says Zhu Yarong, a young historian at the large museum erected at Sanxingdui.
"People here appear to have worshipped sacred trees, just like in Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq," she says.
As the archeologists analyze the finds, they try to solve important questions, such as why the Sanxingdui site had a city wall while Jinsha did not.
The absence of a city wall in Jinsha is particularly strange, because cities in ancient China emerged as concentrations of political power, not trading centers as was mostly the case in the west.
Researchers also know little about the ties the Sanxingdui and Jinsha people had with other cultures, even if they can determine that exchanges must have been frequent.
The archeological teams have uncovered large numbers of ivory tusks originating from China's current border with mainland Southeast Asia.
The question is, how did they get here, and why?
Other questions remain. Where did the Sanxingdui and Jinsha people come from? Where did they go? And what exactly characterized their religion?
These are questions that may never be answered, because the Sanxingdui people left no written record. It is odd that people at their stage of development did not invent some type of writing system, but it is not unheard of.
Other civilizations, most notably in pre-Columbian America, were also illiterate, even as they were highly advanced in other fields such as architecture and astronomy.
Hidden knowledge
For Zhu, the museum historian, the discovery of written records would be a dream come true, unlocking hidden knowledge about how the mystical ancient inhabitants of the area lived and what their thoughts and feelings were.
"We don't know if they actually did invent writing. Maybe they did, but they used a material that has not survived to this day. It would be major, major step forward if we found written records," she says.
Yes, and in Norse mythology and probably originally in the Middle East, although there we only have later documents from the formal relitions that followed.
So9
Drats, missed that book.
Also doesn't help that I look at such things from an aesthetics point of view.
"That is probably how those from the North viewed the southerners, half naked barbarians wearing funny or weird stuffs"
--- Funny, throw in nascar & strange music and that is how the Northeast looks at the rest of the country today.
That's okay, "hurl" and "spew" aren't much better, and "regurgitate" is hard to rhyme with universities not ending in "State". ;')
"In a thousand years would our record be nothing but a collection of Doom3 and Dune2000 games?"
A CD can last 1000s of years, but imagine the difficulty of figuring out what it's for. And for that matter, imagine trying to convince some future "skeptic" that it is an artifact of an advanced, vanished civilization.
Starting a surviving PC -- one capable of booting off CD -- might be practical, depending on how and where it is preserved. Obviously, one would also have to leave a generator in the same cave, and instructions (pictures only) on how to crank it to provide power. Obviously it's too much to expect the Volt and the Amp specs to survive.
Our records could be quite remarkable. Hoover Dam, and other large dams, would still be around, unless they were in the asteroid impact zone. Large reliefs like Mount Rushmore would be around in some form. Plaques on construction projects would survive here and there. Cornerstones of buildings would be around.
Of course, depending on the length of time and the after-impact culture involved, it's possible that the writing would never again be readable...
They could be kin to the Ainu who were caucasoid and the original inhabitants of the Japanese Islands.
That sounds like the Picts.
I'm not worried about a thousand years into the future. Most electronic data won't be accessible in 50. CDs in perfect storage conditions may last 30 years, but will you be able to get a device to read them? NASA has tons of data from the viking and voyager spacecraft sitting on magtapes that can no longer be read because they've decayed so much.
In a modern society, if you want data to survive, you must have a system in place to constantly refresh the old data to new media. You also have to convert file formats as well. It's a major issue, and one that is not really being dealt with even with the resources of FedGov.
Fired clay tablets work. It's not trivial to update the files, though.
"Very high bridges on the noses for Mongoloids, though some Amerind groups have the same."
Proving, therefore, that China and all of Asia were first populated by Amerindians walking over the land bridge to Asia.
Kennewick Man demonstrates that European stock originated in North America and walked to Europe.
All of this was, of course, before the Amerindians cut down all the trees and sparked the first phase of global warming, thereby preventing people from colonizing Asia and Europe from the origin of humanity in America, of course.
You read it here first, folks.
I believe there is genetic proof that mankind today is actually one species with a common heritage. Inter-racial progeny would seem to bear this out.
Yeah, I tried that, but the whiteout that I use on my monitor doesn't work nearly as well on the tablets.
The genetic science backing up the "out of Africa" claim is very suspect. Its claim to authenticity is protected by the very esoteic nature of the mathematical modelling of the genetic forms which its inventors have created. (I've got a BS in mathematics, and can't even follow what they're talking about.) Also, three of the principle authors of this theory are admitted Marxists, which, in my book, makes anything they say suspect.
This isn't an argument about speciation--I'm a believer in the idea that we all have common ancestral types, though not necessary of the Darwinian sort. It's a matter of which peoples on earth are able to establish and maintain certain level of civilizations, who shares common (and exceedingly ancient) cultural icons, etc.
The African people are different from Asians and Caucasians; to claim otherwise is to live in a fantasy world. There are differences between Australian aborigines and Africans. And etc. There are FEWER differences, essentially, between Asians and Caucasians.
It's not PC to say so, but everyone knows it instinctively, and I believe archaeological research is proving it out.
This isn't to claim anyone is "better" than anyone else, so let's avoid indignant posturing. We're just different. The differences are displayed every day.
I'm of a similar belief. Where do you think the Jomon - Ainu fit. The oldest (undisputed) Mongoloid skeleton ever found is 10,000 years old.
Sub-Saharian Africans, I call them 'stay-at-home' Africans. Everyone else in the world are more closely related to each other than they are to the Sub-Saharian Africans.
The Jomon I'm no expert on, but I've a colleague who has completed linguistic studies of the Ainu dialect (which is quite different from native Japanese-which is derived from Korean, despite what the Japanese might want to believe), and his conclusions were that Ainu is a derivative of Turkic. What branch, I don't know. The details he explained to me kind of went over my head at that point, but this is another suggestion of the common origins of Caucasians and East Asians, at least to me.
You're right, I should have been more accurate. Sub-Saharan Africans. I wouldn't call them "stay at home," though, since it's pretty hard to ignore black african influences in the New World (the Olmecs and all). They got around, but their voyages were relatively recent.
This may interest you.
It's always dangerous for me to bring up languages since I'm not a linguist.
A lot of research into these matters is new, so researchers go on "gut instinct" often, and have to run from their academic superiors, depending on what school they teach in. And, of course, if they don't teach in a "name" school, they're ignored.
These matters of the origins of civilization seem self-evident to me; it's just a matter of waiting for the evidence to come in to maintain, or change, one's ideas.
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