The discoveries were made at the famous Sanxingdui archaeological site in Guanghan city in southwestern Sichuan province. The actual treasure was excavated from sacrificial pits 7 and 8 by a collaborative team of academics from Peking University and Sichuan University. Among the items was a bronze and green jade box that was decorated with dragon head handles and was once kept wrapped in silk. Professor Li Haichao, of Sichuan University who runs pit 7, told Chinese news agencies that “It would not be an exaggeration to say that the vessel is one of a kind, given its distinctive shape, exquisite craftsmanship and clever design.” . The collection of intricate sculptures includes mythical creatures, human-snake hybrids and bronze heads decorated with golden masks. The pictorial program of the sculptures, which were mainly located in pit 8, is “complex and imaginative”. Zhao Hao, an associate professor at Peking University, said they reflect “the fairy world that people imagined at the time and demonstrate the diversity and richness of Chinese culture.” The findings are attracting a lot of attention, not only because of the site’s historical significance, but also because of the invocation of the word “fairy” in media statements. But “fairy” can be a misleading term here. The term comes from Old English (Fae) from Old French (faie) and refers to women who were skilled in magic or enchanted things and illusions. In pop culture, the word fairy is most often associated in English-speaking countries with Tinkerbell or, if you want to consider yourself cultured, Puck: magical, often small-sized winged creatures associated with forests, garden beds and wishes . In Chinese mythology, entities described as “fairies” are often more powerful spirits associated with specific locations, particularly mountains, rivers, and oceans. These “spirits” can be benevolent or malevolent, and are sometimes related to former human beings or animals who transformed into local spirit guardians, ancestral spirits, and deities. The Spirit-Guardian (Jingwei) of the Departing-Doves Mountain, for example, transformed into the Spirit-Guardian bird when it drowned in the Eastern Sea. A former mortal, of Strasburg A Chinese vet describes her as both a “goddess” and a “guardian of the spirit” and notes that the Taoists identify her as “Transcendent [human]and that in modern China it is “a symbol of someone who refuses to accept defeat”. Jingwei’s story is about transformation and that fluidity is only enhanced by changing interpretations of her situation over time. The invocation of the word “fairy” in the news reports is enlightening, however, not only because of what it tells us about the discovery in question, but also because of the ways it exposes the exclusion of fairies from Western supernatural consciousness. If you look up the word ‘fairy’ in the Cambridge English Dictionary, you’ll learn that fairies are ‘fantasy’. Look for the most Christian-friendly “angel” and you’ll find a complete lack of existential crises. All this means that communication with angels, spirits and fairies are not different kinds of activities. If talking to fairies sounds crazy, but making sacrificial offerings to the spirits seems expected, then we are just being misled by the cultural biases of our own Christian-centric English language. In the irrevocably hierarchical patchwork pantheon of Anglo-American culture, fairies sit at the bottom of the pecking order and have no visibility whatsoever. But Chinese mythology does not share our assumptions and discriminations. If the current interpretation is correct, then the people at Sanxingdui were in contact with entities that could easily be described as spirits or gods. The language of “fairy” captures the ways in which Chinese spirits and deities were often animal-human hybrids, but aesthetically, as the images from Sanxingdui reveal, they are quite different. You won’t find pixie cuts here.
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China News Service
Although scientists have not given exact dates for the most recent findings, the Sanxingdui ruins are 3500-4800 years old, and experts said the artifacts are about 3000-4500 years old. They are of immense importance for what they reveal about the Shu civilization, which flourished in the region until 316 BC. (when the area was conquered by the Qin Dynasty). Archaeological research is the primary way to reconstruct this otherwise mysterious culture as the literary references to the Shu state are largely mythological and date from the fourth century BC. Chronicles of Huayang. Previous studies of finds from Sanxingdui have noted that the culture that flourished there in the Bronze Age was contemporary with that of the Shang Dynasty and shared some commonalities with its mythology and religion. Equally important among these is the use of copper sacrifices as a means of communicating with the spirits. (This interpretation of the pits is contested: Chen Shen argued in a 2002 book that the pits may have been burial pits rather than sacrificial sites. There are no human remains in the pits). In a report on a bronze statue found in Sacrificial Pit 1, Shen Zhongchang and Robert Jones write that during this period “spirits were especially worshipped” in this way in Shang religion. At the same time, as Robert Bagley has written, “There is nothing in Shang archeology to prepare us for bronze sculptures of the size and complexity” found in Pit 1. Bagley argues that “The sacrificial ritual that produced the two [Sanxingdui] pits [1 and 2 ] it has no exact parallel elsewhere in Chinese archeology and can be related only in the most general way’ to rituals discovered by archaeologists at other Shang sites. Ran Honglin, from the Research Institute of Sichuan Provincial Culture and Archaeology, said of the recent findings that some elements of the sculpture were similar to objects from the Zhou Dynasty. In other words, the finds from Sanxingdui are extremely important for what they can tell us about contact between different kingdoms in ancient China, the development of metallurgical technologies, and ancient Chinese religious rituals. The discovery of these more complex and elaborate sacrificial offerings helps color our rough sketch of Shu cosmology and culture and what Honglin calls “early exchange and integration of Chinese culture.” When Professor Hao spoke of the “fairy world”, the focus of his statement was actually “on the diversity and richness of Chinese culture”. The accounts of ancient Chinese fairies, impressive as they are, undersell the ancient spirit deities and the significance of the discoveries.
