The first to write about this finding was China Daily, the English-language website owned by the Chinese Communist Party. According to him, the remains were found in the “western tomb” on the site of the mausoleum of Emperor Qin Shi Huang-di, a few miles northeast of the city of Xi’an in Shaanxi Province.

Detail

Jiang Wenxiao, the archaeologist in charge of excavating the tomb, said: The main structure of the car decayed after lying on the ground for over 2000 years. The history of the tomb dates back to B.C. It dates back to the 3rd century. The team found the remains of six sheep skeletons attached to pull the cart and concluded that it was a sheep-drawn cart.

Sheep skeletons / Dayoo News

Horse-drawn chariots and ox carts were common in ancient China, but the sheep-drawn chariot was an extremely rare find, Wenxiao said. They appear in Chinese legends as well as in Chinese history. Emperor Wu (or Sima Yan), the founder of the Western Jin dynasty, who reigned from 266 to 290 AD, is said to have driven a sheep-drawn chariot around his palace complex every night and slept where the sheep stood. This practice may be the source of the modern Chinese phrase “seeking luck in a sheep cart” – the emperor was said to have had a harem of 10,000 wives, and it seems that Sima Yan chose his wife from among them in this way.

Wenxiao presented his findings at the Fourth Congress of Chinese Archaeology in Xi’an in October. The team hopes that laboratory analysis of the western tomb’s burial chamber, currently underway, will help them determine who was buried there.

It is currently unknown who is buried in the “Western tomb” / Photo: Dayoo News

In addition to the chariot pulled by six sheep, archaeologists also unearthed a four-wheeled wooden chariot, probably pulled by horses and equipped with an ornate rectangular umbrella. According to Wenxiao, this is the oldest chariot of this type ever found. They also found numerous copper artifacts related to chariots and horses, as well as iron tools and copper weapons, providing a new look at the period when iron tools first appeared.

We will remind you that the mausoleum of Emperor Qin Shi Huang-di, who reigned from 221 to 210 BC and was considered the first emperor of unified China, spreads over an area of ​​​​approximately 26 square kilometers and its construction took 38 years. . Three large pits in the mausoleum’s floor contain more than 8,000 life-size statues depicting the emperor’s soldiers and horses (the so-called Terracotta Army).