The Terracotta Army
The Terracotta Army, numbering over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses, was discovered by a group of farmers when they were digging a water well as recently as 29 March 1974 near Xi’an in Shaanxi province. They represent funerary art buried with Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China in 210–209 BC. The purpose of the buried army was to protect the emperor in his afterlife. Moreover, at another nearby tomb, evidence of mass graves of subjects killed and buried with an ancestor of the emperor, indicates a horrifying tradition of human mass murder in order to provide for a ruler’s afterlife. I prefer the symbolic terracotta army being buried with the emperor than the former practice of killing innocent citizens.
This astonishing discovery is chronicled in this video in which Chinese archeologists describe their findings and the significance of the discovery.
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