Ten thousand cultural relics, represented by chimes, unearthed from the tomb of Zeng Houyi, shocked the world with their brilliant achievements in culture, art and technology, and Ceng Houyi, as the owner of the tomb, attracted worldwide attention. But who is Ceng Houyi? There is no historical record.
Guo Moruo's Historical Draft of China pointed out that the Zhou Dynasty was a vassal with the same surname in Sui and Zeng States. 1979, two bronze inscriptions of Ge Ming were unearthed in a tomb in Gangji Liang Shi, a suburb of Suizhou. The owner of Tongquetai is Ji Yi, the son of Great Mother and the descendant of Xigong. According to the inscription, Lao Lao claimed to be "the grandson of Zhou Wang", which proved that Zeng Hou was originally a descendant of Zhou Wang.
On this basis, Tan Sitong concluded that Zeng was the surname of Ji, and his monarch had the same surname as Zhou.
According to him, among the 10,000 cultural relics in the tomb of Zeng Houyi, chariots and horses are the most, and their variety, quantity and comprehensive function are unprecedented. Most of them are long-range weapons, especially long-rod weapons, and extremely rare spear carriages. These weapons and equipment are used in vehicle warfare, which shows that Ceng Houyi is a strategist and commander who is good at vehicle warfare.
There are a lot of musical instruments buried in the tomb of Zeng Houyi, and there are a lot of musical theory and melody inscriptions in Zhong Qing's inscription, which shows that Ceng Houyi paid attention to musical instrument manufacturing and melody research before his death. There are also a large number of extremely exquisite bronze casting treasures, as well as exquisite paintings, sculptures and calligraphy. And a large number of cultural relics are not funerary objects, but things used by Ceng Houyi before his death, and most of them are supervised by him personally, which shows that he has a wide range of interests, is brilliant and has a high artistic appreciation ability.
Ancient musical instruments were unearthed from Zeng Houyi's tomb in Sui County, Hubei Province, China. Among them, there are world-famous chimes, the largest of which weighs 203.6 kilograms. How high is this bell? There are 64 chimes in the tomb of Zeng Houyi, with a total weight of more than 2,500 kilograms. The largest one is 153.4 cm high and weighs 203.6 kg. According to this form (refer to the picture), the bells in the tomb are arranged in three layers and eight groups on a neatly hung curved ruler-shaped clock frame. 19 The upper layer is a button clock, the middle layer is a corner clock, and the lower layer is a big corner clock. Every clock has a wrong gold inscription, most of which are "Ceng Houyi's early (for) holding" or "Ceng Houyi's early (for) holding".
Zeng Houyi's chimes are not only large in number, complete in structure and large in scale, but also the earliest known super-large musical instrument with multiple chromatic scales in the world. The keys played belong to C major of modern musical instruments, and the total range can span five octaves. There are 12 semitones in the center, and you can play music with five or seven tones in a roundabout way.
The most wonderful thing about this set of chimes is "two tones in one bell". In other words, each clock can make two sounds. Tap the side drum of the bell to get another sound, tap the side drum of the bell to get another sound.
Two painted wooden sticks and six T-shaped Xiao Mu hammers were also unearthed in the tomb, which were playing tools.
After the chime was unearthed, according to the actual detection, it was found that it had a beautiful timbre and a wide range, and could play all kinds of music at all times and in all countries.
On the bell body, bell stand and bell hook of this set of chimes, 3,755 typos were also found, including numbering, notes, phonetic notation, musical rhythm and so on. It has left precious written materials for us to study the history of pre-Qin music today.