by Archaeologists in China have discovered a mysterious series of rectangular pieces of wood related to an ancient astronomical calendar. The artefacts were discovered inside a 2,000-year-old tomb that was very well preserved in the south-west of the country.
Each of the 23 wooden slips is about an inch (2.5 centimeters) wide and 4 inches (10 cm) long and depicts a Chinese character associated with the Tiangan Dizhi, or “Ten Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches” – an astronomical calendar traditional Chinese. founded during the Shang dynasty, which ruled from about 1600 BC. until about 1045 BC.
Archaeologists think that one of the slips may have represented whatever the current year was and that the other 22 slips could have been used to specify any particular year in the ancient calendar, according to a translation of a story on the China News website, an agency run by the Chinese government.
A circular perforation on the edges of each slip indicates that they were once bound together.
However, it is still unclear how the series of wooden calendar slips functioned, an expert told Live Science.
This is the first time such objects have been found in an ancient tomb, although the practice of writing characters on strips of wood or bamboo was common in China before the invention of paper.
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golden age
The wooden slips and several other artifacts were discovered earlier this year in a tomb in the Wulong district, about 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) southwest of Beijing, by archaeologists from the Chongqing municipal government. said the Global Times — which is also run by the Chinese government.
There is a written list in the tomb of all the buried items, which also says that it was built in 193 BC. Which places the tomb during the Han era of the Western dynasty, which ruled a large part of China from 206 BC. to 9 AD; this was followed by the Eastern Han dynasty, which ruled until AD 220, and together they are considered a “golden age” when many Chinese traditions were established.
Archaeologist Wang Meng said the tomb was the finest wooden chamber tomb ever found in southwest China.
Project leader Huang Wei told the Global Times that the tomb also contained more than 600 cultural artifacts, including lacquerware bowls, boxes, jars and plates. There were bamboo instruments and musical pipes, a spear and cooking tripod made of copper, wooden figurines, as well as pottery and bronze objects.
The mystery of the calendar
Astrologer Ed Kruppdirector of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and author of “Echoes of the Ancient Skies: Astronomy of Lost Civilizations” (Dover, 2003), who was not involved in the Wulong discovery, told Live Science that although the Tiangan Dizhi calendar is mainstream – it is used in Chinese astrology, for example – the wooden slips found in Wulong’s tomb were unusual .
“The wooden slips with calendar notations are significant as the first and only known example of that type of inscription on that type of object,” he said in an email.
But it does not seem that the series of wooden slips could function as a calendar; rather, it seems they could be used to refer to any year of the 60-year calendar cycle, he said.
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“If so, they are not ‘books’, but things used to draw attention to a particular year,” he said. He noted its similarities to a practice followed at a Taoist temple in the Chinese city of Suzhou, where a statue with a special mark when it is current is displayed at each year in the cycle.
Krupp said the finds from the Wulong tomb indicated that a person of high status had been buried there. “The artefacts buried with the deceased are numerous and very fine,” he said. “This is rich, expensive stuff.”
