Anyang
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Anyang
Anyang
a city in China in the province of Honan, at the eastern spur of the Taihang Shan on the Hwang Shui River (the Huang Ho basin). As of 1959 the population was 145,000. The city is a railroad station on the Peking-Wuhan line. Its industries include cotton and food.
World-famous excavations of a settlement from the second half of the second millenium B.C., the capital of the Yin state, were carried out from 1928 to 1937 and from 1950 to 1963. The environs of Anyang were already settled in the Neolithic period by the Yang-Shao and Lungshan civilizations. In the early Yin period settlements existed on the banks of the Hwang Shui River. At the site of one of these settlements the last Yin capital was founded about the 14th century B.C. The center of the capital was located near the village of Hsiaot’un, where remains of court and temple buildings and numerous dwellings have been excavated and an archive of prophetic inscriptions has been found; north of Hsiaot’un, burial vaults of the Yin rulers and nobility have been found. After the Chou conquest at the end of the 11th century B.C., the Yin capital was destroyed.
REFERENCES
Hu Hou-hsüan. Yinhsü fachiu o (Excavations of the Yin Fortified Settlement). Shanghai, 1955.Hsin chungkuo k’aoku shouhuo (Archaeology in the New China). Peking, 1961.
Chêng Têk’un. Archaeology in China, vol. 2. Cambridge, 1960.
M. V. KRIUKOV