Lois Ruben Aronow on tue 18 feb 03
The link for this article is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/science/18WARR.html?8hpib=3D&pagewanted=
=3Dprint&position=3Dtop
There are astounding photos!
=46rom the NY Times:
The Chinese have raised another army of remarkable dimensions,
hundreds of foot-tall terra-cotta warriors, along with horses and
chariots, that come from the depths of a tomb site south of Beijing.
The discovery was made late last year in the province of Shandong,
near Weishan Mountain, and the first pictures have just been made
available in the United States.
Archaeologists and conservators are working overtime to preserve the
colorful painted decorations of the 2,000-year-old figurines as they
are being exposed to air and removed from the ground.
This is not the first or the biggest such find. The most famous one,
excavated in the 1970's at a imperial tomb outside the city of Xian,
included 7,000 terra-cotta figures of soldiers, all of them life-size.
A second company of clay soldiers, including farm animals, was found
in 1990 in the vicinity of Xian.
But archaeologists and art scholars say the new discovery suggests
that the Chinese in the Qin and Han dynasties probably made a regular
practice of burying their royal and noble dead with a symbolic
military escort into the afterlife.
The Weishan site, as archaeologists are calling it, may spread over as
much as 10,000 square feet, Archaeology magazine reported in its
current issue. If so, excavators predicted, the site may hold several
thousand of the figurines, an impressive funerary display indicating
that this was the burial place of a nobleman or close relative of a
ruler of the Han dynasty, one of China's longest and most powerful,
extending from 206 B.C. to A.D. 220.
Experts said the tomb appeared to date from the first half of the Han
rule.
Similar burial customs have not been found associated with the latter
Han period.
The impressive life-size figures at Xian came from the tomb of a
powerful Qin emperor in the third century B.C., and the second find
has been linked to the tomb of a Han emperor and empress from the
second century B.C.
Although excavators have found a coffin with a body in the Weishan
tomb, the magazine said, they doubt that these are the remains of the
tomb complex's owner.
"Exactly who gets these underground armies at their tombs is not
clear," Dr. David A. Sensabaugh, curator of Asian art at the Yale
University Art Gallery, said in an interview last week.
"This tomb has to be for someone of a very high level, probably a
prince, a son of the emperor, who ruled in that region."
The first experts to examine the site were impressed by the
organization of the military figurines. At the forefront were
cavalrymen followed by highly decorated chariots and their red horses,
then the ranks of infantry.
Alongside them were several musicians, one with a brightly painted
drum next to him.
Some experts interpreted this as the first archaeological evidence for
a typical Han battle formation. Others said they believed the figures
were not combat soldiers, but a kind of honor guard.
Dr. Sensabaugh said the order of the troops appeared to be similar to
those shown in Han paintings and described in documents for "touring
formations." These were the occasions, he said, when a prince went out
with his chariots and soldiers in a display of pomp and a show of
power, not a march to war.
The magazine report noted that Han funeral practice "was strict and
specified that only generals could be buried with combat warriors and
horses." So the nature of the terra-cotta army and its significance in
ancient Chinese burial practices, the magazine concluded, "will not be
resolved until the owner of the tomb complex is identified."=20
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=46ine Craft Porcelain - New and Updated for 2003!!
http://www.loisaronow.com=20
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