Хятадын Сычуань мужийн Саншиндуй хотын малтлагаас төмрийн хүдэр хайлуулах технологи нэвтрэхээс өмнөх үед хамаарах, солирын төмрөөр урласан өвөрмөц олдвор илэрчээ.
2021 онд археологичид Саншиндуйн 7 дугаар нүхнээс сүхний ир хэлбэртэй, зэвэнд идэгдсэн төмөр эдлэл олсон байна. Лабораторийн шинжилгээгээр уг олдвор нь 90 гаруй хувийн төмөр, 7.41 хувийн никелийн агууламжтай болохыг тогтоосон нь энэхүү эдлэлийг сансрын солироор хийсэн болохыг гэрчилж байна. Энэ нь Хятадын баруун өмнөд хэсгээс олдсон хүрэл зэвсгийн үеийн солирын төмрөөр хийсэн хамгийн эртний олдвор ажээ.
Тус бүсийн эртний иргэд төмөр хайлуулах технологи эзэмшихээс 3,000 жилийн өмнө солирын төмрийг ашиглаж байсныг энэхүү олдвор нотолж байна. Хятадын төв хэсгийн бүс нутгуудад солирын төмрийг ихэвчлэн хүрэл зэвсгийн ир суулгахад ашигладаг байсан бол Саншиндуйн олдвор нь бүхэлдээ солирын төмрөөр хийгдсэнээрээ онцлог юм.
Судлаачид уг эдлэлийг ёслолын зориулалттай зэвсэг байсан хэмээн таамаглаж байгаа ч нарийн зориулалтыг нь тогтоохоор ажиллаж байна. Олдвор нь маш эмзэг байдалтай тул цаашид өндөр нарийвчлалтай шинжилгээ хийж, солирын төрөл болон ашиглалтын арга барилыг тодорхойлох төлөвлөгөөтэй байгаа аж.
Дэлгэрэнгүйг эх сурвалжаас харах
↓Эх сурвалжийг нээх ↓
In 2021, archaeologists clearing Pit 7 at Sanxingdui, in China’s Sichuan Province, found a long, rust-eaten object standing upright at the bottom of the pit’s eastern wall. It was about 20 centimeters (8 inches) long and 5 to 8 centimeters (2 to 3 inches) wide, shaped like an axe blade, and so corroded that its form was hard to read.
Rather than risk lifting it, the team cut it out of the ground together with the surrounding soil and took the whole block to a laboratory. The object eventually crumbled into three fragments.
Lab tests showed it was made of iron, about 3,000 years before iron smelting reached this part of the world. X-ray fluorescence found the metal was at least 90 percent iron with 7.41 percent nickel, a mix pointing to a meteorite. A team led by Haichao Li of Sichuan University calls it “the earliest Bronze Age meteoritic iron artefact found in Southwest China.”
It also stands apart from every other example in China. It contains no bronze at all.
The Ritual Pits Held Thousands of Treasures
Sanxingdui was a walled city occupied from about 2800 to 600 BC, reaching its height during the Shang Dynasty, roughly 1600 to 1050 BC. Its people left behind some of the strangest art of the ancient world, including bronze masks with bulging eyes and towering bronze trees.
Many of those objects came from eight pits in the city’s ritual precinct, which have yielded about 17,000 artifacts, including bronze masks and figurines, ivory, gold and jade. Ash, charcoal and scorch marks on some objects suggest the treasures were burned and buried in ceremonies whose purpose is still debated.
Pit 7 alone has produced 4,378 numbered items so far. The objects found alongside the iron blade date it to the late Shang period, when bronze, not iron, was the prized metal.
Cast iron smelting did not spread across China until around 800 BC, once people learned to reach the very high temperatures needed to pull iron from its ore. Before that, the only metallic iron available came from meteorites, the iron-nickel cores of shattered asteroids that survived the fall to Earth.
A Blade Made Entirely of Sky Metal
Meteoritic iron turns up in rare Bronze Age objects around the world, from Egypt to northern China. In China’s Central Plains, along the Yellow River, smiths usually used it as a small insert, setting a meteoritic iron edge into a bronze weapon.
The Sanxingdui piece breaks that pattern. It was shaped entirely from iron, and it is the largest meteoritic iron artifact known from Bronze Age China. “The presence of meteoritic iron at Sanxingdui further highlights the distinctive metallurgical practice in Southwest China, in contrast to contemporaneous practices in the Central Plains,” the team writes in the journal Archaeological Research in Asia.
The metal’s chemistry supports its cosmic origin. Its high nickel content and uniform composition would have been very hard to achieve with Late Shang metalworking, the researchers say. Metallographic and electron microscope analyses confirmed the iron predates smelting in the region.
The find also stretches the map. Until now, meteoritic iron objects in China came mostly from the north. This one extends the practice to the Sichuan Basin on the upper Yangtze, according to Li, showing that the people of ancient Shu could recognize and work iron from space.
Ritual Weapon, Bronze Tool, or Both
What the object was for remains open. Its axe-like shape and its place among burned offerings lead the team to suspect it was a ceremonial weapon. Because meteoritic iron is harder than bronze, they have not ruled out that it was used to work bronze surfaces.
The type of meteorite is also unknown. “While the SEM-EDS results provide preliminary insights, they are insufficient to definitively classify the specific type of meteorite,” co-author Zishu Yang of Sichuan University explained.
The artifact’s fragile state makes further cleaning difficult. The researchers plan high-resolution analyses to pin down where the iron came from and how it was used.
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