Tianwen Sanxingdui

Author: Wu Hong/Ji Yualong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: The excavation of the Sanxingdui Ancient Culture Site in Guanghan, Sichuan is one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in modern China, once shocking the world. However, to this day, academic research and value judgments on Sanxingdui remain at a low level. A series of puzzling questions—where did the Sanxingdui civilization come from? How remote was it? What unprecedented level of civilization did it reach? What was its exotic flavor? And why did it suddenly disappear?—form the foundation of this book. In recent years, the authors have conducted in-depth investigations and explorations at the Sanxingdui site, studying the ancient human corridor on the Gansu-Qinghai Plateau, the Songma Ancient Road, and the Southern Silk Road. By breaking free from traditional research perspectives and incorporating modern international archaeological, cultural comparative, and paleogeographical research findings, the authors examine Sanxingdui within the broader context of the rise, development, and environmental changes of prehistoric world civilizations. They discovered that the time period during which the Sanxingdui civilization emerged and developed coincided with that of ancient Egypt, ancient India, ancient Babylon, and other world civilizations, and they were located at similar latitudes on Earth. Their decline also occurred around the same time. They belong to the same sequence of wheel-based human civilizations, and in terms of ancient civilization markers such as urban construction, bronze art, religion, and the state, they ranked among the world's foremost civilizations. They were a "strange" part of ancient Chinese civilization—a commercial civilization with a unique exotic flavor, emerging and developing over a thousand years earlier than the Yellow River civilization. Based on this, the authors argue, "Chinese history may need to be rewritten."