A noble tomb with remarkable murals has
been uncovered in Shanxi Province of northwestern China. The tomb dates to the Tang dynasty (618-907), but there seems to be some dispute about the exact date, with online sources mentioning both the exact year 736 and the period around 900. Above is one of the four walls of the main chamber. (Via
The History Blog, the proprietor of which regularly posts amazing big images that I cannot find anywhere)
The entrance.
More of the main chamber. You can see that the ceiling panels depict the magical beasts of the four cardinal directions, with multiple panels of more down-to-earth scenes lower down.
In the lower left on this wall is a depiction of two people with camels and horses in the background. According to the conventions of the time, the woman appears to be Han Chinese, the man some other ethnicity. The excavators say these two people appear in other paintings, and they suspect they are the ones buried in the tomb. So perhaps this was a marriage between a Han Chinese noblewoman and a barbarian general. Shanxi was on the borders of the steppes and always had a mixed population, with both Han and nomadic elements, and we know the Tang dynasty employed horsemen from the steppes in their armies. The builders of the tomb seem to have thought the woman was more important. Does that reflect some underlying appraisal, or was it just that the man was dead and she was paying the bills?
My favorite of the paintings is this one, depicting people at everyday tasks. The only description I have found of the image says:
The east wall mural features a mural with multiple scenes of daily life: a man rolling a stone grinder to peel grain shells, a woman working a stone mill, a man making dough balls with an iron pan on a fire, a man stepping on a pestle (a rice pounding tool) with a bamboo basket and a bamboo dustpan next to it, a woman drawing water from a well using a counterweight heavy-lifting device, and lastly, a woman doing the washing elbow-deep in a basin full of water while a large pot steams on the wood-burning stove.
So lets try to match the images with the jobs. This is clearly the woman at the well.
And this is the woman doing laundry.
I suppose this must be the man stepping on a rice pestle, although I don't think I would have guessed that from the image.
Which makes this the man rolling the stone grinder.
And this a woman working a stone mill, although I'm thinking that those are stones there is no way she is rotating them by hand. A millstone that big weighs about 250 pounds.
And this mystrerious image must be "a man making dough balls with an iron pan on a fire," leaving open the question of why there is a bear cub on his fire.
Anyway, what an extraordinary find.
2 comments:
And this a woman working a stone mill, although I'm thinking that those are stones there is no way she is rotating them by hand. A millstone that big weight about 250 pounds.
Putting aside artistic inconsistency in matters of scale, etc, I think it depends on what kind of quern-stone is actually being depicted.
It's possible that the woman is shown grasping a top-mounted handle, and the protrusion to the left of the stone is an outflow funnel for milled grain. In that case, then yes - I'd tend to agree with you.
But it's also possible that what could be seen as a handle on top is actually a depiction of the woman dropping a stream of grain into the quern through a hole in the top - a common design feature (usually the hole is centrally located, but multiple offset holes are often found on larger querns). And what could be seen as an outflow funnel could actually be a long lever that you grasp while walking around the entire quern to operate it (itself not uncommon for larger querns).
With that kind of design, the considerable power of leverage would make turning a heavy top stone quite manageable.
Looking again, I think it MUST be a lever, because how would milled grain collect in an outflow funnel located where that is shown? There's no collection ramp, or any obvious way to ensure the grain only exits the quern at the point of the supposed funnel.
If anything, I imagine the bronze(?) ring stand at the base of the stones is where milled grain would collect, dropping down all around in a circle.
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