"Death...is a dead head!" As soon as I touched the two holes, I knew that the ball was filled with a skull.
A mole changed her face slightly, but she reacted better than me.
She held on and said: "Yunfeng, you are a grown man, but you are still a tomb robber. What should the skull be afraid of! How dare you kiss this thing if your second son is here."
"Start! I'll do it!" She frowned slightly and got started.
Because I had already cracked the ball open with a big crack before, she didn't expend much effort this time, just hit it with a rock a few times and it was opened.
This time it was really true. What I guessed before was correct. There was indeed a dead skull inside the ball.
Some areas of the skull have been weathered. What is strange is that there are some gilt layers on the surface of the skull. These gilt layers are scattered and do not look like words, but more like some kind of pattern symbols.
In ancient crafts, I have heard about gilding copper, gilding silver, thin gold hairpins, gold and silver, gold and silver threads, etc., but I have never heard of using gilding craftsmanship on the skulls of dead people.
The gilt layer around the skull's eye sockets is golden, and paired with the pure black skull, the style is quite strange.
A mole frowned and said: "In the early years, when I was helping a Chengde gang do logistics, I saw something similar, but that thing was not a skull, but a small piece of human finger bone. At that time, the leader of the gang told me that this thing was from the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period.
period.”
She looked up at the trapezoidal bronze vessels on the roof of the cave and said, "Yunfeng, you're pretty sure. There are dozens of these at first glance. Just smash one down and we'll study it."
"Yeah," I nodded in agreement.
At this height, I couldn't even reach it by jumping, so I still used the old method of hitting it with stones. I specially picked a bigger stone.
"Bang!"
I hit it with the first hit, and the stone and bronze collided together, making a long and crisp echo.
Hearing this sound, I already agreed with a mole's previous guess. Ninety percent of this row of trapezoidal bronze vessels are chimes.
"I'm trying harder," a mole looked up.
"Bang!" The last blow was a solid blow.
With a pop, the chime fell into the river. A mole had been prepared, and she fished it out in less than a minute.
After catching it, I will study it.
This bronze vessel is narrow at the top and wide at the bottom. It has some red spots and green rust on the body. In addition, the waist line, fan line, and cloud and thunder patterns are all very regular. This is an old Western Zhou item that can be opened at a glance.
I weighed it and found it was a bit too light, so I lifted it up lightly.
"Sister Hong, try it. Why do I feel that the weight is not right?"
A mole reached out and picked it up, "Hey, it's so light. Isn't this made of bronze?"
A mole is older than me. She has been in this industry all year round and has seen many more things than me. She used her fingernails to pick up the patina on the copper chime. The patina was very buoyant and would fall off with a light touch.
Already.
Once the green rust faded away, the gray-black background was revealed inside the trapezoidal chime clock.
A mole frowned after looking at it and said: "It's not bronze. This is a good thing. If I guessed correctly, it should be from Tiantie..."
"Iron chimes?" I stared and said in disbelief: "Sister Hong, there were iron tools in the Western Zhou Dynasty? No? Did you admit it wrong?"
She shook her head, "You didn't understand. What I said was Tiantie, not pig iron. Iron tools appeared in the late Spring and Autumn Period. To put it bluntly, Tiantie is meteorite, a meteorite mine. No wonder the weight feels wrong as soon as you get started."
A mole said that the trapezoidal chimes were made of meteorite iron. In fact, there is evidence. A few years ago, in 1996, the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology and the Sanmenxia Cultural Relics Working Team joined forces.
The cemetery conducted rescue excavations and finally discovered two rusty iron swords. The two daggers came from the tomb of Guo Zhong. After X-ray radiation analysis, the archaeological team found many similar high-concentration nickel on the iron swords.
Finally, these two swords from the Bronze Age were identified as meteorite swords by the national archaeological team.
"Sister Hong, tell me, this thing is so precious, why don't we carry it out?" Knowing the preciousness of this chime, I felt a little greedy.
I muttered in my heart, "Rather than put it in this dark underground river, why not let me take it out? It's not a waste of natural resources, right?"
A mole glanced at the chime on the ground, and she was also a little moved.
"It's not heavy, so let's take it with us. Not a single person will come to this place for hundreds of years." She shook her head and motioned for me to bring the chime.
I took off my shirt and twisted it into a rope. I didn't mind the coldness of the chimes. I carried the chimes behind my back and tied them up with my clothes, and then tied a knot in front of my chest. That was done. I shook it, but it didn't move at all. It was stable.
