The Cultural Properties of Xingan Bronze Ware
The Xingan Bronze Ware Group has the typological characteristics of Shang dynasty bronze ware, with the vast majority belonging to typical Shang dynasty bronze ware, especially ritual vessels.
1. Bronze ritual vessels
Ritual vessels are a typical representative of Chinese bronze culture. There are a total of 5 ritual vessels in the Xingan Bronze Ware Group (classified as musical instruments), including 12 types: Ding, Li, Yan, Gui, Dou, Pu, Lei, Hu, You, Zan, Qi, and Nao. The number of tripods is the highest, with a total of 30 pieces, which is the most representative.
2. Bronze weapon
In the Xingan Bronze Ware Group, there are 252 types of weapons, including spears, spears, axes, swords, daggers, helmets, spears, hollow arched blades, and arrowheads. Almost half of them are arrowheads. Ge is the most distinctive weapon of China, with 28 bronze Ge pieces produced by Xin Gan. Although they can be classified into several types, many have been unearthed in Zhengzhou and Anyang.
The bronze yue is a unique bronze artifact in China. The bronze yue unearthed from the Xingan Shang Tomb weighs several kilograms and is the largest ever unearthed. Its shape and structure are similar to those unearthed from the Panlong City in Huangpi, both of which have the style of the Shang Dynasty.
Copper armor belongs to the category of protective weapons, and as many as a hundred have been discovered in the Yin Ruins, with only slight differences in their shapes and structures compared to those unearthed in the new era.
3. Decoration
In the Xingan bronze ware group, except for smaller objects such as arrowheads and small tools, there are many decorative patterns. Overall, these patterns are typical patterns of bronze from the Shang Dynasty. The large square tripod, column foot round tripod, cone foot round tripod, flat round tiger foot round tripod, yan, bean, plate, pot, square you, shovel, etc. are all decorated with animal face patterns, which are extremely common in bronze ritual vessels. On Li, Nao, He Li, Za Zhi Dao, Zhi Zhi, Yue, and 10 daggers, there are patterns of rolling clouds and clouds and thunder. In addition, eye patterns, cicada patterns, vortex patterns, banana leaf patterns, and Kui patterns are all present in this group of artifacts.
The decoration of Xingan bronze ware also has its own characteristics. The expression on its decoration is the swallowtail pattern. On objects such as conical tripods, flat and round tiger tripods, li, yan, xi, spear, qi, and cheng, there are decorated with swallowtail ribbons. This type of decoration is very rare on other bronze artifacts and may be a local characteristic of the middle reaches of the Ganjiang River.
The particularly eye-catching decoration of Xingan bronze ware is the animal shaped accessories on ritual vessels, including tiger, bird, deer, and sheep, with tiger shaped accessories being the most common. Three tripods and seven flat round tiger foot tripods each have a tiger shaped accessory at the top of their standing ears. The shape of tiger shaped accessories is almost uniform, with four legs connected to the tripod ears in a crawling and recumbent shape, and it is hollow. Although there were already quite a few people using tiger shaped decorative objects or artifacts to create tiger shapes during the Shang Dynasty, such decorations were only found in a corner of the middle reaches of the Gan River. Another example is the flat round tiger foot copper tripod unearthed from the Qingjiang lion brain, indicating that this type of decoration has local characteristics.
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