Page 250 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

body of the dead and his or her possessions to be properly installed in the tomb, a long access

ramp of between 18 and 20 meters was provided to the south. Alongside the principal burials of
the Jin lords are the tombs of the lords' consorts.
Tomb M 8, in which a vessel in the shape of a hare (cat. 88) was found, yielded bronze
vessels inscribed with the names of Marquis Pi and Marquis Su of Jin. Dating the objects in the
Jin tombs is controversial, especially since Tomb M 8 contained vessels whose shapes are typical
of the latter part of the Western Zhou period.
The Jin lords seem to have adhered to the ritual practices of Xi'an in the sense that they
used the same types and numbers of ritual vessels during the period down to the ninth century
BCE. From the ninth and early eighth centuries BCE, their customs changed quite markedly. As
well as standard Late Western Zhou ritual vessels, the Jin lords acquired or commissioned small,
unusual bronzes (cats. 89, 90). The shapes are borrowed from vessels in other materials, perhaps
even of wood, for they have little or nothing in common with the basin and tripod shapes of the
principal Zhou ritual vessels, which originally derived from ceramics. Around the same period,
the casters of Jin and their neighbors in the Ying state also made vessels that reproduced the
forms of much more ancient bronzes. It seems possible this development reflected a deliberate
return to the past. It may be that members of the Jin state had lost vessels during the eighth
century BCE, as the Quanrong and other tribes encroached on the ritual centers in the west.

Perhaps the Jin felt impelled to make these inferior copies for burial to replace lost originals.
Apart from the bronzes, the most striking feature of the Jin tombs is the wealth of ancient
jade buried in them, including carvings that may date to the Late Shang and Early Western
Zhou periods — from the twelfth to the tenth century BCE. The tombs also contained mag-
nificent coverings for the body in jade and agate (cats. 85, 86). Systematic decoration of the
dead with face plaques that indicated the features of eyes, mouth, and ears (cat. 84) seems to
have become a standard feature of burials in the Jin state around the same date that a similar
practice developed at the capital of the Zhou kingdom near Xi'an in the ninth century BCE.
From the quantity of jades found in the Jin tombs, it seems possible that the practice was more
fully developed in the Jin state than in other areas. The Jin must have had both a special regard
for jade and unusual access to quantities of ancient pieces and raw material. JR

1 For a survey of scholarship on Western Zhou bronze 4 Rawson 1990, part 1:92 - no.
inscriptions see Shaughnessy 1991. 5 For an account of the archaeological finds in English, see
2 For an account of archaeological finds of the Western Xu 19961), 193 - 231.
Zhou period, see Rawson 1999.
3 Rawson 1990, part 1:15 - 22.

249 | ROYAL TOMBS OF THE JIN STATE, B E I Z H A O