Jottings from the Granite Studio

A 2,500-year old Shang era tomb discovered last January in eastern Jiangxi province has once again provided reseachers with some fascinating discoveries including the grisly unearthing of a burial chamber containing 47 bodies, victims of human sacrifice. Human sacrifice was a key part of Shang political and religious culture, with Shang kings acting in a role of ritual intermediary between the heavens, the imperial ancestors, and the world.

The tomb was discovered after police caught looters trying to excavate the site looking for buried treasure. One of the most impressive artifacts unearthed so far has been an ornately decorated red and black sword that lead archaeologist Xu Changqing has called “the most beautiful and best-preserved sword ever found in this part of China.”

One quibble, the National Geographic article quotes Adrienne Mayor :

Following history’s “axial age,” when sages including Confucius in China, Buddha in India, and Socrates in Greece “spoke out against the practice, human sacrifice became rare,” she said.

“Most cultures eventually replaced living sacrificial victims with symbolic rituals.”

But the article then adds this passage, not attributed to any scholar.

In China, however, sacrifices continued into the early Ming Dynasty, which lasted from A.D. 1368 to 1644.

Emperor Yongle, who oversaw the design and construction of Beijing’s Forbidden City six centuries ago, decreed that many of his imperial consorts be sacrificed to join him in the afterlife.

Followed by a quotation from historian David N. Keightly on the importance of human sacrifice during the Shang.

The juxtaposition gives the impression that China was the only civilization to continue the practice of human sacrifice as a key part of political ritual even after the Axial age. While I don’t doubt incidents such as the Yongle anecdote,* the practice of regular human sacrifice in China reached its apogee under the Shang kings, although Qin Shihuangdi (259-210 B.C.E.) is certainly credited with more than his share of victims sacrificed for his various projects. After the Qin, the practice rapidly fell out of favor as animals or other vessels began to be used in place of human beings. That said, I’d be interested in learning more if anyone has any sources or knows of a scholarly work on the use of humans in sacrificial ritual in the imperial period.

(h/t and image via National Geographic Online)

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*In fact, the story of the Yongle emperor fits more into a pattern in the Ming and Qing of ‘widow fidelity,’ whereby wives or consorts could be esteemed as ‘faithful widows’ if they followed their husbands into death, not unlike the Hindu practice of Sati. (Though how that’s better than being sacrificed in the name of state is a point certainly worth considering.) Generally speaking though, to be a ‘faithful widow’ (as in Sati) the death should should have been voluntary, and the evidence shows that most widows in the Ming (and Qing) chose less extreme, but still quite acceptable, ways of expressing their fidelity such as refusing to remarry or remaining in seclusion.