Warriors of Ancient Ba Tribe
45/40/20
It has been proved that Ba warriors migrated from the Yangtze valley to the northern reach of the Jialing River. This is the place where the boat coffins were found. Later, more and larger boat coffins were unearthed in the west of Chongqing. The burial sites and age of the boat coffins indicate the end of the flourishing era of the warriors. It is rather a sad story. The warriors believed that the boats, like the weapons, would conquer the world and remain immortal.
46/25/20
Half a century later, archeologists Wang Jiayou provided us with a rich body of information about boat coffins. We were able to make out what was happening at the time. The dead man was obviously a Ba warrior, probably no longer young. Three bronze weapons lay beside his head and body. Other warriors had just performed funeral rites for him. His son was probably one of them. Other objects showed family life that had been sealed up for thousands of years. There were combs, lacquer, cooking and pottery utensils as well as spindles and peach and plum stones. All were laid out in an orderly way as if in a home. The still-sharp willow-leaf sword was unsheathed and placed at his waist where he could easily reach it.
47/32
Ba boat coffins were very special. Most were carved out of single tree trunks one and a half meter in diameter, 5 (5 or 2?) meters in length and with the center hollowed out. Their bottoms and ends were shaped like a boat too. Some had an inner coffin in the hold.
Wang Jiayou:
Cutting a trunk 1.5 meters in diameter and 2 meters in length into a boat coffin might seem like hard work. Actually it wasn鈥檛. The ancient people charred the wood and scraped it off layer by layer. The coffin could be made in just a few days.
Making boats and coffins meant the same thing to the Ba people. In their spiritual world, perhaps only the concept of boats existed. They were very brave and fearless in the face of death. Was this related to their special understanding of death? Did they believe in death?
The ancient Ba lived on water, so boats were indispensable tools for them. It is only natural to connect their burial customs with their way of life. But, are there more reasonable explanations? What was the nether world of the ancient Ba like? To most people, the boats and the images of boats appearing in a variety of mysterious forms on Ba artifacts are as elusive as UFOs.
