The Han tombs at Mawangdui in Changsha yielded silk manuscripts, paintings, and everyday objects, preserving texts on medicine, philosophy, and other fields of knowledge. The discoveries allow researchers to compare excavated texts with transmitted books. Different versions of an ancient work do not always contain exactly the same material.
Historical background
Mawangdui is an archaeological site located in Changsha, China. The site consists of two saddle-shaped hills and contained the tombs of three people from the Changsha Kingdom during the western Han dynasty (206 BC – 9 AD): the Chancellor Li Cang, his wife Xin Zhui, and a male believed to have been their son. The site was excavated from 1972 to 1974. Most of the artifacts from Mawangdui are displayed at the Hunan Provincial Museum. It was called "King Ma's Mound" possibly because it was (erroneously) thought to be the tomb of Ma Yin (853–930), a ruler of the Chu kingdom during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. The original name might have been the similarly-sounding "saddle-shaped mound" (mǎ ān duī).
The tombs were made of large cypress planks. The outside of the tombs were layered with white clay and charcoal. White clay layering originated with Chu burials, while charcoal layering was practiced during the early western Han dynasty in the Changsha area. The tombs contained nested lacquered coffins, a Chu burial custom. The four lacquered coffins are estimated to represent one million hours of human labour. The tombs also followed the burial practices dictated by Emperor Wen of Han, containing no jade or precious metals.
The eastern tomb, Tomb no. 1, contained the remains of a woman in her fifties (Lady Dai, personal name Xin Zhui). Her mummified body was so well-preserved that researchers were able to perform an autopsy on her body, which showed that she probably died of a heart attack. Specifically, her diet was too rich in sugars and meats, and she suffered from arterial-coronary problems. Buried with her were skeletons of various food-animals, jujubes, lotus soup, grains and a complete meal including soup, rice and meat skewers on a lacquer set. Researchers found honeydew melon seeds in her stomach, implying consumption right before death. She outlived the occupants of the other two tombs.
Tomb 3
Tomb 3 contained a silk name banner (similar to that of tomb 1) and three maps drawn on silk: a topographic map, a military map and a prefecture map. The maps display the Hunan, Guangdong and Guangxi region and depict the political boundary between the Han dynasty and Nanyue. At the time of discovery, these were the oldest maps yet discovered in China, until 1986 when Qin State maps dating to the 4th century BC were found.
Tomb 3 contained a wealth of classical texts. The tomb contained texts on astronomy, which accurately depicted the planetary orbits for Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars and Saturn and described various comets. The Mawangdui texts of the I Ching and Tao Te Ching are hundreds of years earlier than those known before. The tomb also contained a rich collection of Huang-Lao Taoist texts, as well a copy of the Zhan Guo Ce. The tomb also contained various medical texts, including depictions of daoyin (qigong) exercises, as well as a historical text, the Chunqiu shiyu.
Historical background
The Mawangdui Silk Texts are Chinese philosophical and medical works written on silk which were discovered at the Mawangdui site in Changsha, Hunan, in 1973. Their twenty-eight silk books of around 120,000 words cover military strategy, mathematics, cartography, and the six classical arts: ritual, music, archery, horsemanship, writing, and arithmetic. They include some of the earliest attested manuscripts of existing texts (such as the I Ching), two copies of the Tao Te Ching, a copy of Zhan Guo Ce, works by Gan De and Shi Shen, and previously unknown medical texts such as Wushi'er Bingfang (Prescriptions for Fifty-Two Ailments).
The texts were buried in tomb number three at Mawangdui (which was sealed in 168 BC), and were hidden until their late-20th-century discovery. Some were previously known only by title, and others are previously unknown commentaries on the I Ching. In general, they follow the same sequence as the received versions, which were passed down by copying and recopying texts collected and collated during the fifth century AD. However, in some important aspects they differ noticeably from the received texts known before their discovery.