The characteristics of the bronze wares of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States
(1) Types and combinations of device types
There are many kinds of bronze wares in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, including ritual vessels, musical instruments, production tools, living utensils, weapons, and chariots and horses. Bronze sacrificial vessels are classified according to their uses: cooking vessels, including tripod; food containers, including gui,dou, and Dun; , Jian, pan, gong, etc.; musical instruments include chime bells, chimes, and cymbals, cymbals and cymbals are very few; daily utensils include hooks, bronze mirrors, etc.; weapons include daggers, spears, scorpions, halberds, swords, Arrowheads, etc. are mainly manufactured by workshops controlled by the arsenals of various countries; chariot and horse implements include chariot bridles, chariot jurisdictions, bow caps, hinge tubes, shafts, titles, yokes, yokes, luan and other car decorations, and there are bisects, titles, and danglus. Horse decorations such as horses, bells, and thrift; tools, only adzes, chisels, knives, and cuts. Among them, the tripod is divided into the wok tripod specially used for steaming, the rising tripod for displaying meat during the banquet, and the shy tripod for preparing additional meals.
Compared with the Shang Dynasty and the Western Zhou Dynasty, the types of ritual vessels in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period had obvious changes. For example, the number of drinking vessels was greatly reduced.
Four-eared Fou with Feather Pattern in the Early Warring States Period
In the Spring and Autumn Period, there were a lot of food utensils and musical instruments, so Mr. Guo Baojun called this period "the combination of bells and dishes", followed by weapons. Among the food utensils, the tripod, gui and bean are well developed; the new Dun that is used to hold food or steam food is most produced in Qi, Chu and Yan. Pots were the main wine vessels, and fou, which had few tableware in the Western Zhou Dynasty, developed to a certain extent at this time; the new wine vessels were mainly fou. The number of toilet bowls and pans in water vessels tended to increase at this time. In archaeological work, sets of pans and pans were often unearthed; In addition to continuing the Yongzhong of the Western Zhou Dynasty, musical instruments such as Niuzhong, Chunyu, and Gouzhen also became popular. Weapons are mainly ge, spear, halberd, sword and accessories of ge and spear.
During the Warring States period, the combination of food utensils, musical instruments and weapons was still the main one. The common food utensils mainly include tripod, bean, Dun, pot, fou, and plate, but rare; the light and practical bronze wares mainly include watermelon Dun and Chiliang Yu, and there is also a long Dun in the tomb of Zeng Houyi. A set of more than a dozen chime bells is often found for musical instruments, such as a set of 13 chime bells unearthed from the Changtai Guan Chu Tomb in Xinyang, Henan; a set of 14 chime bells unearthed in Fuling, Sichuan, 8 of which were gold; Three layers and eight groups of 65 chime bells.
During the Warring States period, weapons changed the most. The war has changed from mainly chariot warfare to cavalry and infantry, so the use of bronze swords is quite common. Some bronze wares from this period have images of fighting with swords. For example, a bronze mirror with water and land attack patterns unearthed from the Warring States Tomb in Shanbiao Town, Jixian County has infantry holding swords on it; a gold-stitched bronze mirror unearthed in Luoyang Jincun has an image of a horse-riding warrior holding a sword fighting a beast. Ge, spears and halberds in this period were very numerous. During this period, the production of clothing utensils, especially bronze mirrors and belt hooks, increased. Bronze mirrors are most popular in the south, especially in the state of Chu, while belt hooks are more common in the Central Plains.
(2) Shape characteristics
① Ding: Ding with ears and lids, with 3 small animals or 3 rings of small buttons on the lid is more popular. The legs of the tripod are usually in the shape of a thin and long hoof, which is especially prominent in the tripods of the southern state of Chu. During the Warring States period, the walls of the tripods became thinner and thinner, with three sacrifices, three rings or three birds on the cover, and the tripod feet became lower.
② Bean: It is long-handled and deeply belly-shaped, with a cover and a handle on the cover, which can be placed on its back.
③yi: Some have no feet and become scoop-shaped.
④ Zong: still four-legged, but the legs are often composed of animal shapes; during the Warring States Period, there were no-legged Zong.
(3) Decoration features
During the Spring and Autumn Period, the precise and neatly carved panchi patterns gradually replaced the stealing curved patterns, ring-belt patterns, double-ring patterns, and scale patterns that were popular in the late Western Zhou Dynasty. Relief-style plant and animal images are a prominent feature of this period, a typical representative of which is the lotus and crane square pot. At the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, a kind of engraving and thin-line portrait carving technology began to sprout. Several pieces of copper scraps found in Liuhe Chengqiao, Jiangsu Province were engraved with portraits of animals, trees, and human activities, with simple lines. The emergence of this kind of portrait theme broke the mysterious and rigid situation of bronze patterns since the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, and made the decorative content more lively. The contents of these patterns of personnel activities, such as banquets and hunting, are important materials for studying social life at that time. The emergence of a network of square and continuous patterns indicates that the new technology of flower plate printing has been adopted at this time, which has made great progress compared with the previous process of using all engraving models.
During the Warring States Period, a large number of patterns of personnel activities appeared on bronze wares, and large flat carving portraits often appeared on utensils such as beans, pots, and mirrors. The Feast, Fishing, Hunting and Fighting Pot unearthed in 1965 in Baihuatan, Chengdu, Sichuan Province is a typical work of this period. In addition, triangular cloud patterns, hooked thunder patterns, flower patterns, etc. were popular at this time, while the Panchi pattern tended to be simplified.
(4) Features of inscriptions
In the Spring and Autumn Period, there are various types of fonts, some are thin and some are fat; some are deliberately crafted and full of decoration. The style is mostly rhyme. After the middle of the Spring and Autumn period, wrong golden books appeared, especially in the Wuyue area, the characters and pictures were drawn in the shape of birds and insects with twists and turns. The content of the inscription is more about sacrifices and so on.
During the Warring States Period, a large number of inscriptions appeared, with smaller and thinner fonts. The content of the engraved inscriptions is generally relatively simple, mostly recording capacity and weight, which is related to the development of commercial economy and the further use of measuring instruments at that time. In the well-known Shang Yang measuring inscription, there is a sentence "Yuanji Shixi < respect (twenty) five cents respect (inch) and one is a liter", indicating that this measuring vessel is the volume of liters. The inscriptions on weapons, mainly swords, daggers and spears, often indicate the name of the weapon workshop or region that manufactured the weapon. During this period, whether it was the inscriptions on weapons or other bronze wares, there were often official names or "Wule Gongming" (the so-called "Wule Gongming" is a system that began to appear in the Spring and Autumn Period. engrave your own name on it, so that the managers can check the quality of the product).
Inscriptions on bronze wares during the Warring States period also frequently included gold and silver inscriptions. For example, the inscriptions on Jun Qijie in Ejun were misplaced gold seal scripts.
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