Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderFact

In 1974 farmers digging a well near Xi'an, in China, found the Terracotta Army: an estimated 8,000 life-size clay soldiers, with horses and chariots, buried around 210 BC to guard the tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang.

Ikigai Daily

History

The story behind the card

The army stands in pits about 1.5 km east of the emperor's burial mound. Pit 1 holds the main body of infantry, Pit 2 cavalry and chariots, and Pit 3 what looks like a command post; Pit 4 is empty, perhaps never finished. Burnt roof beams and missing weapons suggest the pits were looted and set on fire soon after the dynasty fell, and the collapsing roofs smashed the figures, so those on display have been pieced together from fragments. Even so, more than 40,000 bronze weapons have been recovered, from swords to crossbow triggers. Other pits hold figures of officials and acrobats, bronze chariots and bronze water birds. The historian Sima Qian, writing about a century later, said 700,000 labourers built the tomb and that it held rivers of mercury; high levels of mercury in the mound's soil support him. The tomb itself has never been opened.

Türkçe oku
1974'te Çin'in Xi'an kenti yakınlarında kuyu kazan çiftçiler, bugün Toprak Askerler diye bilinen orduyu buldu. Pişmiş topraktan yapılmış, insan boyunda tahminen 8.000 asker, atları ve savaş arabalarıyla birlikte MÖ 210 dolaylarında gömülmüştü. Görevleri, Çin'in ilk imparatoru Qin Shi Huang'ın mezarını korumaktı.

Ordu, imparatorun mezar tepesinin yaklaşık 1,5 km doğusundaki çukurlarda duruyor. 1 numaralı çukurda piyadelerin büyük bölümü, 2 numaralıda süvariler ve savaş arabaları, 3 numaralıda ise bir komuta merkezine benzeyen bir düzen var; 4 numaralı çukur boş, belki de hiç bitirilmedi. Yanmış tavan kirişleri ve eksik silahlar, çukurların hanedan yıkıldıktan kısa süre sonra yağmalanıp ateşe verildiğini düşündürüyor. Çöken tavanlar heykelleri paramparça etti; bugün sergilenenler parçalar birleştirilerek yeniden oluşturuldu. Yine de kılıçlardan tatar yayı tetiklerine kadar 40.000'i aşkın tunç silah bulundu. Başka çukurlardan devlet görevlilerini ve akrobatları canlandıran heykeller, tunç arabalar ve tunç su kuşları çıktı. Yaklaşık bir yüzyıl sonra yazan tarihçi Sima Qian, mezarı 700.000 işçinin yaptığını ve içinde cıvadan ırmaklar bulunduğunu anlatır; mezar tepesinin toprağında ölçülen yüksek cıva düzeyi onun anlattıklarını destekliyor. İmparatorun mezarı ise bugüne kadar hiç açılmadı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Terracotta Army
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BC. When the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about it, around 450 BC, it was already more than 2,000 years old.

The pyramid was the tomb of Khufu, whom the Greeks called Cheops, a king of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty. Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC, was told that 100,000 men had worked on it in three-month shifts: ten years to build the causeway for hauling the stone, and twenty for the pyramid itself. He even reports an inscription recording what was spent on radishes, onions and garlic for the workers. Modern digs tell a different story. Workers' settlements at Giza, and a workers' cemetery found there in 1990, point to thousands of conscripted labourers rather than slaves. In 2013, at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast, archaeologists found the Diary of Merer, the logbook of an inspector whose crew of about 40 men shipped limestone from the Tura quarries to Giza. It is the oldest known papyrus with writing on it.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

Woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean off north-eastern Siberia, until about 4,000 years ago. By then Egypt's Great Pyramid had already stood for several centuries.

On the mainland, the last woolly mammoths died out around 10,000 years ago, as the Ice Age ended and the cold grasslands they lived on shrank. Two island populations held on much longer: one on St Paul Island in Alaska until about 5,600 years ago, and one on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, around 2000 BC. Rising seas had cut Wrangel off from Siberia, leaving some 300 to 1,000 animals alone there for thousands of years. These dates come from radiocarbon dating of bones and tusks, which measures how much of a slowly decaying form of carbon is left in them. Genetic studies show that the population was inbred but stayed stable for thousands of years, so its end seems to have come suddenly. What finally killed the last mammoths is still unknown.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

Oxford was teaching students more than three centuries before the Aztec Empire existed. Teaching there is recorded from 1096; the empire began around 1428, when three city-states in the Valley of Mexico, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, joined forces as the Triple Alliance.

Oxford has no founding date. There is evidence of teaching there in some form by 1096, and it grew quickly after 1167, when Henry II barred English students from the University of Paris. In 1209, after clashes with the townspeople, some scholars left for Cambridge and started the university there. The popular claim that Oxford is older than the Aztecs usually uses 1325, the year the Mexica people founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, where Mexico City stands today. But the Mexica became an imperial power only in 1428, when, together with Texcoco and Tlacopan, they defeated Azcapotzalco, the city that had dominated the valley. The empire lasted less than a century: Hernán Cortés and his Indigenous allies took Tenochtitlan in 1521.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

In AD 476 the Germanic general Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor in the West. The Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, lasted almost a thousand years longer, until the Ottomans took the city in 1453.

Romulus Augustulus was a boy, put on the throne by his father, the general Orestes, and he reigned for only ten months. Odoacer did not name a new emperor. He made himself king of Italy and sent the symbols of the western emperor's office to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople, as if to say that one emperor, in the East, was now enough. The eastern empire kept Roman law and government, and its people called themselves Romans (Rhomaioi) to the end; the name “Byzantine Empire” came into wide use only after it had fallen. Its neighbours saw it the same way. Arabs and Turks called its people Rum, “Romans”, and the Ottoman name for the Balkans, Rumeli, “land of the Romans”, comes from the same word. The army of Mehmed II took Constantinople on 29 May 1453.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

Around 1259 BC, Ramesses II of Egypt and the Hittite king Hattusili III made peace after generations of rivalry over Syria. Egypt carved its copy on temple walls, the Hittites kept theirs on clay tablets, and both survive.

The rivalry peaked in 1274 BC at the Battle of Kadesh, on the Orontes River in today's Syria, where neither side won outright. About fifteen years later came the treaty, sometimes called the Treaty of Kadesh, although it never mentions the battle. Both kings promised not to attack each other, to help each other against outside enemies and rebels, and to hand back each other's political refugees. The Egyptian version is carved in hieroglyphs at Karnak and the Ramesseum in Thebes. The Hittite version, written in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the day, was found in 1906 at Hattusa, the Hittite capital, near today's Boğazkale in Çorum province. Two of its tablets are in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, and a copy hangs at United Nations headquarters in New York.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Next card in the archiveAround 261 BC the Indian emperor Ashoka conquered Kalinga, on India's east coast. The suffering it caused changed him: in inscriptions carved on rocks and pillars across his empire, he expressed remorse and called for rule by dhamma, meaning moral conduct, non-violence and tolerance.Read next →