Skip to main content

China’s 8,000 Terracotta Warriors: An Animated & Interactive Introduction to a Great Archaeological Discovery

Unless you're a Chinese history buff, the name of Qin Shi Huang may not immediately ring a bell. But perhaps his accomplishments will sound familiar. "He conquered the warring states that surrounded him, creating the first unified Chinese empire" — making him the very first emperor of China — "and enacted a number of measures to centralize his administration and bolster infrastructure," writes Smithsonian.com's Brigit Katz. "In addition to standardizing weights, measures and the written language, the young ruler constructed a series of fortifications that later became the basis for the Great Wall."

Second only to the Great Wall as an ancient Chinese artifact of note is Emperor Qin's army: not the living army he maintained to defend and expand his empire, fearsome though it must have been, but the even more impressive one made out of terracotta.

"In 1974, farmers digging a well near their small village stumbled upon one of the most important finds in archaeological history," says the TED-Ed lesson written by Megan Campisi and Pen-Pen Chen above: "a vast underground chamber surrounding the emperor's tomb, and containing more than 8,000 life-size clay soldiers, ready for battle," all commissioned by Qin, who after ascending to the throne at age thirteen "began the construction of a massive underground necropolis filled with monuments, artifacts, and an army to accompany him into the next world and continue his rule."

Qin's ceramic soldiers, 200 more of which have been discovered over the past decade, have stood ready in battle formation for well over 2000 years now. Stored in the same area's underground chambers are 130 chariots with 520 horses, 150 cavalry horses, and a variety of musicians, acrobats, workers, government officials, and exotic animals — all made of terracotta, all life-size, and each with its own painstakingly crafted uniqueness. They populate what we now call a necropolis, an elaborately designed "city of the dead" built around a mausoleum. You can get a 360-degree view of a section of Qin's necropolis above, as well as a deeper look into its historical background from the BBC documentary New Secrets of the Terracotta Warriors, the BBC documentary above, and this episode of PBS' Secrets of the Dead.

Why direct so much material and labor to such a seemingly obscure project? Qin, who also showed a great interest in searching far-flung lands for life-prolonging elixirs, must have considered building a well-populated necropolis a reasonable bet to secure for himself a place in eternity. Nor was such an endeavor without precedent, and in fact Qin's version represented a civilizing step forward for the necropolis. "Ruthless as he was," write Campisi and Chen, he at least "chose to have servants and soldiers built for this purpose, rather than having living ones sacrificed to accompany him, as had been practiced in Egypt, West Africa, Anatolia, parts of North America," and even previous Chinese dynasties. "You can't take it with you," we often hear today regarding the amassment of wealth in one's lifetime — but maybe, as Qin must have thought, you can take them.

Related Content:

One of World’s Oldest Books Printed in Multi-Color Now Opened & Digitized for the First Time

How Ancient Greek Statues Really Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Colors and Patterns

Roman Statues Weren’t White; They Were Once Painted in Vivid, Bright Colors

What Ancient Chinese Philosophy Can Teach Us About Living the Good Life Today: Lessons from Harvard’s Popular Professor, Michael Puett

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculptures, Statues & Artworks: Download & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

China’s 8,000 Terracotta Warriors: An Animated & Interactive Introduction to a Great Archaeological Discovery is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2GwCRAN
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more