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posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 24 2016, @02:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the still-as-stone dept.

Ancient Greeks May Have Influenced the Creation of China's Terracotta Army

Archaeologists have suggested that ancient Greeks may have been in contact with China nearly 1,500 years before the arrival of Marco Polo, and that Greek sculptors influenced the creation of the Terracotta Army:

China and the West were in contact more than 1,500 years before European explorer Marco Polo arrived in China, new findings suggest. Archaeologists say inspiration for the Terracotta Warriors, found at the Tomb of the First Emperor near today's Xian, may have come from Ancient Greece. They also say ancient Greek artisans could have been training locals there in the Third Century BC.

Polo's 13th Century journey to China was the first to be well-documented. However, Chinese historians recorded much earlier visits by people thought by some to have been emissaries from the Roman Empire during the Second and Third Centuries AD. "We now have evidence that close contact existed between the First Emperor's China and the West before the formal opening of the Silk Road. This is far earlier than we formerly thought," said Senior Archaeologist Li Xiuzhen, from the Emperor Qin Shi Huang's Mausoleum Site Museum.

[...] Farmers first discovered the 8,000 terracotta figures buried less than a mile from the tomb of China's first emperor Qin Shi Huang in 1974. However there was no tradition of building life-sized human statues in China before the tomb was created. Earlier statues were simple figurines about 20cm (7.9ins) in height. To explain how such an enormous change in skill and style could have happened, Dr Xiuzhen believes that influences must have come from outside China. "We now think the Terracotta Army, the Acrobats and the bronze sculptures found on site have been inspired by ancient Greek sculptures and art," she said.

Also at National Geographic.

Did Ancient Greeks Help Build China's Terracotta Army?

Greek sculptors may have helped carve the famous terracotta warriors that have for more than 2,000 years watched over the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor.

Historians and archeologists excavating the tomb surmise that the statues, which were unusual for the time period, were influenced by Greek sculpture, suggesting that East and West met much earlier than previously thought.

"We now think the Terracotta Army, the acrobats and the bronze sculptures found on site, have been inspired by ancient Greek sculptures and art," Li Xiuzhen, a senior archaeologist at the site, told the Guardian.

Not the sort of thing that senior scientists on the Chinese mainland usually suggest.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday October 24 2016, @05:53PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday October 24 2016, @05:53PM (#418225) Journal

    Yeah, I discussed this last week when there was this "shocking" revelation of ancient Roman coins found in Japan. Personally, I find it shocking that so many media sources are acting like Marco Polo was the first contact between East and West. (E.g., the Christian Science Monitor article title actually has the tagline at the very top of the page: "This discovery calls into question the commonly held belief that Marco Polo was the first European to travel to Asia in 1300 AD, and suggests that this estimate may be off by more than 1,500 years.")

    Maybe some people whose only background is middle-school history might believe that, but no serious historian does.

    And the Romans also had some contact with the Chinese, according to historical documents on both sides of the exchange.

    Indeed, there's an entire extended Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] devoted to relations between China and ancient Rome. So, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that relationships might go back even further.

    What's weird about the present argument is the speculation that there might even have been a Greek sculptor on site to "train the locals." Seriously? Yeah, it's possible, but I'd wait for at least SOME evidence of Greek presence in China in that era before postulating imported sculpting teachers from Athens. Far more likely that if there was influence, it was indirect through artifacts moving along trade routes, which perhaps inspired Chinese sculptors to try something different.

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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday October 24 2016, @07:00PM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Monday October 24 2016, @07:00PM (#418243) Journal

    Fifth column, Fourth rank, sixth row, third from the left. Did that one myself.

    Nah, just kidding. Spent all my time in China at the royal observatories.

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday October 24 2016, @07:28PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday October 24 2016, @07:28PM (#418253)

    One point that really gets driven home when you study ancient history is that no, societies were not generally isolated from each other. It's entirely possible to traverse mountains, deserts, oceans, and other geographic features that you might think were show-stoppers using ancient technology. As a good example of this, there's significant evidence of contacts between the Americas and a number of surrounding areas (Africa, Polynesia, Japan, Europe) that go back much further than Columbus or even Leif Ericson.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Monday October 24 2016, @07:56PM

      by Francis (5544) on Monday October 24 2016, @07:56PM (#418266)

      Indeed, China is kind of an odd one because it's had prolonged periods where there was no contact with the outside world, but even there, those spells usually didn't last more than a couple hundred years and were only enforceable because they had a huge amount of wealth and a strong military.

      I'd be surprised if they were as successful at it as it seems on the surface though. It's really hard to guard a desert.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @06:54PM (#418674)

    Far more likely that if there was influence, it was indirect through artifacts moving along trade routes, which perhaps inspired Chinese sculptors to try something different

    That ignores several other details. If they were inspired to try out new things, one would expect there to be a couple of statues here and there. It's not like the first project would be creating the thousands of statues from scratch on a major project like this.

    For example, China is currently planning on sending people to the moon (last I heard). They didn't just wake up one day and try a moonshot, they are doing progressive improvements by creating things like space stations.

    It's entirely possible that some inspired (army of) artists decided to try their hand at life-sized statues, and went all-out creating thousands of them. However, I would have expected a more progressive build-up (finding individual statues here and there... finding less detailed or broken statues as they refine the art... years spend refining the craft and figuring out how to get it to scale... etc).