△Bronze with a human head in the Anyang Yinxu Museum (Photo/Internet)
Zhang Mingyang:
The first time I learned about the Shang Dynasty Sacrifice was from the article "Zhou Annihilation Shang and the New Life of China", which is also one of the core themes of that article and the book. In the political and religious life of the Shang Dynasty, what was the status of human sacrifice?
Li Shuo:
Judging from the various ruins of the Shang Dynasty (not only the capital city of Yinxu), merchants attached great importance to sacrifices to ancestors and gods, and human sacrifices were the highest specifications. This is not only a custom unique to the Shang royal family, but even not only the aristocracy, but also common among the people.
Some archaeological excavations have very low-specification settlement remains, simply put, a poor village, with very cruel human sacrifice sites, such as the Tongshan site in the northern suburbs of Xuzhou City. Yin is not only the royal family and nobles, but also the living areas of the poor and untouchables, and the ruins of human sacrifice are often found in these bottom settlements, although the scale is not as large as the upper level, but it can be seen that the bottom people cherish the opportunity to engage in human sacrifice. It can be said that in the Shang Dynasty, human sacrifice was a national religious phenomenon.
As for an introduction to the scale of human sacrifice, archaeology can only provide "samples", and the whole picture is difficult to see. We can see that a large part of the unearthed Shang King's divination speech, the oracle bone text, is a sacrifice to ghosts and gods, and it is a sacrifice to people.
△Photos of the excavation of the Yin ruins in the 1930s (Photo/Internet)
I also made a comparison in the preface to "Jai Shang": the Yin Wu site was the capital city of the second half of the Shang Dynasty, which was used for more than 200 years; Up to now, the normal tombs excavated by archaeologists in Yin Wu are more than 6,000, representing more than 6,000 normal deceased; There are nearly 2,000 collective human sacrifice pits excavated here, with an average of 5 to 10 people in each pit, so that the conservative number of human sacrifices used is more than 10,000, far more than the normal dead.
Of course, this is just a comparison between samples, the real number we cannot know, but this comparison can see the characteristics of that era.
Zhang Mingyang:
The theme of the book is "Zhou Annihilation Shang". When did the idea of Zhou Wen Wang Yishang first germinate, and what was the driving force? In your book, you wrote very infectiously about King Wen's trip to the capital of Yin, and the large-scale human sacrifice site and prison memories in the capital of Yin were very stimulating to him and his family.
Li Shuo:
King Wen of Zhou's experience of going to Yin Capital is actually not too detailed in history.
I saw from the archaeological report that there is a north-south avenue in Yin Capital City, leading north to the royal palace, which is the highest specification road that Yin Wu has excavated so far, and a wooden bridge over the ditch.
About a kilometer south of the palace, on the east side of this avenue, there is a merchant settlement specializing in making pottery (north of Liujiazhuang), and the daily pottery of the entire Yinxu capital city may be mainly produced here, and they engage in human sacrifices on a large scale and a large time span, which has not stopped for more than two hundred years, and the largest of them is next to Yindu Avenue. They like to mix people with cattle and horses to slaughter and bury, and only a small part of the sacrificial ground has been excavated, and the accumulation of bones is already shocking.
△The sacrificial pit in the ruins of the tomb of the King of Yinxu in Anyang (Photo/Xinhua)
I imagine that if King Wen of Zhou and his family went to Yindu, they should have started from Guanzhong and crossed the Yellow River in the Mengjin area, and continued north to Yindu—the same route that King Wu of Zhou later took to destroy the merchants. Before they arrived at the Shang Palace, they must pass through the settlement north of Liujiazhuang, and on the right hand side was the sacrificial ground for slaughtering people and cattle and horses. Moreover, there are a large number of pottery kilns in this settlement, and the fired pottery must be smoky and this visual, olfactory, and auditory effect is very scary if it is restored.
And this is just one of the many merchant settlements in Yindu, which belongs to the appetizer of merchant sacrifice culture, and the level of merchant kings is even more unimaginable.
As for the more human sacrifice scenes that King Wen of Zhou saw in Yindu, I restored them from the relevant passages in the I Ching, and scholars have almost never paid attention to these in the past, but combined with the merchant sacrifice sites found by archaeology, these words and sentences of the I Ching that seemed inexplicable in the past can be reasonably explained.
But there are also very strange places, such as the "Gen" trigram, which needs to use the commentary of the Tang Dynasty scholar Kong Yingda to restore that this trigram is a complete murderous anatomical process, such as one of them, which is to cut the human tenderloin and arrange it neatly until the heart is taken out and burned (there is a similar scene in the movie "Revelation", but the human sacrifice is on its back).
"Geng Qi's limit, list its dream, Li Xunxin", we definitely can't understand the original text, but Kong Yingda has a note: "limit" is the human belt part, "夤" is the back loin, this moment is docked with the human sacrifice scene of the Shang Dynasty.
△ Stills from the movie "Apocalypse" (Picture/Video Screenshot)
But the problem is that the Tang Dynasty certainly could not have known that there was a human sacrifice in the Shang Dynasty, and the Spring and Autumn Warring States did not know so early, but how did these explanations about the waist and tenderloin in Kong Yingda's notes be handed down? This puzzled me.
As for when the idea of King Wen of Zhou originated, it is difficult to say, because King Wen lived a long life, even if the magical legends in ancient history are removed, King Wen has lived at least more than fifty years, and in such a long span, his life and career goals must have undergone major changes, but we can't be as detailed as the chronology.