Niaodan Mountain Tomb

Niaodan Mountain Tomb

Niaodan Mountain Tomb is a cultural tourism attraction.

Niaodan Mountain Tomb is located at the foot of Niaodan Mountain Slope, Wendegang, Dawang Farm, Sihui City. The tomb was discovered in July 1973 and excavated and cleared in August of the same year. It is an earthen pit wooden-chamber tomb, with the wooden chamber having decayed.

The tomb has front and rear chambers; the front chamber contains no artifacts, but the rear chamber yielded 59 bronze items including ding (tripods), he (wine vessels), duo (bells), ge (dagger-axes), spears, dui (butt ends), chisels, spades, arrowheads, axes, zun (vessel bases), bamboo-strip knives, scrapers, and human-headed columnar vessels, as well as 1 pottery jar and 3 whetstones. The artifacts date back to the early Warring States period or slightly later.

These bronze artifacts are relatively well-preserved, with their surfaces coated in smooth bluish-green or dark green oxidation layers. The exteriors of all three ding are covered in soot. The he features beast-headed spouts and handles, a lid, and a chain connecting the lid to the handle. Its body is adorned with twisted-pattern, rope-pattern, and thunder-pattern decorations, displaying exquisite craftsmanship. Other bronze items also feature similar motifs. Spears and axes even bear “king” character-like patterns. By type and function, the artifacts can be divided into six categories: cooking vessels, containers, musical instruments, weapons, tools, and human-headed columnar vessels. Among them, four human-headed columnar vessels consist of two sections: the upper human head portion and the lower columnar body. The upper part resembles the human torso above the chest, while the lower section is a rectangular column. The human head has a relatively wide skull, round ears, deeply set eye sockets with visible eyeballs, sunken cheeks, a protruding mouth, a large mouth, a long neck, narrow shoulders, and a vertical line on the forehead extending down to the mouth forming a nose. The lower section is somewhat flattened, larger at the top and smaller at the bottom, with a square hole on the side of the lower end for inserting a long wedge; the design is quite unique.