I found it odd that the article seemed to imply that silk was used in human sacrifice ("sacrificial clothing"), but it never explicitly stated this--perhaps too unpleasant to admit outright? It wouldn't be surprising since the Shang practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale (comparable to the Aztecs).
Studied ancient Chinese history but not a silk expert, here's my 2c.
Critical background is that silk takes a lot of labour to prepare. First you must have the right kind of insects (various species of moth in the larval stage are commonly known as "silkworm"), then you must have the right kind of trees to feed them (commonly mulberries), then you add a lot of labour for capture, harvesting, spinning, dyeing, weaving. In modern times I have only really seen it prepared commercial scale in Jiangsu province (near Xuzhou). If you head too far north the insects probably suffer from the cold, and if you head too far south any artificial farming monoculture is probably readily outcompeted by other flowering plants and predatory insects which are more suited to the tropics (on account of higher moisture, food availability and temperature).
Relative to existing fabrics such as hemp, silk has at least in other contexts been of value militarily because of its relative strength to weight ratio and dense weave when applied to important tasks such as resisting arrows, although I'm uncertain if this use had emerged yet. Any military use would tend to reinforce a cultural link between life and death owing to its spatiotemporal proximity to mortality events.
The fact that it is soft and labour-intensive (expensive / in short supply) means it was probably reserved for the wealthier or higher ranking figures.
Although the paper doesn't state it clearly, it actually deals with the archaeological findings of a non-Han Chinese civilization in the area of Sichuan which was illiterate and was based around what appeared to be a bird and tree cult (the Shu kingdom of the Sichuan basin[1]). It is therefore possible that a kind of soft, reflective-refractive, feather-like, readily dyed textile with a fine weave may have contributed to some sort of ritual purpose in line with these beliefs. Later this civilization was destroyed by the Han Chinese.
The wicking properties of silk are fair (I was unable to find a quantitative reference) as was the major early textile of hemp (which is also tough and therefore long-lasting) which is significant as we know that Sichuan in the Shu kingdom period was a vast, tropical inland basin criss-crossed by regularly flooding rivers descending from the Himalayas, thickly forested and with crocodiles, elephants, rhinos, giant cats, colourful birds, etc. Both silk and hemp textiles would help to cool anyone wearing them, relative to other options (animal skins, etc.). Furthermore, in the absence of modern medicine, fine-weave capable wicking fabrics would assist with resisting potentially lethal bacterial and fungal infections in the tropical environment and may therefore have been used as wound dressings or undergarments.
> a non-Han Chinese civilization in the area of Sichuan
From TFA: Huang Di Yuan Concubine Leizu Xiling taught others to raise silkworms, and the legend Leizu is from the people of Chengdu in Sichuan
Huang Di was regarded the ancester of every Han Chinese, and Sichuan was the birth place of Han. The literal meaning of "Han" traces back to LiuBang, the Great King of Han, founder and first emperor of the Han dynasty, literally established his fief over Sichuan (Ba, Shu, Hanzhong and its 41 counties). Liubang spent his next 5 years elimilated all his enemies and began the first Pax Sinica of 300 years.
If you mean the pre-Qin history of Sichuan, the Shu state was one of the "8 partners of Oath" that together with the Zhou state rebeled against the Shang, forming the foundation of Chinese civilization over its 800 years course.
The Ba & Shu kingdom were conquered by Lord Hui-wen, the great-grandparent of Qin-Shi-Huang the first emperor of China. Do you call this a "civilization was destroyed by the Han Chinese" or am I missing something?
> Relative to existing fabrics such as hemp, silk has at least in other contexts been of value militarily because of its relative strength to weight ratio
Silk's just easier in general. Unlike vegetable fibers, silk can be reeled to yarn/thread directly. With cotton (or wool), there are about 4-6 other processes before you can even get to spinning. Hemp's worse still, I think there's a retting process in there like with linen.
Or perhaps, it's more true that the labor-intensive portions are up front... you're feeding the dumb little worms up to 4 times a day early on, transferring them off of the eaten leaves (so as to avoid disease), and this only lightens up to twice a day later in the lifecycle. And this isn't tapping out a little pinch of food like for a goldfish bowl, they'll often do 10,000 worms at a time just to have some modest quantity of fiber (perhaps enough for 5 or 6 yards of fabric). This ends up being like 60+ lbs of mulberry leaves there at the end.
All told though, I'd much rather raise the worms than sit there for six months trying to card cotton by hand.
A woman in my local spinning and weaving club took up silk worms as a hobby, spent about 6 months from beginning to end and wound up (lol) with a ~ square foot patch to hang on the wall. Pretty impressive conversion from tree leaves to silk when you think about it.
Me and my kids are still trying to figure out how to scale it up. We thought we had the right sort of mulberries... first batch starved. Then we tried Samia instead of Bombyx, but every single package would arrive damaged and empty. We've got mulberry seeds going, and we're getting some cuttings for this spring. Even then, you need something like 250+ cocoons for an ounce of silk, so we're not expecting much at first.
Wait, why are your packets of seed arriving empty all the time? Customs declaring them exotic and harmful? Mulberry mobsters? Moths in the delivery chain?
Silkworm eggs, not seed. Got my refunds. No clue. Domestic, wasn't shipped from overseas or anything, and if it was customs they usually send something saying that they're confiscating the shipment (or so I'm led to believe, I don't often try to smuggle anything). It was a bit weird. They were pretty good about delivering the empty ripped envelopes though.
Even early piratical man - ranging from the seafaring Athenians to Han Chinese - who developed extensive seafaring capabilities utilized these materials in peace and in war. Thus, the Chinese idiom "turning war into jade and silk" is a means of communication with the gates of heaven.
All the authors are Chinese. They might have been confirming a cultural transmission about the origins of using silk that otherwise had no direct archaeological evidence.
They got a bit of the history of the Silk Roads incomplete. The Silk Roads, as it is understood now, isn't just about trading in silk, but the idea that the ancient world was connected and globalized through an extensive trade network. It isn't just overland routes, but also maritime routes for spice trade with India, and connections from North Africa deep into the interior of the African continent. Paper was worth more than silk along the Silk Roads. However, from the lens of Chinese history, silk was something that the Chinese monopolized for a while and was sought after by other cultures and civilizations connected through the Silk Roads.
I wonder how different African history would be if there were a major river emptying into the Indian Ocean instead of rather small ones. You have some minor rivers and the Red Sea. Not great for making a trading superpower like Egypt.
> From the 9th century, Swahili merchants on Zanzibar operated as brokers for long-distance traders from both the hinterland and Indian Ocean world. Persian, Indian, and Arab traders frequented Zanzibar to acquire East African goods like gold, ivory, and ambergris and then shipped them overseas to Asia. Similarly, caravan traders from the African Great Lakes and Zambezian Region came to the coast to trade for imported goods, especially Indian cloth. Before the Portuguese arrival, the southern towns of Unguja Ukuu and Kizimkazi and the northern town of Tumbatu were the dominant centres of exchange.
Even the large rivers that do empty into the ocean, they have significant portions of rapids that make it impractical to use as a trading route.
A Western academic would phrase it very differently. If you read the paper, they claim that a document called the "Jiatu Zhijia" describes a very similar object called a jiatu that supposedly resembles a divine turtle that caused legendary emperor Yao to abdicate to Shun, i.e. acting as a material carrier between heaven and earth.
I can't actually find other English uses of that name, and while I can guess that they're referring to one of a small set of documents discussing the (possibly mythological) abdication of Yao, those documents were written thousands of years after the events. I'm not wholly opposed to the argument, but you should explicitly justify it in cases like this instead of accepting the symbolism uncritically.
I'm probably wrong but since it was discovered in a sacrificial pit I assumed the bronze age people burned the silk as a way to "communicate with heaven".
If you are buying a 'silk' garment it is common to ask the shop-keeper to hold it to a cigarette lighter to prove it does not contain a synthetic petroleum-based fabric, such as polyester.
I'm noy bothered by it but I wonder if it betrays some sort of religious belief from the authors? Which ideally should be either avoided or disclaimed explicitly
If you want your writing to be taken as establishing facts, you need to base it on a priori established facts; if you base it on hypotheses and beliefs then you're just expanding on the hypothesis, contributing further belief.
I suspect though that it's not the author's beliefs, just an ambiguously written way of saying that it was done by those people with that belief - in the same way that an atheist or follower of some other religion may say that Christians pray in order to communicate their wishes to God. Of course there is the rude and angry for no clear reason brand of atheist who could never bring themselves to say such a thing, but to the rest of us there is no problem in describing someone else's actions by their own reasons for doing them, even if we don't share that motivation. I have colleagues who run for pleasure; though I do not for mine.
> Similarly, silk was also used as a sacrificial object, such as in the form of silk books or paintings on silk, with the silk serving as a carrier to convey the content of the calligraphy and painting upon it to Heaven.
But it does seem that there is some context that would be helpful here, at least for this Western reader.
Just for fun: any culture with silk could have made lighter-than-air hot-air balloons. And the way to prepare strong inorganic acid compounds was known then. Combined with metals like the tin in bronze it could produce hydrogen which could be trapped in oiled silk.
Manned silk hydrogen balloons as battlefield surveyors played a hugely important role in the american civil war. But yeah, it might be a bit much given the very remote sites of tin mining for most of the bronze age. Other metals like iron also work but are almost equally scarce at the time.
Indeed, see the word that I started my comment with. But the point I am making was not referenced in the discussion.
In fact, I think the main point of the linked article is actually not that silk was being used at all in the bronze age by the Yangtze River civilization, but that the silk is being used for sacrificial purposes, but the title on HN does not reflect that.
Being poetic about it, silk was effectively wielded as an economic weapon against the British empire to the point they retaliated with opium (flooding a foreign market with cheap drugs is surely an act of subterfuge if not war, so who's to say it has to have a pointy end to be a weapon?)
> silk was effectively wielded as an economic weapon
Wasn’t most of the silk used in Europe produced in Italy and France, though? Added together they weren’t that far off from China (which also had a huge domestic market). India was also a major exporter so clearly Britain had the option to expand “domestic” production or buy more silk from Italy (importing from China was presumably just cheaper).
European silk production collapsed in 1849 due to some still not well understood disease but that was quite some time after the first Opium War.
Reminds me of how the settled peoples of Europe, the Middle East and Asia eventually worked out the nomads would definitely raid you if you didn't make your settled-people-goods available for trade.
The amount of cyanide affects its ability to be used as a weapon. Almonds have cyanide. They're a very ineffective weapon, unless you hurl a sack of them at an opponent like a mace maybe.
Silk is a defensive weapon. Or, maybe silk cords power bows or Ballista?
A lot of martial arts can teach you how to defend yourself with rope. You’re not going to kill a mammoth or conquer Normandy with it but that’s still a weapon.
I highly recommend the China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou, which was the center of the imperial silk industry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Silk_Museum
https://web.archive.org/web/20170907005855/http://en.chinasi...
It has complete royal robes ~1,000 years old, and a few damaged garments more than 2,000 years old IIRC.
I found it odd that the article seemed to imply that silk was used in human sacrifice ("sacrificial clothing"), but it never explicitly stated this--perhaps too unpleasant to admit outright? It wouldn't be surprising since the Shang practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale (comparable to the Aztecs).
Studied ancient Chinese history but not a silk expert, here's my 2c.
Critical background is that silk takes a lot of labour to prepare. First you must have the right kind of insects (various species of moth in the larval stage are commonly known as "silkworm"), then you must have the right kind of trees to feed them (commonly mulberries), then you add a lot of labour for capture, harvesting, spinning, dyeing, weaving. In modern times I have only really seen it prepared commercial scale in Jiangsu province (near Xuzhou). If you head too far north the insects probably suffer from the cold, and if you head too far south any artificial farming monoculture is probably readily outcompeted by other flowering plants and predatory insects which are more suited to the tropics (on account of higher moisture, food availability and temperature).
Relative to existing fabrics such as hemp, silk has at least in other contexts been of value militarily because of its relative strength to weight ratio and dense weave when applied to important tasks such as resisting arrows, although I'm uncertain if this use had emerged yet. Any military use would tend to reinforce a cultural link between life and death owing to its spatiotemporal proximity to mortality events.
The fact that it is soft and labour-intensive (expensive / in short supply) means it was probably reserved for the wealthier or higher ranking figures.
Although the paper doesn't state it clearly, it actually deals with the archaeological findings of a non-Han Chinese civilization in the area of Sichuan which was illiterate and was based around what appeared to be a bird and tree cult (the Shu kingdom of the Sichuan basin[1]). It is therefore possible that a kind of soft, reflective-refractive, feather-like, readily dyed textile with a fine weave may have contributed to some sort of ritual purpose in line with these beliefs. Later this civilization was destroyed by the Han Chinese.
The wicking properties of silk are fair (I was unable to find a quantitative reference) as was the major early textile of hemp (which is also tough and therefore long-lasting) which is significant as we know that Sichuan in the Shu kingdom period was a vast, tropical inland basin criss-crossed by regularly flooding rivers descending from the Himalayas, thickly forested and with crocodiles, elephants, rhinos, giant cats, colourful birds, etc. Both silk and hemp textiles would help to cool anyone wearing them, relative to other options (animal skins, etc.). Furthermore, in the absence of modern medicine, fine-weave capable wicking fabrics would assist with resisting potentially lethal bacterial and fungal infections in the tropical environment and may therefore have been used as wound dressings or undergarments.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shu_(kingdom)
> a non-Han Chinese civilization in the area of Sichuan
From TFA: Huang Di Yuan Concubine Leizu Xiling taught others to raise silkworms, and the legend Leizu is from the people of Chengdu in Sichuan
Huang Di was regarded the ancester of every Han Chinese, and Sichuan was the birth place of Han. The literal meaning of "Han" traces back to LiuBang, the Great King of Han, founder and first emperor of the Han dynasty, literally established his fief over Sichuan (Ba, Shu, Hanzhong and its 41 counties). Liubang spent his next 5 years elimilated all his enemies and began the first Pax Sinica of 300 years.
If you mean the pre-Qin history of Sichuan, the Shu state was one of the "8 partners of Oath" that together with the Zhou state rebeled against the Shang, forming the foundation of Chinese civilization over its 800 years course.
The Ba & Shu kingdom were conquered by Lord Hui-wen, the great-grandparent of Qin-Shi-Huang the first emperor of China. Do you call this a "civilization was destroyed by the Han Chinese" or am I missing something?
So how do you define "non-Han"?
Or you just like to spin a narrative here?
> Relative to existing fabrics such as hemp, silk has at least in other contexts been of value militarily because of its relative strength to weight ratio
Silk's just easier in general. Unlike vegetable fibers, silk can be reeled to yarn/thread directly. With cotton (or wool), there are about 4-6 other processes before you can even get to spinning. Hemp's worse still, I think there's a retting process in there like with linen.
Or perhaps, it's more true that the labor-intensive portions are up front... you're feeding the dumb little worms up to 4 times a day early on, transferring them off of the eaten leaves (so as to avoid disease), and this only lightens up to twice a day later in the lifecycle. And this isn't tapping out a little pinch of food like for a goldfish bowl, they'll often do 10,000 worms at a time just to have some modest quantity of fiber (perhaps enough for 5 or 6 yards of fabric). This ends up being like 60+ lbs of mulberry leaves there at the end.
All told though, I'd much rather raise the worms than sit there for six months trying to card cotton by hand.
A woman in my local spinning and weaving club took up silk worms as a hobby, spent about 6 months from beginning to end and wound up (lol) with a ~ square foot patch to hang on the wall. Pretty impressive conversion from tree leaves to silk when you think about it.
Me and my kids are still trying to figure out how to scale it up. We thought we had the right sort of mulberries... first batch starved. Then we tried Samia instead of Bombyx, but every single package would arrive damaged and empty. We've got mulberry seeds going, and we're getting some cuttings for this spring. Even then, you need something like 250+ cocoons for an ounce of silk, so we're not expecting much at first.
Wait, why are your packets of seed arriving empty all the time? Customs declaring them exotic and harmful? Mulberry mobsters? Moths in the delivery chain?
My guess would be that they came from Amazon
Silkworm eggs, not seed. Got my refunds. No clue. Domestic, wasn't shipped from overseas or anything, and if it was customs they usually send something saying that they're confiscating the shipment (or so I'm led to believe, I don't often try to smuggle anything). It was a bit weird. They were pretty good about delivering the empty ripped envelopes though.
Even early piratical man - ranging from the seafaring Athenians to Han Chinese - who developed extensive seafaring capabilities utilized these materials in peace and in war. Thus, the Chinese idiom "turning war into jade and silk" is a means of communication with the gates of heaven.
> Silk residues were successfully detected, which confirmed the early use of silk as a material carrier to communicate between Heaven and Earth
That last bit seemed to jump out of nowhere. Maybe I'm missing some implications of the grid-like oval bronze thing? Very mysterious.
All the authors are Chinese. They might have been confirming a cultural transmission about the origins of using silk that otherwise had no direct archaeological evidence.
They got a bit of the history of the Silk Roads incomplete. The Silk Roads, as it is understood now, isn't just about trading in silk, but the idea that the ancient world was connected and globalized through an extensive trade network. It isn't just overland routes, but also maritime routes for spice trade with India, and connections from North Africa deep into the interior of the African continent. Paper was worth more than silk along the Silk Roads. However, from the lens of Chinese history, silk was something that the Chinese monopolized for a while and was sought after by other cultures and civilizations connected through the Silk Roads.
I wonder how different African history would be if there were a major river emptying into the Indian Ocean instead of rather small ones. You have some minor rivers and the Red Sea. Not great for making a trading superpower like Egypt.
One of the recent videos that I watched was RealLifeLore : How Africa’s Geography Traps it in Endless Poverty https://youtu.be/Y8m95sCDEf0
A chunk of it is about the nature of the lack of good harbors along the coast that would be able to shelter trading ships from the open ocean.
Zanzibar is the noted example of a port https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanzibar#Before_1498
> From the 9th century, Swahili merchants on Zanzibar operated as brokers for long-distance traders from both the hinterland and Indian Ocean world. Persian, Indian, and Arab traders frequented Zanzibar to acquire East African goods like gold, ivory, and ambergris and then shipped them overseas to Asia. Similarly, caravan traders from the African Great Lakes and Zambezian Region came to the coast to trade for imported goods, especially Indian cloth. Before the Portuguese arrival, the southern towns of Unguja Ukuu and Kizimkazi and the northern town of Tumbatu were the dominant centres of exchange.
Even the large rivers that do empty into the ocean, they have significant portions of rapids that make it impractical to use as a trading route.
You mean like the Ethiopian Empire?
A Western academic would phrase it very differently. If you read the paper, they claim that a document called the "Jiatu Zhijia" describes a very similar object called a jiatu that supposedly resembles a divine turtle that caused legendary emperor Yao to abdicate to Shun, i.e. acting as a material carrier between heaven and earth.
I can't actually find other English uses of that name, and while I can guess that they're referring to one of a small set of documents discussing the (possibly mythological) abdication of Yao, those documents were written thousands of years after the events. I'm not wholly opposed to the argument, but you should explicitly justify it in cases like this instead of accepting the symbolism uncritically.
I'm probably wrong but since it was discovered in a sacrificial pit I assumed the bronze age people burned the silk as a way to "communicate with heaven".
Silk does not burn in normal flame.
If you are buying a 'silk' garment it is common to ask the shop-keeper to hold it to a cigarette lighter to prove it does not contain a synthetic petroleum-based fabric, such as polyester.
Still, a very pretty sentence for an abstract.
I'm noy bothered by it but I wonder if it betrays some sort of religious belief from the authors? Which ideally should be either avoided or disclaimed explicitly
Why does religious belief require a disclaimer?
Do other philosophical positions, like atheism or panpsychism?
If you want your writing to be taken as establishing facts, you need to base it on a priori established facts; if you base it on hypotheses and beliefs then you're just expanding on the hypothesis, contributing further belief.
I suspect though that it's not the author's beliefs, just an ambiguously written way of saying that it was done by those people with that belief - in the same way that an atheist or follower of some other religion may say that Christians pray in order to communicate their wishes to God. Of course there is the rude and angry for no clear reason brand of atheist who could never bring themselves to say such a thing, but to the rest of us there is no problem in describing someone else's actions by their own reasons for doing them, even if we don't share that motivation. I have colleagues who run for pleasure; though I do not for mine.
They talk about it later on:
> Similarly, silk was also used as a sacrificial object, such as in the form of silk books or paintings on silk, with the silk serving as a carrier to convey the content of the calligraphy and painting upon it to Heaven.
But it does seem that there is some context that would be helpful here, at least for this Western reader.
Chinese burn paper items, such as paper money, when paying respects to their ancestors. We believe it will go to the other world.
It is actually common in other cultures as well.
Just for fun: any culture with silk could have made lighter-than-air hot-air balloons. And the way to prepare strong inorganic acid compounds was known then. Combined with metals like the tin in bronze it could produce hydrogen which could be trapped in oiled silk.
Seems like a huge waste of tin and silk.
It would have been quite extraordinary for transport at the time.
Manned silk hydrogen balloons as battlefield surveyors played a hugely important role in the american civil war. But yeah, it might be a bit much given the very remote sites of tin mining for most of the bronze age. Other metals like iron also work but are almost equally scarce at the time.
“Silk residues were successfully detected, which confirmed the early use of silk as a material carrier to communicate between Heaven and Earth”
Love that the work was strong enough that they could slip a line like this into their abstract.
Interesting, but silk use in the bronze age is not a new discovery.
My understanding is that it's not a well-known discovery, so that alone should make it interesting enough for discussion.
Indeed, see the word that I started my comment with. But the point I am making was not referenced in the discussion.
In fact, I think the main point of the linked article is actually not that silk was being used at all in the bronze age by the Yangtze River civilization, but that the silk is being used for sacrificial purposes, but the title on HN does not reflect that.
Shouldn't we call it the Silk Age then?
Can't really make weapons out of silk.
Being poetic about it, silk was effectively wielded as an economic weapon against the British empire to the point they retaliated with opium (flooding a foreign market with cheap drugs is surely an act of subterfuge if not war, so who's to say it has to have a pointy end to be a weapon?)
> silk was effectively wielded as an economic weapon
Wasn’t most of the silk used in Europe produced in Italy and France, though? Added together they weren’t that far off from China (which also had a huge domestic market). India was also a major exporter so clearly Britain had the option to expand “domestic” production or buy more silk from Italy (importing from China was presumably just cheaper).
European silk production collapsed in 1849 due to some still not well understood disease but that was quite some time after the first Opium War.
Reminds me of how the settled peoples of Europe, the Middle East and Asia eventually worked out the nomads would definitely raid you if you didn't make your settled-people-goods available for trade.
Is a shield a weapon? Is armour a weapon? Silk is resistant to cuts. People made suits of armour out of silk.
Burning silk (and other organics) makes cyanide. I have no idea if this can be weaponised.
You're surely trolling, you think shields and armour might be a weapon but you're not sure about cyanide?
The amount of cyanide affects its ability to be used as a weapon. Almonds have cyanide. They're a very ineffective weapon, unless you hurl a sack of them at an opponent like a mace maybe.
Silk is a defensive weapon. Or, maybe silk cords power bows or Ballista?
A lot of martial arts can teach you how to defend yourself with rope. You’re not going to kill a mammoth or conquer Normandy with it but that’s still a weapon.
A garrote
Idle question: If I am caught carrying one, what is my excuse ? What could it be besides a garrote ?
Great for assassins, but not terribly useful in a large battle.
Very true. Also not useful for space battles. Or rhinoceros training.
Useful information.
Are weapons the defining characteristic of civilizations? Really? What about fashion? Surely we are now in the Polyester Age.
Weapons and tools is what the three-age system was defined by.
The petroleum age would seem an even more encompassing description along the same theory.
Boy are we lol
> Can't really make weapons out of silk.
Someone will always find a way, and then everyone will copy them
source: every public internet thing ever