Tomb raiding was definitely a horrible word in ancient times. People are even more ashamed of grave robbers than grave robbers, because such people are heinous people who don't respect their ancestors, so they must "make a decision".

Grave robbery and criminal law

As early as the Neolithic Age, the tomb was destroyed out of hostility. The Longshan cultural cemetery in Yinjiacheng, Sishui, Shandong Province is a typical example. According to Lu Chunqiu's records, there are a large number of tombs buried with them, and "there are a lot of treasure beads to play with", so "there is no tomb to celebrate the day" and "there is no tomb to celebrate the day". Digging during the day.

/kloc-in the winter of 0/976, according to the records of Qin Wang's burial place in Historical Records, archaeologists searched for Qin Gong's cemetery in Lingshan, Fengxiang, Shaanxi Province, but did not receive the expected results. Later, according to the information provided by a farmer by chance, I came to the south side of Fengxiang South Command Village to investigate a wheat field that had not grown well for many years. This is because ancient tombs are generally tamped with solid soil, which is not conducive to crop growth. Through drilling, an unprecedented Qin tomb named Qin Gong 1 tomb was discovered here. The largest tomb discovered so far in the pre-Qin period is a typical "heavy burial" in terms of the shape of the tomb, the specifications and quantity of funerary objects and the number of martyrs. Perhaps because of this, it has experienced many serious excavations. At the beginning of the excavation, as soon as the plough layer on the tomb was uncovered, 247 stolen holes were found. When the tomb was excavated, there were still more than a dozen stolen caves. The cave-stealing era lasted from Han Dynasty to Tang and Song Dynasties. Tomb Qin Gong 1 is the tomb with the largest number of stolen caves found so far.

According to historical records, the custom of "digging graves" is popular among local people in Zhongshan. The story of the ranger "casting money to dig the grave" was also noticed by Sima Qian. Zhou Yan, a Tang Dynasty poet, once described the prevalence of folk grave robbery in such a poem: "When you reach the ancient tomb forest, the bones are vertical and horizontal. Tian vertical whip skull, village children sweep the elves laughed "a person in the print, table column burning silence. Try to read the inscription on the tablet. It used to be English. " Han Yu lamented the destruction of tombs in the Eastern Han Dynasty, and also lamented that "digging tombs is the official road, and Nanyang has close relatives".

Digging graves used to be a game of illegal aristocratic bureaucrats. For example, Liu Qu, the king of Guang Chuan in the Western Han Dynasty, had a hobby of openly digging graves. "Miscellanies of Xijing" says that there are countless ancient tombs excavated by Liu Qu, and that "all the tombs in China have been excavated", with hundreds of strange places.

When Wang Mang fell, the peasant army destroyed the tombs of the Western Han Dynasty, which was a large-scale grave-robbing movement recorded earlier in history books. "The Book of the Later Han Dynasty" also said: "Digging the grave for treasure is a disgrace to Lv Hou's body. Thieves are all killed with jade boxes, so red eyebrows are obscene. " Because the burial technology of the corpse was quite mature at that time, the excavation often looked lifelike, and thieves insulted the female corpse.

In ancient wars, the victorious side often indulged in robbery. Tomb raiding is actually one of the forms of plunder, such as seizing the army and washing the city. The Book of Old Tang Dynasty records that when Tang Xianzong launched a military struggle against Fanqiangju Town, he ordered all troops "not to hurt or kill people, burn houses, plunder people's wealth and develop graves". It can be seen that the army will inevitably burn, kill and plunder in the newly controlled areas, and "developing graves" is one of the more serious forms.

Psychological analysis of the motive of robbing a tomb.

The main motive of robbing a tomb is to rob the property buried by the owner. Sima Qian once said in Historical Records that social behavior is often driven by interests, and those who dare to die and "don't avoid the law" are actually out of the pursuit of wealth. He listed various ways to get rich when the so-called industrial and commercial Huo Zhi House embarked on the road to success, and pointed out that "digging graves and raping started in Shu Tian", saying that the super-rich in Shu Tian were all rich because of robbing tombs.

The special pursuit of funerary objects is also worthy of attention. Zhang Bangji, a poet in the Song Dynasty, told a story: Song Huizong liked bronze ritual vessels in Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties, so local officials dug tombs and asked them to provide containers. Song people's notes "Tiewei Mountain Talks" said that the emperor was "ancient" and "the world knew that he loved it so much, so he got a device and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then moved to millions of people without wings. So the graves in the world have been cut down. "

Tomb raiding sometimes has amazing motives. "Different Gardens" records that Fang Jing's tomb in the Han Dynasty was stolen in the Eastern Jin Dynasty and remains intact. "Zombie human flesh is comparable to medicine, and the sergeant points it." According to Tao's Record of Dropping Out of Farming in Nancun, there was a legend that "mummy" could cure "broken limb" in Yuan Dynasty, which was close to the superstition that "zombie human flesh is comparable to medicine". Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica quoted this theory, which is also noteworthy. Recently, Wu's Dianshizhai Pictorial had a story entitled "Thieves Steal Bones", which wrote: "Some gangsters pried open seven or eight coffins and stole bones, some called them stuffy incense, and some called them medicine bait. Although it is a proposal, it is comparable to stealing clothes. " This kind of motive of "using bones as incense" or "bait" is really amazing.

The well-known story of Wu Zixu's "whipping corpse" is an extreme form of revenge for robbing a tomb. There are many other examples in history, such as burial, dismemberment (such as MuRongPulin's tomb of Tuoba Wang Guifa), coffin cutting and bone burning (such as excavation of Wang Dingling). However, this situation is often intertwined with the situation of burying property in the tomb, which is not easy to distinguish clearly. For example, Sun Dianying, a warlord who planned and organized armed robbery of the Eastern Mausoleum of the Qing Dynasty, even defended himself by saying that "Manchu killed three generations of my grandson's ancestors and wanted to avenge the revolution" and flaunted the theft of the Eastern Mausoleum as "the life of Manchu" and "the life of the dead". However, its real motive is actually no different from that of ordinary grave robbers.

In the war, digging graves was also used as a means of psychological conquest. Ming army excavated Li Zicheng family cemetery and Qing army excavated Zheng Chenggong family cemetery, which are typical historical cases.

Like Liu Qu, the king of Guang Chuan in the Western Han Dynasty, there was a bureaucratic aristocrat who was addicted to grave robbery. According to the book of Chen, "I wandered among the tombs, learned the name of the owner, ordered him to dig around, took his stone carvings, elbows and shins, held them for fun and hid them in the stacks." His behavior of "going to the ancestral grave" and "uncovering the skeleton with a sarcophagus" is related to his psychological characteristics of "young and fierce, insatiable and abusive". The so-called fierce and weird temperament from childhood seems to have some kind of neurological dysfunction, which can be understood as the obvious manifestation of anti-social personality signs in early childhood. The so-called "good development of ancestral graves" seems to be a reflection of morbid personality. Psychologists' analysis of the "impulsive disorder" of theft addiction may help us better understand the addiction to grave robbery. American psychologists Robert G Meyer and Paul Salmon pointed out in their book Abnormal Psychology that "many people are thieves for excitement" and "many people are thieves because they don't really need or use stolen goods. Their lonely behavior is a response to an irresistible impulse, because then they can get a sense of relaxation. "

Seventy-two suspected graves of Cao Cao

The rampant robbery has gradually improved the anti-robbery technology.

The most common way to prevent grave robbery is to hide the grave so that the grave robbers don't know where it is. It is said that one of the main starting points of ancient tombs is not to seal trees or set eye-catching signs on the ground, which is to prevent illegal excavation. In Volume 557 of Magnolia in Taiping, the story of Lv Dai's unsuccessful excavation of the tomb of Zhao Tuo, the king of South Vietnam, is quoted from Jiao Guang Ji, pointing out that Zhao Tuo "can't know where it is because the shepherd's axis is damaged."

Tomb raiding in the Three Kingdoms period at the end of the Han Dynasty led to the emergence of so-called "suspected tombs" and "virtual tombs" in various forms of anti-tomb raiding, that is, the situation of confusing tomb robbers with true and false tombs. Among them, Cao Cao's most famous "commander-in-chief, a hundred officials, personally excavated, broke the coffin and naked the corpse, and got a small treasure", "specially appointed corps commander, touched the gold captain, did not show his bones, and led a violent life". According to folklore, there are as many as 72 suspected graves of Cao Cao. Luo Dajing, a native of the Southern Song Dynasty, wrote in "He Lin Yu Lu": "There are seventy-two tombs on the Zhanghe River, and according to legend, there is also the tomb of Cao Cao." Tao, a poet of the Yuan Dynasty, once wrote: "There are seventy-two tombs of Cao Cao suspected on the Zhanghe River. Yu Ying in Song Dynasty wrote a poem: "When he was alive, he deceived heaven and rejected Han, and when he died, he deceived others and built a suspicious tomb. Life is worse than death, so why go to the deep forest? I don't doubt people's suspicions. I don't know one thing. As long as there are seventy-two suspicious graves, there will be a grave to hide your body. " "The Chu people in the Qing Dynasty won the sequel to Jian Xuan Ji with the article Cao Cao's Tomb in Zhanghe River, saying that there are fishermen, and there is a gap in the river, and it takes dozens of steps to get a stone gate. "When you open the door for the first time, you can see that it is full of beautiful women, sitting or lying or leaning in two rows. In an instant, everything turned to ashes and was entrusted to the ground. There is a stone bed lying alone, crowned as a king. A monument to neutrality. If there are literati among fishermen, Cao Cao will be there. "

The practice of "suspected burial" to prevent illegal excavation is still used in later generations, such as Schleswig-Holstein, Shi Hu, Murong De and Gao Huan. There are no bones in Feng Sufu's tomb in Beiyan, Beipiao, Liaoning Province, and the possibility that the bones are rotted and destroyed by grave robbers has been ruled out. Therefore, some scholars infer that this is "the first case of' hidden burial and virtual burial' after scientific cleaning". (Cao Yongnian: On "Hidden Burial and Virtual Burial", Literature and History 3 1 series)

The traditional anti-tomb-raiding methods are solid stone walls and iron walls, anti-theft chisel with accumulated sand and water, and the way of killing tomb robbers with poison smoke from crossbows.

Moral criticism and legal punishment of grave robbery

In China's traditional patriarchal society, the tomb was once a symbol of maintaining the spiritual authority of ancestors and embodying clan cohesion. Protecting graves has long been a moral principle. In Du Xunhe's poems in the Tang Dynasty, the so-called "cultivated land is forbidden to invade even buried soil" shows that this moral standard has also formed a constraint on the workers at the bottom of society.

Laws prohibiting grave robbery should have appeared in the pre-Qin period. For example, in Lu Chunqiu, it was written that at that time, for "traitors" to rob tombs, there were already punishment measures of "banning them with heavy punishment". Huainanzi said that the criminal law has the contents of "theft punishment" and "grave punishment". According to the Book of Wei, when Wen Chengdi visited the northern Wei Dynasty, he saw that "the tomb was destroyed and abandoned" and said, "Anyone who wears a ruined tomb will be beheaded on the same day!" This is also a proof that the law has strictly prohibited "puncturing and destroying" graves. The laws of the Tang Dynasty included the punishment of grave robbery. The Law of the Tang Dynasty clearly stipulates the punishment for those who send graves, such as: "Those who send graves are forced to accept them; Those who have opened the coffin are twisted; It will be three years if it is not made. " Through the contents of the criminal law, we can know that the tombs of the royal family are specially protected. It is also worth noting that the guards will be severely punished after the robbery. According to the records of Ming history, the law at that time had the principle of severely punishing the crime of grave robbery. The Laws of the Qing Dynasty contained the content of "sending graves", and 36 cases were punished respectively. Provisions 22, the content is extremely detailed.

According to the Book of the New Tang Dynasty, Zhang Hongjing, the envoy of Lulong, set out for An Lushan and Shi Siming, but the local people still had peace of mind and respected history, so he "punished the troubled times at first and tried to change its customs, but it backfired, making the people more inclined to peaceful history and deviated from the court." This is precisely because the practice of "sending tombs to destroy coffins" is too extreme and does not conform to people's traditional emotional habits. "Old Tang Book" also records that Zhang Hongjing "sent (an) the tomb of Lushan Mountain and destroyed its coffin, which was particularly disappointing". People's "unhappiness" and people's "disappointment" all show a psychological tendency to resent the practice of "sending graves to destroy coffins"

According to Nan Shi, it is said that when someone tried to steal the hair from Zhang Gui's tomb, drums and horns were heard in the battle, and the grave robbers had to retreat. Cheng Dachang, a poet in the Song Dynasty, said in the Collection of Archaeology: "The history contains the Tang Mausoleum in Wen Tao, but it can't be close, but it is close to the wind and rain." History books also frequently record strange phenomena such as being surrounded by snakes, thunder and rain when robbing a tomb. If people are not afraid of this supernatural warning to protect tombs, they will often be severely punished. It is written in Different Gardens that Shi Xie's tomb is often foggy and deserted, and no one dares to dig it. Local officials in the Jin Dynasty went to the study room to explore, and fell off their horses and died on their way back. There is an article about "Digging a Tomb" in Yuan Mei's Zi Wu Yu, saying that Zhu, who started out as a grave builder, built a grave of a rich man, but the sarcophagus could not be opened, so he corrected all the monks and opened it. "After cursing for more than a hundred times, the sarcophagus suddenly opened, stretched out a green arm, made a long praise, and arrested the monks into the coffin." Later, Zhu also "ruined his family by litigation and hanged himself in prison." There are many stories similar to grave robbery. This phenomenon is also a reflection of the public opinion tendency of denying grave robbery.