Chapter 38
initely fetch a sky-high price on the black market."Sister Hong, these are all broken. The stone carvings are so impressive, look at how half the heads of these two horses are missing."I pointed at th..."Six coffin nails"
"Lao San, be careful, don't get too close. If it's just six coffin nails, I'm fine, but I'm afraid it'll be five."
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A mole patted its chest and muttered, "Well, it's not five anyway."
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I learned a little more about that later.
Ancient funeral customs have been evolving, but some aspects have remained relatively unchanged for thousands of years.
For example, being buried peacefully in a coffin, the coffin nails sealing the wood to separate yin and yang.
When a coffin lid is being nailed down, six nails and seven nails are normal. But if it's less than six, that's not good.
Five nails are called soul-binding nails, and four nails are called soul-suppressing nails. According to traditional beliefs, both of these are considered very unlucky for both the dead and the living.
Sun Lao San is a brave man. After all, he has been working as a construction worker for many years and has seen countless coffins. I can tell he isn't afraid of these things at all.
A crowbar was jammed into the coffin's seam, the coffin nails already rotten. With a little effort, he pried it open.
"What's inside" A mole whispered.
"Nothing much, just a little gold wire and a bunch of white chocolate. Come take a look," he beckoned us over.
We walked over to take a look, and it was true. There were no burial goods in the coffin except for two short pieces of gold wire and some scattered human bones. He said that white chocolate was these scattered human bones.
The gold thread is just a tiny bit, it definitely couldn't be from the remnants of a golden-threaded silk robe.
Sun Lao Da shook his head after looking. “It seems the conditions down there are good. After two thousand six hundred years, the bones are still intact. A pit like this, located in the north, would be lucky to have a tooth or two left.”
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" Let me know if you have any other text you'd like me to translate!
"Excuse me, please move your legs," said the old man Sun as he picked up a human leg bone and tossed it onto the coffin lid.
"Huh What's this"
After he moved the bone, he used a small pry bar to dig around it, and a large black spherical object came out.
Upon closer inspection, it appears to be a mud-covered round stone. The surface of the ball is also coated with some unrotted seeds.
"This...this seems to be watermelon seeds, doesn't it" One mole frowned.
"It's really a stinky melon seed, bad luck! I know what this thing is," Sun Lao San threw away the stone ball and kept wiping his hands on his clothes.
"This is a posterior pearl, in ancient times it was used to torture people. If the tomb owner really had such a thing, then he wasn't a good person."
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Then Sun Lao Da pointed at the bones in the coffin and shared his theory with us.
The practice of human sacrifice was actually abolished at the very beginning of the Western Zhou Dynasty, but due to the emperor's enfeoffment of numerous vassal states, many distant lords still clung to this barbaric custom from the Shang Dynasty.
Back then, women's social status wasn't as high as it is now. In the cases of sacrificial burial, women made up a very large proportion. The skeleton in this coffin should also be that of a woman.
Brother Three, he's so faithful to the thought.
During the Western Zhou Dynasty, which lasted for three thousand years, that day was in summer. It was very hot. The hired female weavers at home were temporarily off work. Everyone sat together chatting about family matters.
Suddenly, the homeowner showed kindness and brought a truckload of fragrant watermelon for everyone to eat on this hot summer day, deceiving these female workers into thinking they were there to eat watermelon to beat the heat.
To everyone's surprise, the melons had been laced with a sleeping drug. After eating the melons, everyone fell unconscious.
At this point, the master brought out a stone ball and directly inserted it into the women's back orifices. Some of them might have woken up in pain, but it was useless. They were still nailed shut inside the coffin and died painfully inside.
This inhumane and utterly cruel burial practice, where people were buried alive, actually originated from a custom in ancient Yue Kingdom.
Not only is the posterior nares plugged with a bead, but then the mouth is also sewn shut with gold thread. The meaning behind this is to have no entry or exit, and serve the master wholeheartedly.
Those few remaining strands of gold thread were used to sew the mouths shut of the female sacrificial victims.
After all this was done, a considerable number of women were still alive. However, because their mouths had been sewn shut with gold thread, they couldn't scream even in the coffins, their mouths wouldn't open.
Several days later, he died in such darkness.
Extremely tragic.ron gate. The gate was secured on either side with cast iron bars fixed into the wall. This iron gate was very solid, and the iron pipes in the middle looked like they were solid and as thick as a chi...