At first, the local government received a report and found the stolen hole left by the grave robbers on the nearby mountain. When the experts arrived, they found that this tomb was not a simple Han tomb, and all the signs pointed to the legendary Liu He, who rose from Wang to Emperor and was deposed as Hou. After the overall investigation, experts were pleasantly surprised to find that this is the most well-preserved tomb with the most abundant funerary objects of the Han Dynasty.
In addition to the 15-meter-long stolen cave discovered by the villagers, experts also found an ancient stolen cave in the Five Dynasties, and neither of them successfully implemented the theft plan. The reason is, on the one hand, luck, on the other hand, thanks to the earthquake. During the Eastern Jin Dynasty, there was an earthquake here, which flooded the nearby county seat by Poyang Lake. The flood filled the tomb, which made it more difficult to rob the tomb, isolated the oxygen, and preserved most fragile cultural relics to this day.
Tens of thousands of precious cultural relics have been unearthed here, most of which have to undergo complicated treatment and protection work and will not be exhibited in public. It took five years, but all the cultural relics in the tomb have not been sorted out, which shows that there are many funerary objects in Liu He. All kinds of life devices and musical instruments are naturally full of them, and bronze and jade ritual vessels are naturally not rare.
In the tomb, scholars always counted nearly 2 million pieces of "five baht coins", with a total weight as high as 10 tons, which is not a small sum at any time. A few days later, they found an equally amazing amount of gold, including dozens of horseshoes. It can be seen that although Liu He was abolished, he still lived a comfortable life, and he was rewarded by the new emperor from time to time without being abused.
Grave robbers who are only looking for money will surely be ecstatic about these antiques, including those they are eager for. What they are most concerned about is still how high they can sell, not the historical accumulation of the cultural relics themselves. Archaeology is different. As a country-dominated industry, it can only invest money in it and get no return on income. Scholars just marvel at the amount of money, and their focus is on the ancient monetary units contained in it and the specifications when it is in circulation.
What really surprised the scholars most about the tomb of the sea faint Hou was the more than 5,000 bamboo slips found later and the information recorded on other cultural relics. At first, after cleaning up the northwest corner, no one knew what a lot of dark deposits were next to it. If Wu Shunqing, an expert, hadn't recognized them as bamboo slips at a glance, these most precious objects would have been removed as ordinary garbage. Because bamboo decays badly inside, it took two months to prepare a solvent that can strengthen the structure, so that it can be carefully taken out and identified.
We know that the Book of Songs suffered from the Qin fire, and different versions of the "Four Poems" were derived. At present, only Mao's poems have been passed down to this day. The Analects of Confucius is also like this. After a large number of physical books were burned, ancient scholars could only pass them down from generation to generation by reciting. The pronunciation varies from place to place, and there are often mistakes in reciting, thus two versions of the Analects of Confucius were born, of which Qi Lun has two more chapters than Lu Lun.
In the Han Dynasty, in order to expand the area of his palace, a prince invaded Confucius' old house, and as a result, he found a large number of Confucian works in the wall, including another version of the Analects of Confucius, which was named Ancient Theory. At present, what we can see is mainly a combination of Lu theory and ancient theory, while Qi theory has been lost for 1800 years. There is one more piece of Qi theory found in this tomb than now, which makes scholars ecstatic, and maybe future students will have to recite one more text.
The same is true of Historical Records. Sima Qian, with a strict attitude towards history, also wrote a biography of Emperor Wu at that time, but it was deleted long ago, so we have no way of knowing the content. In addition, later scholars also suspect that other parts of the historical records have been deleted for political needs, which is not the author's original intention. According to a document unearthed to record the process of repairing the tomb, we know that when Liu He died, it was 32 years since the historical records were written, which means that the historical records discovered this time have certainly not been modified much, and may even be the original version.
As for other bamboo slips, ancient books such as Yi Xue and medicine are also recorded, and there are many books that have been lost in later generations and can only be known by their titles, or they have been changed beyond recognition in the process of inheritance. In a word, these bamboo slips are of epoch-making significance in edition science.
About the life of Confucius, a screen in the tomb records the birth time of Confucius, which is different from all the existing ancient books and comes out 15 years earlier than the rigorous historical records. This will also rewrite the cognition of all Confucian and historical researchers.