Sanxingdui bronze heads with gold foil masks

Sanxingdui (Chinese: 三星堆; pinyin: Sānxīngduī; literally "Three star mound") (also seen locally spelled as Xanxingdui in Sichuan) is an ancient Chinese city where archaeologists discovered remarkable artifacts that radiocarbon dated circa 12th-11th centuries BCE, and Sanxingdui is the name given to this previously unknown Bronze Age culture. The museum is located near the city Guanghan, China. Pinyin, more formally called Hanyu Pinyin (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; Pinyin: ), is the most common variant of Standard Mandarin romanization system in use. ... Archaeology or sometimes in American English archeology (from the Greek words αρχαίος = ancient and λόγος = word/speech) is the study of human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains, including architecture, artefacts, biofacts, human remains, and landscapes. ... In archaeology, an artifact or artefact is any object made or modified by a human culture, and often one later recovered by some archaeological endeavor. ... The Bronze Age is a period in a civilizations development when the most advanced metalworking has developed the techniques of smelting copper from natural outcroppings and alloys it to cast bronze. ... Guanghan is a Chinese city of approximately 121,000 inhabitants located in the southernmost province of Sichuan. ...

Location

Coordinates: Latitude 30°57'20.53"N Longitude:104°19'16.38"E Guanghan Guanghan is a Chinese city of approximately 121,000 inhabitants located in the southernmost province of Sichuan. ...

The Sanxingdui archaeological site is located about 40 kilometers northeast of Chengdu in Sichuan Province, 10 kilometers east of the city of Guanghan.but is 50km from the CITY OF treasures Not to be confused with Chengde. ... Sichuan (Chinese: 四川; pinyin: Sìchuān; Wade-Giles: Ssu-ch`uan; non-standard transliteration: Szechwan) is a province in central-western China with its capital at Chengdu. ... Guanghan is a Chinese city of approximately 121,000 inhabitants located in the southernmost province of Sichuan. ...

Discovery

Sanxingdui bronze head with characteristic large ears, protruding pupils and elaborate forehead ornament

Sanxingdui bronze eagle head

In 1929, a farmer unearthed a large stash of jade relics while digging a well, many of which found their way through the years into the hands of private collectors. Generations of Chinese archaeologists searched the area without success until 1986, when workers accidentally found sacrificial pits containing thousands of gold, bronze, jade, and pottery artifacts that had been broken (perhaps ritually disfigured), burned, and carefully buried. Researchers were astonished to find an artistic style that was completely unknown in the history of Chinese art, whose baseline had been the history and artefacts of the Yellow River civilization(s). A selection of antique, hand-crafted Chinese jade (jadeite) buttons Unworked Jade Jade is used as an ornamental stone, the term jade is applied to two different rocks that are made up of different silicate minerals. ... Chinese Jade ornament with flower design, Jin Dynasty (1115-1234 AD), Shanghai Museum. ...

Ancient Bronze Casting

This ancient culture had remarkably advanced bronze casting technology which was acquired by adding lead to the usual combination of copper and tin creating a stronger substance that could create substantially larger and heavier objects; for instance, the world's oldest life-size standing human statue (260 cm. high, 180 kilograms), and a bronze tree with birds, flowers, and ornaments (396 cm.), which some have identified as renderings of the fusang tree of Chinese mythology. The most striking finds were large bronze masks and bronze heads (some with gold foil masks) represented with angular human features and exaggerated oblique eyes, some with protruding eye pupils and large upper ears. Based upon the design of these heads, archeologists believe they were mounted on wooden supports or totems, perhaps dressed in clothing. Other bronze artefacts include birds with eagle-like bills, tigers, a large snake, zoomorphic masks, bells, and what appears to be a bronze spoked wheel but is more likely to be decoration from an ancient shield. Apart from bronze, Sanxingdui finds included jade artifacts consistent with earlier Chinese neolithic cultures, such as cong and zhang. The coniferous Coast Redwood, the tallest tree species on earth. ... The Chinese characters for Fusang Fusang (扶桑, Mandarin Pīnyīn: fúsāng) is a country described by the Chinese Buddhist missionary Hui Shen (慧深; Japanese pronunciation: Kei-shin) in 499 CE, as a place 20,000 Chinese li beyond the sea to the east of China (this is either 1... A totem is any entity which watches over or assists a group of people, such as a family, clan or tribe (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary [1] and Websters New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition). ... A cong ( Wade-Giles tsung) is a form of jade artifact from ancient China. ...

Cosmology

As far back as Neolithic times, the Chinese identified each of the four quadrants of the sky with animals: a bird with the South, the tiger with the West, the dragon with the East, and a tortoise/snake with the North.^{[citation needed]} Each of these compass points was associated with a constellation that was visible in the relevant season: the dragon in the spring, the bird in the summmer, etc. Interestingly, these are the four animals that predominate the finds of Sanxingdui--birds, dragons, snakes and tigers, leading to a theory that these bronzes representing the universe. It is unclear whether they formed part of ritual events designed to communicate with the spirits of the universe (or ancestral spirits). As no written records remain it is difficult to determine the intended uses of objects found. Some believe that the continued prevalence of depictions of these animals, especially in the later Han period, was an attempt by humans to "fit into" their understanding of their world. (The jades that were found at Sanxingdui also seem to correlate with the six known types of ritual jades of ancient China, again each associated with a compass point (N, S, E, W) plus the heavens and earth.)^{[citation needed]}

Sanxingdui culture existed contemporaneously with the Early and Late Shang (1600-1027 BCE). The site at Chenggu shows influence from both Shang and Sanxingdui.

All the Sanxingdui discoveries aroused scholarly interest, but the bronzes were what excited the world. Task Rosen of the British Museum considered them to be more outstanding than the Terracotta Army in Xi'an. The first exhibits of Sanxingdui bronzes were held in Beijing (1987, 1990) and the Olympic Museum in Lausanne (1993). Sanxingdui exhibits traveled worldwide, and tickets were sold out everywhere; from the Hybary Arts Museum in Munich (1995), the Swiss National Museum in Zurich (1996), the British Museum in London (1996), the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen (1997), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1998), several museums in Japan (1998), the National Palace Museum in Taipei (1999), to the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore (2007). In 1997, the Sanxingdui Museum opened near the original site. London museum | name = British Museum | image = British Museum from NE 2. ... The Terracotta Army (traditional Chinese: ; simplified Chinese: ; pinyin: ; literally soldier and horse funerary statues) or Terracotta Warriors and Horses is a collection of 8,099 larger than life Chinese terra cotta figures of warriors and horses located near the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor (Chinese: ; pinyin: ). The figures vary... Xian redirects here. ... Peking redirects here. ... The Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland houses permanent and temporary exhibits relating to sport and the Olympic movement. ... For other uses, see Munich (disambiguation). ... The Swiss National Museum or Landesmuseum (German) – part of the Musée Suisse Group – is one of the most important art museums of cultural history in Europe and the world. ... Prinsens Palais in Copenhagen. ... The front of the Guggenheim Museum from 5th Avenue This article refers to the Guggenheim Museum in the upper east side of Manhattan (New York). ... Overview of the National Palace Museum. ... The Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM, Simplified Chinese: ) is an institution which forms a part of the three museums of the National Museums of Singapore. ...

Possible Influence

The Sanxingdui Culture was a mysterious civilization in southern China, which was in the kingdom of Shu during the period of the Shang Dynasty. Although they developed a different method of bronze-making from the Shang, their culture was never recorded by Chinese historians. Sanxingdui culture is thought to be divided into several phases. The first one may have been independent, while the later phases merged with Ba, Chu, and other cultures. Shu (蜀) was an ancient state in Sichuan, China. ... Remnants of advanced, stratified societies dating back to the Shang period have been found in the Yellow River Valley. ... Ba (巴) was an ancient state in eastern Sichuan, China. ... State of Chu (small seal script, 220 BC) Chu (楚) was a kingdom in what is now southern China during the Spring and Autumn period (722-481 BCE) and Warring States Period (481-212 BCE). ...

Besides Sanxingdui, other archeological discoveries in Sichuan, including the Baodun and Jinsha cultures, all indicate that civilizations in southern China go back at least 5,000 years. Such evidence of independent cultures in different regions of China defies the traditional theory that the Yellow River was the sole "cradle of Chinese civilization." Jinsha (金沙) is an archaeological site in Sichuan, China. ... For other Yellow Rivers, see Yellow River (disambiguation). ...

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Sanxingdui

• Erligang culture
• Erlitou culture
• History of China
• History of metallurgy in China
• Wucheng culture

The Erligang culture (二里岡文化) (1600 - 1400 BC) is the term used by archaeologists to refer to a Bronze Age archaeological culture in China. ... The Erlitou culture (二里頭文化) (1900 BC to 1500 BC) is a name given by archaeologists to an Early Bronze Age society that existed in China. ... The History of China is told in traditional historical records that refer as far back as the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors about 5,000 years ago, supplemented by archaeological records dating to the 16th century BC. China is one of the worlds oldest continuous civilizations. ...

External links

• More About the Finds at Sanxingdui, National Gallery of Art
• Treasures from a Lost Civilization: Ancient Chinese Art from Sichuan, Seattle Art Museum

References

• Bagley, Robert, ed. 2001. Ancient Sichuan: Treasures from a Lost Civilization. Princeton, NJ: Seattle Art Museum and Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08851-9
• Liu Yang and Edmund Capon, eds. 2000. Masks of Mystery: Ancient Chinese Bronzes from Sanxingdui. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales. ISBN 0-7347-6316-6

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Coordinates: 30°57′21″N 104°19′16″E / 30.95583, 104.32111 Dr Edmund Capon AM OBE (born 1940 in England) is an art scholar specialising in Chinese art. ... Image File history File links Zhongwen. ... The UTF-8-encoded Japanese Wikipedia article for mojibake, as displayed in ISO-8859-1 encoding. ... Japanese name Kanji: Hiragana: Korean name Hangul: Hanja: Vietnamese name Quốc ngữ: Hán tá»±: A Chinese character or Han character (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: ) is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese, rarely Korean, and formerly Vietnamese. ... Map of Earth showing lines of latitude (horizontally) and longitude (vertically), Eckert VI projection; large version (pdf, 1. ...