Strange Mysteries from Ancient World

  Strange Mysteries from the Ancient World - Part 2

   Now we will tell you another story from China, about a forgotten tomb.

The Forgotten tomb:

   It was the first day of the last month of the year 1952. Laborers were busy making sports field in the Jiangsu Province. Since the sports field was to be made for the Jingvi Middle School of Vixing city, the land was chosen very cautiously. The chosen piece of land was surrounded by an rectangle small hill and had four mounds. It was indeed difficult for laborers to remove the mounds. However, laborers were busy doing their work as usual. When suddenly, a labor shrieked with astonishment for his spade had struck a thin layer. There a hole was visible. Everybody peeped inside, and even in darkness they could see some peculiar objects inside.

   The inexperienced laborers were frightened. They quickly called the police. The police went down the small opening and announced to everyone’s surprise that a major archaeological discovery had been made. The place was sealed and soon archaeologists thronged the place. The excavation started and it became clear that the place was a tomb, and there were two tombs instead of one. The tombs had been built in a peculiar style. Each tomb had a chamber which had an arched roof and was constructed of wedge shaped bricks. On it there was a square slab. While some bricks covered the floor, the roof was covered with faces of animals.

   The task of dating was quite easy. The inscription on one tomb read: “20th September of the Seventh year of Yuan Kang the late General Zhou.....” And one of the other, the official titles and signatures were inscribed. So, the archaeologists concluded that it must have been the tomb of a nobleman called Zhou Chu, a great military leader and scholar, who lived during the rule of Jin dynasty from 265 A.D. to 420 A.D. Zhou Chu was a great military man and had died fighting the Tibetans in 297 A.D.

   However, these were mere historical facts. But the real discovery which astonished the world related to the pieces of metal found in one of the tombs. In the beginning these were considered to be useless objects. But when they were chemically examined, the result shocked the world. They were pieces of pure aluminum. This was a bewildering fact because aluminum was unknown to the Western world till the beginning of the 19th century. The discovery made the historians consider whether Chinese were more advanced than Europeans and secondly whether Chinese knew the production of electricity, for which aluminum is largely required.

   The disbelievers did not agree that aluminum was produced in that period. Even Chinese historians also doubted its historical validity. According to some critics it must have been dropped by grave robbers later on. The world was not ready to accept that the Chinese knew the production of aluminum. The researchers from the University of St. Andrews conducted an exhaustive survey in 1980 and concluded that the entire discovery was a “Hoax”. But in 1985 the Chinese geologists claimed that they had found grains of “Native Aluminum” in Guizhou province. “Native Aluminum” is a rare commodity and has been found at very few places. The recent Chinese discovery has once again revived the aluminum controversy. It has confirmed the possibility of the fact that aluminum found in the tomb was genuine.

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