Bronze Gods of Shu: The Lost Civilization of Sanxingdui - Paperback
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Bronze Gods of Shu: The Lost Civilization of Sanxingdui
In 1986, construction workers in China's Sichuan Province broke through into a pit containing bronze masks with eyes that protrude like stalks, life-sized human figures in elaborate cosmic costumes, and sacred trees nearly four metres tall hung with sun-birds and coiling dragons. Nothing like them had ever been seen before. They belonged to a civilization that the history books did not contain.
Bronze Gods of Shu: The Lost Civilization of Sanxingdui tells the full story of one of archaeology's most extraordinary discoveries - the Bronze Age Shu Kingdom, which flourished in the Chengdu Plain of southwest China between 2700 and 1000 BC, producing art of staggering originality and a religious world of shamanic complexity that challenges everything we thought we knew about the origins of Chinese civilization.
Drawing on the landmark excavations of 2019-2022 and the findings of the 2025 Sanxingdui Forum, historian Gilbert McMicken reconstructs the Shu world in full: its rice-fed cities, its elephant ivory trade routes, its solar theology and cosmic bronze trees, its brilliant metallurgical technology, and the single night of sacred fire in which its people deliberately ended their world and sealed it beneath the earth for three thousand years.
A civilization lost. Now, finally, found.
Gilbert McMicken is an Irish historian and scholar based in Belfast whose work spans the archaeology, religion, and cultural history of the ancient world. With a particular interest in the civilizations that flourished beyond the well-trodden pathways of Western historical attention, he has devoted years of research to recovering the full complexity of Bronze Age cultures whose extraordinary achievements have been obscured by the limits of earlier scholarship. His writing is shaped by a conviction that the most important stories in human history are often the ones that have been waiting longest to be properly told - and that telling them well requires equal measures of scholarly rigour and narrative ambition. Bronze Gods of Shu is his account of the most astonishing archaeological discovery of the modern era: a civilization that built gods large enough to touch the sky, sealed them with deliberate care beneath the earth of southwest China, and waited three thousand years for the world to be ready to understand them.
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