5-6千年以前的红山文化,和4-5千年以前的良渚文化,一个在东北一个在江南一带,留下了大批古迹,其中有大规模的金字塔: 

虽然不如差不多多同时的埃及金字塔那么雄伟精确,也还是需要高度组织和科技水平的

以下两地图显示大多数金字塔的分布位置 

塔上有什么?下面几图看到坟墓祭坛

和墓里一些内容

红山墓葬发掘玉器

女神庙 

红山各式玉龙- 右边比较商周玉龙

良渚玉 有所不同

红山和良渚人民后来去了哪里,现在还不清楚.美洲的马雅文化建筑,玉器似同红山有点关系,但北美洲最早的遗迹差不多是两万年以前的,不是红山以后搬去的.江南4000年前有海侵洪灾,以后山东龙山文化和广东石峡文化有发现类似良渚的玉器,比较可能是先民避洪迁移.传说中舜族就是由东向西迁移的,后同尧族禹族连合成为华夏族.

值得注意的是商周墓葬是不堆土的.礼记还有一段故事说孔子葬母是他学生不听他话在幕上堆土不久倒塌,可见周有两种不同传统,堆土建金字塔是非主流.要到秦汉才又有金字塔,似有皇帝身份进一步提高的迹象

The above picture shows three mysterious jade objects found in ancient tombs that are carbon dated to 5000 years ago, before there was any written history. Ancient books, mostly finished in the Han Dynasty but some already in existence in Zhou times and containing fragmentary legends that would have been orally transmitted before the invention of writing, obscurely mention jade objects used in some heaven and earth worship rituals. It is hard to make sense, first because the descriptions are so obscure, second because we are not sure which actual objects the mentioned names correspond to. After working through various possibilities, it is now commonly agreed that the cong 琮described in the books correspond to the rectangular block with round hole in the middle. The other two have so far not been identified with objects mentioned in the books, and are referred to by the modern names invented from their shape: the Horse Hoof Object and the Cylinder Shaped Object. They have the common feature that all have a hole in the middle, and at least for the cong, there is the idea that it "goes through to heaven", thus allowing us to imagine that the other two also have the same function.

A seemingly unrelated obscure detail in history books was that in Zhou times, the state of Chu had the duty to provide the Zhou court with "holy reeds" for the purpose of "absorbing wine". It is vaguely known that some ancient rituals involve a divine statue made from a bundle of reed; when wine is poured on the statue, it gets absorbed, as if the god has drunk it. Some believe this came from west asia: during the harvest, the last bunch of wheat from the field is bundled up and worshiped as the corn god.

A Japanese author connected the two obcure details together: he suggested that the sacred reeds are plugged into the hole in a cong to symbolize humans getting through to heaven with the help of the divinity represented by the reeds. I myself have suggested that the Horse Hoof Object was the original version, and later evolved into the more formal, artistically crafted cong and Cylinder Shape Object versions. Someone else suggested that the Horse Hoof Object symbolized the vagina, through which humans are born, arriving into the material world from another world that ancient humans imagined to be existing on the other side. Of course this is all just guessing, since we have nothing more concrete to work with.

The more concrete question is how long it took the ancient humans to learn the jade carving skills while at the same time working out the religious ideas. Before such fine objects could be produced with the necessary skills, they first had to produce more crude objects using easier materials and simpler tools. It is impossible to jump from pottery to fine jade; possibly the intermediary steps were wood and bone; while carved wood objects from over 5000 years ago would have rotted away, some bone objects ought to have survived.

上面图中三种玉礼器， 中间都有孔，应该同“通天”有关。有一位日本作者提议孔是用来插包茅的。周朝时楚国有进贡包茅的责任，用以“缩酒”，似乎源自捆茅做神像，倒酒在神像上被 吸收好像神饮酒。（这又好像同西亚习俗有关：收割麦时留下最后一束麦作伸像崇拜）。把神茅插在孔里，象征人通过神通天。

如果这个想法对的话，左边的红山马蹄器应该是原始的，后来正规化演变成良渚琮和筒形器。有人提议马蹄器象征阴道，人由另一世界来，通过阴道进入人间；也就是说，阴道是天地之间的通路。

雕玉需要时间发展工具技术，而宗教思想也要时间形成。古人在还不会雕玉的时代，应该有用过简单工具容易用的材料做过更原始的礼器，不过如果是用木或骨，已经烂掉了我们看不到。陶器能留到今天，不过制陶和雕玉技术相差太大不能由陶进化去玉。

The the taotie 饕餮

Shang bronze utensils are noted for a gross scariness that somehow suited their culture, which is known, from inscriptions on oracle bones, to require almost nonstop divinations about whether the gods approved even the smallest actions the king wished to undertake, including, for example whether it is OK to make sacrifices to the gods with 3 cows, 5 cows or 7 cows. Mangled skeletons from graves show that human sacrifice was carried out regularly, often on a very large scale. (Reminder of Cambodia under Pol Pot.) Otherwise we have no information, first hand or even second hand, about what life was like in Shang times, unlike the Greeks who left us wall paintings, pottery pictures and legendary epics that at least allow partial glimpses into life 3000 years ago.

A prominent feature of the bronze utensils is the taotie monster face, of which a number of examples are shown in the above diagram together with several related objects. Two are >4000 year old jade objects with the Liangzhu monster face, one a detail on a jade knife from the Longshan era several hundred years later than Liangzhu, with a clear derivation relation to the taotie. Also shown are two other Shang objects, one a bronze utensil showing a tiger swallowing a human and the other a jade carving showing an eagle holding two human heads. The latter two have been differently interpreted, that the tiger/eagle is some kind of guardian demon embracing/protecting the humans, or destroying harmful ghosts. This interpretation fits in with the frequently appearing taotie - it ought to be a "good guy" not a "bad guy" if the Shangs wanted to see it so often.

The demon is probably related to the ghost eating Zhongkui that appear in stories and rituals of much later times. Even today jade carvings representing Zhongkui's head, and paintings depicting him giving his sister away as bride (with some mythological meaning which we no longer know), can be found in arts and crafts shops. Some Japanese pictures of Zhongkui show him with four eyes, apparently related to the two-faced Liangzhu monster, and an annual Zhou ritual has a ghost-exorcist mask with four eyes; today some parts of China still have these masked rituals but now presented as festival drama acts; the masked Noh plays of Japan appear to be another residual practice. The door demons used by the traditional Chinese mansions are another residual practice involving this ghost eater.

A Zhou book mentions the taotie as a greedy monster that self destructed from over indulgence. This is most probably a misinterpretation by someone writing in a later era when ritualistic practices of past dynasties were only vaguely known. Today taotie is mainly used in restaurant advertisements of grand banquets.

上 图有几张商青铜器上常见的饕餮面，同良渚神徽显然有关。又有关的是商玉鹰攫人首玉佩和虎食人卣，给我们的感觉是恐怖吓人；这也是商青铜器通常给人的感觉。 但有些作者认为虎/鹰是保护神拥抱人/带人升天，或是在毁灭恶鬼。饕餮出现这么多，好象应该是正面角色，也是一种保护神。但我们对狂热拜神，残酷牺牲的商 文化了解有限，这些都只是猜测而以。周朝有书提到饕餮，是一因贪食伤身的怪物，但这恐怕又是后代不知道乱猜而以。今天有提到饕餮，几乎一定是什么豪华大餐 的广告。钟馗，门神都是这食鬼神演化出来的，周朝的除夕傩礼有个黄金四目的方相似乎就是由双面的良渚神徽衍出的，而中国后来的傩戏和日本的能戏也是源出于 此；日本有些钟馗图中他有四只眼，应该就是由方相出来的。

The Liangzhu Monster Face 良渚神徽

Archaeologists found in China two neolithical centres of jade worship: the Hongshan sites in northern china yielded a relatively small number of objects, but with highly imaginative designs and polished execution (considering the primitive tools available at the time) that challenged our modern, patronizing view about the ancient state of mind; the southern Liangzhu sites are even more impressive: there are great numbers of them spread over much of middle part of eastern china, and they are of a large scale, with each tomb situated on a soil platform that would have required thousands of people to pile up, and many yielding hundreds of jade items per tomb. While the majority of these lacked the artistic refinement of Hongshan jade, the more complex objects pose their own challenges to our understanding of the ancient people.

The picture of a two-faced demon, with numerous variations, appears frequently on Liangzhu jade objects, mostly on the ritual "cong", but occasionally also on axes and discs.I myself have an unusually shaped, flattened cong with two faces instead of the standard four, and a circular tube with three demon faces. The former type, as far as I could discover, has not before been seen either in archaeological sites nor in private collections, while only a small number of the latter type are known. Whereas the four faced congs usually have the demon face on each corner, one large cong has demon faces in the corners as well as in the middle of each side, with a pair of bird signs separating the frontal and corner faces. A similar arrangement is used on each side of my two-faced cong, with two corner demons, two centre demons, and four bird signs separating them. The tube has three different types of demon faces, each of a familiar design from unearthed jade.

The figure as a whole is a man wearing a large feather hat with perched legs and spread-out upper arms, but sharply bent elbows so that the lower arms and hands point back at his own chest, while the lower face appears to consist of eyes that are also the breasts of the man, a nose that might be the man's genitals, and a mouth that might be considered to be the navel though it is situated rather low, or possibly the vagina. The strokes that draw out the eyes, arms and legs, however, seem to bear the skin pattern of a python. In short, the picture contains a variety of ideas of some divine ancestral figures that have been amalgamated.

Given the large scale of the Liangzhu tombs and the complex ritualistic thinking presented by the variety and elaboration of jade objects, the Liangzhu people had a highly organized social system, which somehow left no trace in historical records. We have no idea what happened to the Liangzhu people, other than that around 2000BC they disappeared from their original locations, but some subsequent sites showing Liangzhu influence were found in the surrounding regions such as Shandong, Guangdong and Taiwan. A simpler version of the demon face, usually embedded into a figure with more prominent bird features, appears on jade "blade objects" in Shandong, and this probably developed into the Shang taotie figure that appears on bronze vessels.

We also do not know what the Liangzhu people used the cong for. It has been suggested that the round hole is used to hold sacred reeds/feathers that represent ancestral gods, and ritual wine is poured down the reeds during ceremonies to represent gods accepting the gift by soaking up the wine. Some contemporary sites in northwest china also have jade congs, but plainly polished with no demon faces, and this type of cong also occasionally appears in Shang and Zhou sites. However, the few mentions of the cong in Zhou ritual books are too obscure for us to definitively interpret whether congs were used in this way, in contrast to the quite frequent mentions of the jade disc being used as gift to honour visitors and jade rings being worn as indications of status in Zhou historical records. Zhou books' few mentions of taotie are also nonsensical so it appears that one thousand years after the Liangzhu people's disappearance, the Chinese world had already lost all knowledge of them.

 

Hongshan dragons 

Manchurian pig dragon (Yu-Zhu-Long); this rather mysterious object may have a connection to the Sumerian Uroboros, the serpent that swallows its own tail, symbolizing infinity and eternity. Why it has a what looks like a pig's head is not clear - some Manchurian and other ancient graves were found to have multiple pig jaw bones, so some form of pig worship was indicated. You can see how the pig-dragon evolved towards something closer to the modern form of the dragon - the C-type dragon shown in the lower left corner is less pig and more snake than the other three; these pictured figurings have been authendicated by archaelogists as ancient (i.e., over 5000 years old); as no metal tools were available at the time, the sculpting of these figurines depended on the use of strings, leather strips, bone pieces and stone instruments, grinding jade down with quartz and silicon carbide sand; modern imitations using electric drills and carving tools leave quite different marks, mainly because they work much faster so leave contrast of "too much" with "too little" depending on where the cutting occurred; the older jades show the work to be generally rather slow but even; pig dragon fakes usually also fail to capture the particular "feel" of the originals - dignified yet approachable, a divine animal that is the friend of your tribe and object of worship

the ancient jade buried in graves for 5000 years would come into contact with different minerals from the soil and coffin material, as well as body fluids, which penetrate the jade in various ways depending on its own texture and events in its surrounding such as rain, flooding, drought, even earthquakes; hence the many different tinges and stains. Whereas the original jade may be dark green, light green, green-yellow, sometimes beige white, it often turns chalky in combination with lime put into coffins, especially in the southern regions, to slow decay; ceremonial burning of the jade objects also occurred leaving smoky burn marks. Other stains may be due to mercury (usually in small but deep patches of very dark blue close to black), iron oxide (reddish brown), copper (green), crude oil (drippy dark brown - other impurities spread in patches while the highly viscous oil and some tree resins leave streaky stains). Faked ancient jade use various methods to bake colours into a newly carved piece, but it is difficult to get the same colour spread. With some experience gained from looking at authenticated museum pieces, one could detect signs of faking except for the really skilfully done ones, which however is not usually worthwhile for inexpensive pieces.

A related jade object, which were found in smaller numbers and in nearby Inner Mongolian locations, is the C dragon whose head and tail are further apart and the body more slender. An intriguing point about the C dragons: two raised patches are found, one on the forehead and one under the chin, made up of a diagonal grid of XXX; the same diagonal patches have been found on some Hongshan insect figure jade, eastern zhou jade dragons, and jade human figures dug up in central Hebei, not far from Inner Mongolia/Manchuria, dated to Eastern Zhou (Zhongshan State); on a human figure in the Hotung collection of British Museum (J Rawson, Chinese Jade, p. 283, fig 19.2), on various northern and western china ancient pottery, in particular on the Zaobaogou pottery urn with the pig/bird/deer headed snakes, and on Gansu pottery human faced fishes as well as some abstract figures probably representing frogs; such a grid is seen on the dancing girl and on the seated woman in the figure below, showing that the pattern was widely used and had some important significance, probably derived from fishing nets and fish scales as symbol of worship by fishing tribes, with particular connection to Fuxi who supposedly invented the fishing net. Note that while there are numerous Warring States and Han jade dancing girls with the same posture, they do not have the same skirt, indicating that after Zhongshan State's demise, the meaning of the grid got lost. (There was however one dancing girl with the mesh pattern on her cuff! instead of skirt. Some west asian archaeological reports note the same pattern on ancient potteries, and consider it to represent the fertility goddess Astarte, which provides some explanation for the presence of the pattern on chinese dancing girls, who were presumably performing rituals honouring gods that take care of people interested in fertility. In a Tibetan story about a king at the time of arrival of buddhism, he was said to have build a temple with both the swatika and the mesh pattern "to please both buddhists and tibetans", meaning that the swatika was a less traditional symbol for the tibetans, and they were less closely related to the indo-europeans and more agricultural than the nomadic Qiangs - the tibetans and qiangs traditionally did not eat fish so the mesh pattern could not represent nets and scales. Going more modern the dragon on the Qing imperial robes is covered in the mesh pattern, hinting that the grid's meaningfulness was broadly traditional.)

The diagrams also illustrate the graduate transformation of the socalled "curvy clouds object" found in Hongshan tombs. I believe the original, simple form with four arms is related to the swatika, with two entangle snakes; combining two of them, either face to face or one upside down, produces the more complex forms, which then get simplified, ending in almost unrecognizable new shapes

the Hongshan C dragon

The C dragon was one of the most significant archaeological finds from the neolithic Hongshan area. Its precise meaning is even today unclear, and there is even some mystery about how it was found. It is believed that in 1971 a young peasant planting trees on a slope in a borderline area between Inner Mogolia and Liaoning Province noticed a hole in the ground, and putting his hand in he found what looked liked a big cast-iron hook. After taking it home, he realized it was made of dark green jade and could be an ancient artefact, and took it to the county archaeological office, which merely treated it as a ordinary find. A few years later in a routine visit, a team from the Liaoning Museum inspected it and thought it was from the Shang era (i.e., about 3500 years old), though realizing that it looked different from other artefacts from Shang sites in the area. However, in 1986 a major Hongshan era site was unearthed in a nearby location, yielding a pair of jade pig-dragons which bore noticeable similarities to the C dragon, thus allowing it to be more confidently placed into the late neolithic era.

Both the pig dragon and the C dragon bore a relationship to Uroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail, which also relates to the human-faced fish painted on a pottery jar from the Gansu province, on the opposite side of ancient China. The similarty between these artefacts reveal a connection between ancient China and West Asia, in particular with ancient Hebrews. (Further discussion of this can be found in another article Round Heaven - Square Earth.)

It is highly likely that the C dragon was the tribal emblem of a branch of the Hongshan people. It is probably meant to be placed at the top of a wooden pole, which has a groove on top into which the sharp blade on the lower side of the "horn" would snugly fit, so that the back of the body, where the hole is located, fits along the pole, and a string is passed through the hole to bind the dragon securly to the pole. The combination might be held in hand by a tribal chief, or set up on an altar. (The object seems too small to be part of a building or flagpole.)

The C dragon in the above picture is my own, found in a Singapore flea market stall. The stall keeper told me that it was taken out of China during the Cultural Revolution era, when old things were not regarded as valuable and could even lead to political trouble, by a collector who later emigrated to Canada. This story may or may not be true, but if a copy, it is an extremely well made one judging by its appearance (most copies fail to capture the dynamic toughness of the genuine article; this one does), tool marks, surface impurities and jade material quality).

Only two C dragons were unearthed, both from the same county though in two different villages. However, whereas objects unearthed in tombs or dwellings can be pinned down in age by carbon dating bones or other organic material located in the same sites, both C dragons were single finds not allowing such precise dating. Their age was therefore a matter of archaelogical guesswork from similarity to other objects that do have a known age. A third, larger C dragon is located in the Beijing Palace museum, with an unclear place of origin; its high quality material and workmanship makes one suspect that it was a copy made by palace craftsmen for royal enjoyment, but we are at a loss to say where is the original object the craftsmen might have copied.

红山c龙

红山c龙只有两件是出土品，都是在内蒙古翁牛特旗找到的，但不是经过科学步骤正式挖锯，既没有明确的底层年代，也没有一起出土能用碳14方法定年代的物件，所以无法确定年龄，1971年第一条在三星他拉村出土后，1975年辽宁博物馆专家拜访时见到还以为是商朝的东西；83-86年红山一带挖据了几座古墓后， 看到其工艺造型都同正式出土的红山玉器有些类似，因此定为红山文物。

故宫博物院有一条c龙，原来是傅忠谟家族收集的，虽然1989年有在“古玉精英”一书内发表，但没说清来源和收藏年代。这条玉料很精美，看皮壳虽有些年纪但好象比傅家其他的红山玉件嫩了点，形制也跟两条出土品有点不同，背稍微太弯，尺寸也大了，可能是高贵人家的旧仿品，比方有一条真品是传家宝，由长子承受，但另做一条仿品给幼子；问题是真品现在去了哪里。另有周南泉先生收藏一条断了尾的，看上去似乎是真品。

c龙在市面上有很多仿品，但绝大多数不像样。这是因为c龙有一种独特的威势和动态，现在的玉匠很不容易琢磨到。“古玉精英”还有登一条c龙，看上去就不大对。这条好像记得是高价拍卖有人买去了。 因为翁旗二龙并非科学出土，有人还怀疑过是否某某人自己制造了埋在土里等人去发现（日本有位名教授就这样做过，目的是证明本国历史悠久），但这造型有这种威势动态的效果，不是凭空臆想的人能知道的，要累积经验才行，还要练雕刻功夫到家才能表现在难度很高的玉料上，只有长期生长在这文化中的古人才能做到。

c龙的孔在中部，如果挂起来会是横向（见上面图），很不对头，我一直不明白。不久前看到郭大顺先生“红山文化”一书中谈勾云器才恍然大悟：勾云器出 土通常是竖的不是横的，所以它的孔不是用来挂在身上，而是绑在木柄上做成一种权杖。红山有一墓出土一勾云器，同一件玉钺一起放在腹部，似乎是左右手各持一 支交叉放在下胸部。以此类推，c龙也是竖的装在一根木棍上，木棍顶部有一条细沟把鬃部嵌入，再用细绳穿过孔把龙身绑在棍上。

红山勾云器 the Hongshan "curved cloud object"

this evolved from a looped dragon, as the above diagram clearly shows; later shape evolvement made this less clear; it is believed by some including myself that the cloud/dragon object was meant to be tied to a stick, with the prongs fitting into a groove and the hole used to pass a string used to secure the object,producing a kind of "flag" or "orb" to be held by tribal chiefs to denote their status, hence the frequent discovery of the object in Hongshan tombs.

红山勾云器原始形制是蟠龙；这由上面图可看到；后来经过各种演变；请看图View Slideshow 有推测勾云器是用细绳穿过小孔绑在木柄上的，后面突出两片插进柄上一条槽中以保稳固。这样做成一种权杖以代表族长身份，所以在红山墓葬中经常发现