Mystery of Zhangzhung Civilization Unveiled

2015-12-03

As early as the 1920s and the 1930s, the late Guiseppe Tucci, a noted Italian Tibetologist, turned his eyes to ancient tombs in western Tibet. He found tombs covered with stone slabs in Leh City in Ladakh. According to his recollection, tombs, built with unpolished stones....each measure 1.8 meters long, 1.4 meters wide and 1.8 meters deep. Handmade potteries....were sometimes adorned with deep red patterns.''

From these tombs, the Italian, Professor of Oriental Religions and Philosophies at the University of Rome, unearthed many skulls. They were rectangular in shape, a fact that stands in sharp contrast to the short skulls of modern people.

Other findings included bronze articles, including thumb-size oval beads and pendulums with a triangular hole in the top.

The Italian expert covered Ngari Plateau, where he found tombs surrounded by piled stones.

However, all these did little to reveal the mysteries of the Zhangzhung Civilization. What's more, efforts to follow the footsteps of Tucci were suspended for close on half a century.

Chinese archaeologists set foot to Ngari Plateau in 1957 for a survey of the ruins of the Guge Kingdom. And the survey was repeated in 1979, 1981 and 1985.

Only in 1998 did the efforts to explore the mysteries of the ancient kingdom of Guge shed some light, with the Cultural Relics Salvation Team in Ngari finding ancient tombs in a place known as ??Karpur'' where potteries dating back to a period earlier than the Guge Kingdom were found. When we saw them in 1999 at an exhibition, we were astonished to find they were just like what Tucci had described.

In early August 1999, we were surveying in Ngari for the sixth time together with other archaeologists. A torrential rainstorm had lashed the area in the previous days, and the area was very wet. 
One day, when we were on our way back to our camping ground in the afternoon, we came across an old friend named Engyila and his wife Soiyang in a village. They had been our hosts during our previous digging in the area. Upon his invitation, we went to their home for a tea break.

We had not seen each other for ages, and the man kept pouring buttered tea into our bowls. When we sipped the drink, he reached his hand under the table and brought out a pottery jar and twined sheep wool yarn around it.

We were not attracted by the pottery jar as he did so while we were drinking the buttered tea. When he filled our empty bowls once again, after we had already had several, he repeated his action. This time, we watched how to twine the wool yarn around the pottery.

All of a sudden, we were shocked to see its shape and demanded a closer look. 

Engyila and Soiyang perceived something important and gave us the pottery jar. It looked just like those we saw at the exhibition of cultural relics unearthed in Karpur! Brown in color, it was painted with red pattern, its mouth upturned and its handle covered with carved patterns!

We asked them where they found it, and Soiyang told us the torrential rain had revealed a pit about one meter beneath the ground surface.

We found some potteries there. As the jar is long in shape, we use it to serve as a spindle. Others are not useful for us, and our children have smashed them all,'' Soiyang said. 
Upon our request, he gathered broken segments of the potteries, and brought us to the pit where we found human bones! From this, we determined the pit constituted part of an ancient tomb.

During the rainy summer of 1999, we found 26 tombs and one pit for sacrificial horses. Our digging covered an area of 200 square meters. The large tombs were square, rectangular or ladder shaped, while the small and medium-sized ones were irregular round stone mounds. In some of the tombs, we found sheep heads, and in one of these we found up to 18 sheep heads inlaid on the four walls.

From these tombs, we found potteries, bone artefacts, stone and iron tools, and wooden and bamboo implements. Most of the pottery was brown or vermilion in color, with round bottoms. A small number of them had a flat bottom and a few had three handles. Patterns were all made with ropes or cutting tools. Other findings include a bronze sword, which was like those unearthed in Yunnan.

The pit with sacrificial horses is 1.60 meters long, 0.60 meter wide and 0.20 meter deep. Given the largeness of the headless skeleton, we came to the conclusion these bones belonged to a horse. It is part of Zhangzhung Civilization that the ancient people slaughtered animals to become burial objects and spread layers of cinnabar under the slaughtered animals by tradition.

We entrusted specialists with Peking University and the Archaeological Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to do the carbon-14 tests on our findings. They came to the conclusion that these were dated back to 2,725-2,170 years, or 2,370+(-) 80, a period equivalent to the Qin (221-206 BC) and Han (206 BC-220 AD) Dynasties in the Central Plains.

According to historical records, before the rise of the Tubo Kingdom, western Tibet was where the Zhangzhung Kingdom was located; Zhangzhung was later subdued and became part of the Tubo Kingdom. When it, in turn was toppled, the Guge Kingdom was founded on the site of the Zhangzhung Kingdom.

The discovery of these ancient tombs is obviously a blessing for archaeologists to unveil the ancient Zhangzhung Civilization.