700-Year-Old Shipwreck Loaded with Artifacts Discovered in China
Relics including this jar decorated with a dragon and phoenix design have been found.
Ship Dates Back to Yuan Dynasty and Demonstrates Amazing Chinese Art
Even though China was dominated politically by the Mongols at the time, it was Chinese culture that prevailed. This is what the splendid art and artifacts discovered in the 21 meter-long (70 foot) wooden shipwreck clearly demonstrate. These include a bright-colored jar portraying a dragon and phoenix as Live Science reports .
Shougong Wang of the Shandong Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and leader of the team of researchers that made the discovery under a , wrote in a paper published in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics that the ship was unearthed at a modern day construction site in Heze City, Shandong Province, and had a hull sectioned into twelve cabins by twelve bulkheads. He also added that the ship was probably used for river journeys.
Furthermore, the archaeologists estimate that the ship dates back to the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), and they also noted that it held a shrine, a captain's cabin, crew quarters, cargo compartments and a control room that doubled as a kitchen.
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Important Religious Figurines Found Inside the Ship
In the cabin that was used as a shrine, archaeologists found a religious burner and stone-carved figurines as Live Science reports . Carved out of agalmatolite stone, one of the figurines is 8.2 centimeters (about 3.2 inches) in height, and depicts a tiger sitting beside an "arhat" – an individual who in Buddhist belief has attained enlightenment. Another figurine portraying a dragon on the left side of an "arhat," was also found in the cabin. Carved out of agalmatolite stone as well, this figurine is slightly taller at 8.5 centimeters (about 3.3 inches), while the arhat is holding an alms bowl in his left hand.
“More than 100 artifacts were unearthed from both inside the shipwreck and its surrounding area, including artifacts of porcelain, pottery, lacquerware, jade, stone, iron, bronze and gold," the archaeologists wrote in the journal article .
Representative Yuan Dynasty period ewer.
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“The deposits around the shipwreck and the cracking of its [hull] suggest the possibility that the ship sank after its hull was hit and the ship wrecked," the archaeologists wrote as Live Science reports . The team didn’t find any human remains inside the shipwreck, and for that reason they haven’t suggested or speculated anything about the fate of the crew. "During a relatively short period of time after the accident, the silt beneath the shipwreck was washed away by the current, [and] the shipwreck continued to sink from 1 m to 2 m [3.3 feet to 6.6 feet] below the original riverbed, then stabilized at its current location. Silt and mud were then deposited over it, and the shipwreck was completely buried," is all the team has reported so far about the shipwreck according to Live Science.
Live Science conclusively reports that the shipwreck was unearthed between October 2010 and January 2011 by archaeologists from the Shandong Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the Heze Municipal Commission for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments. A journal article with their results was published in 2016, in Chinese. It wasn’t until recently that this article was eventually translated into English and published in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics .