‘Cool. What’d you find?’ Jimmy resettled the camera over his shoulder.
‘Show you in a minute.’ Lourds headed for the grave.
Once more, Lourds squatted at the edge of the grave and stared down at the skeletal remains. At his direction, Jimmy took video footage of the grave and its grisly inhabitant.
‘Now, Thomas, what did you find?’ Professor Hu waved Jimmy and Baozhai away.
Carefully, Lourds reached down through the dead man’s empty rib cage. After so many thousands of years, the bones were fragile and easy to destroy.
A smooth stone lay on the ground to one side of the spine. Lourds touched it with his fingertips, rocked it slightly, then redoubled his efforts to scissor his fingers and remain steady. With the stone caught between his fingers, Lourds withdrew his hand. He sat and crossed his legs, totally involved with his prize.
‘What is it?’ Hu knelt and peered closely, sliding his reading glasses on as he examined the stone.
‘I don’t quite know.’
‘Then how do you know it’s anything at all?’ Gloria sounded a trifle put out.
‘Because this stone is smooth.’ Lourds twisted it in his fingers, showing off the smooth surface. Shaped something like a hen’s egg, it was half the size of his fist. ‘None of the other rocks down there are smooth.’
As one, the others peered over into the grave for a moment. Then they pulled back and looked at the stone in Lourds’s palm.
‘That still doesn’t mean anything.’
Lourds remained focused on his perceived prize. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t. But do you know what?’
‘What?’ Hu looked at Lourds over the top of his glasses.
Lourds smiled. ‘I don’t think this is a stone at all. It’s actually not heavy enough.’ He looked around the ground beside him and found a rock that had a semiflat side. Laying the stone on the ground, he lifted the rock and prepared to bring it down.
‘Wait!’ Hu held up his hands. ‘We can x-ray that—’
Lourds brought the rock crashing down.
3
The ‘stone’ fragmented when the rock smacked it. Pieces shot out in all directions, several of the fragments hitting Lourds’s bare leg hard enough to sting.
‘Oh my.’ Hu put his hands to his face in consternation. ‘Thomas, do you realize what you’ve done?’
Lourds sorted through the pieces around him. ‘Not yet, but hopefully soon.’ He knew he was going to feel like an idiot if the ‘stone’ turned out to be nothing at all, and he was going to feel even worse if the ‘stone’ turned out to be an artifact they should have saved.
But he had a feeling about it. He’d learned to trust his gut over the years, and it had been telling him that the stone had been an important ruse.
‘That “stone” was only pottery. A protective covering. You know, it’s interesting all the things researchers have learned from Neolithic Yellow River pottery. I’m sure you’ve all heard about the alcohol recipe that was reconstituted from residue that had soaked into pottery jars?’
Hu nodded but looked decidedly anxious.
‘As it turns out, the recipe was for alcohol fermented from rice, honey, and hawthorn, or as it’s known in scientific circles, Rhaphiolepis. That particular species of evergreen has white or pink blossoms, and it bears a fruit, a pome, like a small apple actually, that can be made into a jam. Dogfish Head Brewery actually bottles that very recipe today. It’s featured as one of their Ancient Ales series. They call the beer Chateau Jiahu. For the most ancient beer known to man, it’s not bad, but I prefer one of the German darks.’
With a flourish, Lourds plucked a small, pale green-gray tortoiseshell from amid the debris and plopped it onto his palm. He smiled.
‘Oh my.’ Hu’s exclamation this time was in a much different tone.
Several onlookers from nearby digs had come over, attracted by the commotion surrounding Lourds. He lit up at once, enjoying the attention. He loved being in front of a classroom.
‘Tortoiseshells have been a mainstay of Chinese and Asian culture for thousands of years.’ Lourds held the small shell up at the ends of his fingertips, delicately flipping it over to show the underside, and pointed to the sections. ‘In ancient times, diviners used these plastrons to foresee the future. The Shang Dynasty is filled with stories about men who used them for those purposes. The process was to heat and crack the plastrons, then inscribe them.’
Jimmy Woo had his camcorder on his shoulder and was filming away.
Baozhai held a small wireless microphone in one hand and slid quietly into the shot. ‘So the tortoiseshells were used in magic ceremonies?’
Lourds laughed. ‘No. Histories were kept on the tortoiseshells. Historians wrote out stories of events and people on the plastron pieces. In fact, the oracle bones, as the pieces came to be called, gave historians the knowledge of the past and the complete royal genealogy of the Shang Dynasty, from Tian Yi to Di Xin.’
‘Why did historians use the tortoiseshells?’
Lourds flicked the tortoiseshell with a forefinger, and the hollow note sounded loud in the quiet surrounding him. Punk rock music from one of the other dig groups sounded in the distance. ‘I would think they used them because they were so durable. The Shang Dynasty ran from 1766 BC to 1122 BC, by Liu Xin’s accounts. Liu was an astronomer in the Xin Dynasty. Another source, the Bamboo Annals, found in the tomb of the king of Wei, cites the time frame as 1556 BC to 1046 BC Papyrus wasn’t invented and used by the Egyptians till the third millennium BC’ He smiled again. ‘It also helped that tortoises were so plentiful. Put a tortoise into a pot in the evening for a tasty soup, then you could note out the family history — including the previous night’s family meal menu — the next morning.’
The crowd laughed.
‘Sadly, thousands of years of history were lost because no one realized the significance of these little bits of bone. Paper was invented in China in the second century AD or thereabouts. There is some speculation that it was used before then, but that seems to be the major point of entry. At the time paper was made, it was intended to replace silk in the Chinese culture, so that more silk could be traded and sold abroad. As you may recall, paper is counted as one of the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China. The inventions of the compass, gunpowder, and printing are the other three — for those of you taking notes.’
Professor Hu spoke up at once. ‘There will be a test for my students.’
Mock groans mixed in with the laughter.
Lourds turned the tortoiseshell. ‘Thousands of years passed, and people came to believe the plastrons held curative powers. Myths sprang up that all the broken shell pieces were dragon bones and could be used to cure various sicknesses or wounds. Apothecaries and shamans used the shell pieces whole or crushed to manufacture medicines and poultices for sicknesses like malaria and for injuries.’ He shook his head at the thought of all that lost history.
Baozhai pushed the microphone toward Lourds again. ‘You say thousands of years passed before anyone recognized that the tortoiseshells contained written records.’
‘There was a scholar in the Qing Dynasty who figured it out. His name was Wáng Yiróng, and he didn’t put it together until 1899. At the time, Wang was being treated for malaria. He and a friend, Liú È, spotted the engravings on the turtle shells and noticed they looked like the inscriptions on zhong bells and ding tripodal cauldrons from the Shang Dynasty to the Zhou Dynasty that they had been studying. They started to work on interpreting the glyphs immediately. That discovery of the glyphs on the plastron pieces changed the face of Chinese archaeology forever.’