In ancient times, human sacrifice was considered the most effective way to reach the heavenly (or underground) office, so ritual killings were widespread almost everywhere. One way or another, all ancient civilizations distinguished themselves, but the first on the list are usually recalled the peoples of pre-Columbian America - the Incas, Mayans and especially the Aztecs, who turned human sacrifice into grandiose ritual performances.
The second in line is likely to be the Celts. Behind them are the Vikings and the Germans. The more spectacular the rituals are, the longer they are remembered: "the wicker man", "bloody eagle" … Russia and Eastern Europe also did not lag behind: on the request "human sacrifice from the Slavs" Yandex gives out almost 20 million results - a popular topic for discussion today. The ancient Greeks and Romans so diligently created their civilized image that cases of ritual murders in these cultures will be quickly remembered, perhaps, only by experts, but they were. It is more difficult with the Etruscans - we have outlined the modern point of view on this matter in the material "The dark side of the Etruscans: in Populonia they found a unique burial of a young man in iron chains."
Africa, Ancient Egypt, India, the Middle East, a recent find in Korea (although in this case we are talking about the so-called "construction sacrifice", which is found even in those cultures where there are no signs of mass sacrifices) - human life was used everywhere as a fail-safe a way of communication with gods and ancestors. But all of the above (except, perhaps, the Aztecs) are far from the ancient Chinese.
When in 1928 excavations began in Yinxu (literally - "the ruins of the Yin State"), few people expected that the work would take decades, and the finds would literally be terribly interesting. Yinxu is the ruins of the last capital of the Shang dynasty, which ruled China from the 16th to the 11th century BC. Shang is not the most ancient Chinese dynasty, but the first, the existence of which is confirmed both by written sources and numerous archaeological finds. The Shang rulers moved their capital from place to place six times, but the latter, now known by the unpretentious nickname "ruins of Yin", was located in the territory of modern Henan province, not far from the city of Anyang.
At one time, the reason for excavations in Yinxu was unusual artifacts found here back in 1899: fortune-telling bones. Rather, mysterious old bones with inscriptions were found here before, but they were used in a completely different area - as a miracle cure for malaria and stab wounds. In 1899, ancient artifacts first fell into the hands of scientists, they determined their true purpose, and the value of strange finds grew more and more as research progressed - oracle bones turned out to be an inexhaustible source of information. Hieroglyphs carved into ox bones and turtle shells are now recognized as the oldest form of Chinese writing. The deciphering of the inscriptions helped to restore the complete tree of the rulers of the Shang dynasty and, among other things, to learn very unusual details about the life of the state that existed 3100-3600 years ago.
A well in Yinxu with a heap of divination bones made from turtles' shells. Photo: Xuan Che / Wikimedia Commons.
As the excavations progressed, scientists were able to relate the content of the oracle bones to the archaeological finds at the site. The result was shocking.
Excavations in Yinxu are still underway; the ancient city never ceases to amaze scientists. “This is an amazing place in every sense. Architectural structures are striking in their gigantic dimensions, as well as the scale of construction in general. In recent years alone, we have found many beautiful bronze and bone artifacts, including oracle bones,”Christina Cheung, a bioarchaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, told LiveScience and lead author of the latest scientific work on the Yinxu excavation.
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Christina Cheng's specialty is bioarcheology, and the study, published in June in the Journal of Anthropological Archeology, concerns finds of a very different kind: human remains.
Archaeologists have discovered a huge number of mass graves in Yinxu, neatly located throughout the ancient capital. Most of the graves contained the remains of 10, 30 and 50 people. Scientists have noticed that the inscriptions on the fortune-telling bones mention the same numbers when it comes to human sacrifices in exchange for the opinion of higher powers on a particular issue.
Mass burial of ritual victims in Yinxu. Photo: Wai Lit / Flickr.com
According to last year's data, the total number of sacrificial human remains found at the "ruins of Yin" reached 10 thousand. Over the past year, the numbers have changed: now scientists are talking about 13 thousand people who were killed during ritual ceremonies and buried in Yinxu. Not at a time, of course: researchers believe that such a number of victims "accumulated" over the 255 years that the capital of the Shang dynasty was located in this place.
“On the territory of the royal necropolis, we found the remains of at least 3,000 sacrificed people, even more - during excavations of the royal palace,” says Cheng. And this is only in Yinxu, the last capital of the Shang dynasty. Researchers found similar mass graves with mutilated human remains in other cities of the ancient Chinese state.
According to archaeological finds, human sacrifice was practiced in ancient China for thousands of years during three dynasties - Xia, Shang and Zhou, successively replacing each other. The most active "donors", by all indications, were the Shang rulers. On average, each sacrificial ceremony claimed the lives of fifty people. During the largest sacrifice, 339 people were killed at a time.
According to Christina Cheng, there were two main types of human sacrifice in the Shang era: Rensheng and Rensun. In the graves of Rensun victims (roughly translated, this term means “people-companions”), archaeologists often find exquisite burial gifts, and the context of the burials suggests that the victims of Rensun were mainly servants or relatives of the late aristocrats and influential officials.
The necropolis with the burials of human victims in Yinxu. Photo: beibaoke / LiveScience
Remains of Rensheng victims look quite different (this term is almost literally translated as “human sacrifice”): almost all of them are terribly mutilated, bodies are buried in group graves, and burial artifacts are either absent or very few.
Nearly all Renshengs were predictions that were in great demand during the Shang era. Since the connection between divination bones and human sacrifices is not the most obvious, it is worth explaining exactly how the divination process took place.
Each of the kings of the Shang dynasty constantly had vital questions: for example, whether it would be desirable for the spirits to save the ruler from an unbearable toothache or to give a rich harvest.
The fortuneteller cut out (later - wrote down) the question on an appropriate medium (using the shoulder blades of a bull or plastron, the lower shell of a turtle), then heated the bone or shell until cracks appeared, and then "translated" the answer from the spirit world according to the pattern of cracks. Usually, the answer (result), as well as the date, were recorded on the media with a question - everything is official, even everyday, for archives and reporting.
A Shang-era oracle bone made from the scapula of an ox. Photo from thoughtco.com / Lowell Georgia
Human sacrifices were an integral part of the process: their number, as well as the method of killing most pleasing to the spirits (scientists counted 12 different ways, a separate term was used for each), were often indicated in the question itself. For clarity, here are some examples of questions from divination bones:
- Will the spirits accept a sacrifice in the amount of twenty people killed by the "tan" method? [Recorded Result] Thirty people were presented to the spirits, and the outcome was extremely favorable.
- His Majesty will have to behead the sacrificial people. Will the perfume approve? [Recorded Result] On the day of yǐchǒu (date), human sacrifices were made using the Fa method, and a cow was killed.
- Will sacrifices be accepted on the day wù (date), killed by burial alive? [Recorded Score] It rained on bǐngwǔ (date) day.
- We ask: do spirits give rain if on the day of bǐngxū (date) we sacrifice women by burning them?
- Will the answer be favorable if on the day of xīnyǒu (date) we make sacrifices by means of exsanguination?
The mentioned method of "tan" means killing by beating a person to death, the method "fa" - cutting off the head (decapitation was the most popular, judging by the records on the oracle bones). The complete list of methods for executing victims, compiled by scientists on the deciphering of oracular bones, looks like this: decapitation, dissection / cutting the body in half, quartering or gradual cutting off of body parts to death, beating to death, exsanguination, burial alive, drowning, burning, boiling in boiling water, death from the scorching sun or "drying" of already dead open bodies under the sun to the state of jerky, death from any of the above methods, followed by leaving the bodies without burial …
The choice of one of the 12 methods of sacrifice depended on the addressee and purpose. The addressees were the spirits of ancestors as sacred guardians and protectors of the state, ruler, family, etc., and the spirits of nature - they were addressed mainly on weather and agricultural issues. Judging by the statistics of conversions, the cult of ancestors in the Shang era surpassed the worship of natural deities in importance and intensity.
The forces of nature usually relied on victims killed by "natural" methods: burning (fire), drowning (water), burial alive (earth). The ancestral spirits demanded more blood in exchange for blessings, protection from disasters, support and good luck in business. For them, the most preferred methods of killing were decapitation, dismemberment, beating to death, cutting off the legs, exsanguination, boiling in boiling water, "drying" in the sun, and the like. Women were often sacrificed to the spirits of nature, to the spirits of ancestors - men, mostly prisoners from hostile tribes. So the donor solved three problems at once: for example, having beheaded several dozen prisoners, he showed due respect to the ancestors, received an answer to his question and made his enemies fearful. Pragmatic and efficient.
Captured men and women from tribes warring with the Shang are often mentioned in texts on fortune-telling bones, often even indicating the tribe - for example, "Will the sacrifice of three men of the Qiang tribe and two cows killed by cutting off the limbs be pleasing to the spirits?"
Last year, Tang Jigen, head of the Anyang Branch of the PRC Academy of Social Sciences, suggested that the main source of victims for communication with spirits were people from the Qiang nomadic people - it is known that Shang and Qiang often and violently feuded. “In the Yinxu graves, we found sacrificial remains in groups of 10, 30 and 50 people. In the texts on the fortune-telling bones and other sources describing the rituals of worshiping the ancestors of the Shang kings, we often saw entries like “Slay 10 Qiang People,” “30 Qiang People,” or “50 Qiang People,” says Tang Chijen. By the way, despite all the disasters, the Qiang people survived: now Qiang is one of the ethnic minorities in western China with a total population of about 300 thousand people.
Anthropologists have already found that most of the Yinxu sacrificial remains belong to men between the ages of 15 and 35. But who were they - local residents or captive aliens, as the texts on the fortune-telling bones suggest? The study, led by a group of scholars led by Christina Cheng, was supposed to confirm - or disprove - the theory of prisoners of sacrifice, which emerged from the analysis of ancient records.
For this, the researchers conducted a laboratory analysis of the remains found at the royal cemetery in Yinxu, where the tombs of the rulers and 2500 burials of the victims of divination ceremonies are located. For the study, the remains of 68 people were selected, almost all of them belong to the "Rensheng" category.
Mass burial of Rensheng ritual victims in Yinxu. Photo: TheComplexWorld.
Usually, to determine the place of origin of ancient people, scientists analyze strontium isotopes in tooth enamel. However, the Rensheng victims studied by Christina Cheng were decapitated (fa), making it impossible to perform standard isotope analysis of the teeth.
Instead, the researchers analyzed the isotopic composition of carbon and nitrogen in bones. Such an analysis allows you to find out how a person ate and what water he drank, that is, his diet can indirectly indicate the places of his long-term residence.
The data obtained from the 68 victims of the Rensheng from Yinxu was compared with the data from 39 ancient bones, definitely belonging to ordinary local residents buried in the vicinity of Yinxu during the Shang era.
Isotope analysis showed that both the Rensheng victims and the Yinxu residents ate a lot of millet. However, in the diet of the locals, in addition to millet, there were small amounts of other food - wheat, rice, fish, venison … - while the food of the future victims of fortune-telling ceremonies did not differ even in such a small variety.
From the totality of the data, the scientists concluded that the victims of the Rensheng were indeed strangers, most likely captives. Thus, modern scientific evidence has confirmed the information on the oracle bones. “For the first time, we have been able to provide direct proof of a theory that was previously based only on the study of texts over 3000 years old. For us, this is like finding Troy and proving that the Iliad was not a complete fiction,”Cheng told Live Science.
One theory was confirmed, the other was refuted. Previously, many scholars of the Shang Dynasty had argued that people who were destined for sacrifice were not used as either a labor force or a slave force. Transcripts of the oracle bones suggested that future victims spent about 8 days in Yinxu before the ceremony, no more. However, the results of the isotope study do not coincide with the existing interpretation of the fortune-telling texts.
Macro- and microelements from food are deposited in the bones and persist for thousands of years: modern isotope research is based on this fact. However, first substances from food accumulate in small bones, and then in large ones. Differences in origin between local residents and prisoners of the "Rensheng" were revealed by the isotopic composition of large bones, while the same isotopes are found in small bones of local and alien species. This suggests that future victims did not live in Yinxu for eight days, as previously thought, but for at least several years - long enough for the local diet to affect the small bones of the skeleton, but did not have time to affect the large ones.
Christina Cheng and her research colleagues are confident that the result obtained is true: it is not profitable to maintain a huge number of captives for a long time without using them as labor. There is another circumstantial evidence of this: in previous studies of fortune-telling texts, it is said that aristocrats of the Shang era were obliged to provide the ruler with the necessary number of captives for sacrifices on demand. Consequently, the captives were kept somewhere and somehow for a long time, pending their transfer to the ruler at the first request.
Modern experts note the extreme cruelty and complete disregard for human life in ancient China - "people were sacrificed in almost the same ways as animals, in the eyes of the ruling elite, the difference between a slave and cattle was not great," said one of the linguists studying texts on fortune-telling bones. At the same time, cruel mass sacrifices speak of the extreme piety of the Shang rulers - in the context of their world and their time, they performed godly (pre-and nature-pleasing) deeds, showing an example of piety and earnest reverence for higher powers. Chinese experts usually emphasize that the phenomenon of human sacrifice was widespread everywhere, and ancient Chinese customs are only part of the worldwide practice. A kind of hint: they say, first look at your story.
Mass ritual sacrifices in China fizzled out around 700 BC, and not at all because of the increasing humanity of society. A simpler and more widely available method of fortune-telling appeared, which does not require blood and is still very popular: this is the famous "Book of Changes", the I Ching, which saved thousands and thousands of human lives. When you want to know your future in the I Ching, remember the story we have told.
Maria Myasnikova
