Casting of the Houmuwu Ding, Peak of Shang Bronze Art
- Date
- c. 1200 BCE
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- North China (Anyang, Henan)
- Era
- Ancient Civilizations
- Significance
The Houmuwu ding (formerly read Simuwu), a rectangular four-legged ritual cauldron unearthed near Anyang in 1939, is the heaviest piece of ancient bronze to survive anywhere in the world, standing 1.33 m tall and weighing about 833 kg.
Cast in the late Shang for a royal ancestral cult — its interior inscription dedicates it to 'Queen Mother Wu' — it epitomises the Shang mastery of the labour-intensive piece-mould casting technique, in which multiple fired clay section-moulds were assembled around a core and filled with molten alloy; the body and legs were cast as one and the handles added separately. Such ritual bronzes (ding, gui, jue and others), decorated with taotie monster masks and dragon motifs, were the supreme markers of political and religious authority in Bronze Age China: the number of ding a noble could use signalled his rank, and possession of the great cauldrons came to symbolise the legitimacy of rule itself. The vessel demonstrates an organised metallurgical industry mobilising enormous resources of ore, fuel and skilled labour under royal control.
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Empires active in c. 1200 BCE
- New Kingdom of Egypt1550 BCE – 1077 BCE
- Shang Dynasty1600 BCE – 1046 BCE
- Hittite Empire1650 BCE – 1178 BCE
- Phoenician City-States1200 BCE – 539 BCE
- Elamite Kingdom2700 BCE – 539 BCE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Standardisation of the Phoenician alphabetc. 1050 BCE
- The Bronze-to-Iron transition and the early Iron Agec. 1200 BCE
- Compilation of MUL.APIN and Babylonian astronomyc. 1000 BCE
- The Cascajal Block: earliest writing in the Americasc. 900 BCE
- Iron Smelting Develops in the Nok Culture of West Africac. 800 BCE
- Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, earliest known treatise on traumac. 1600 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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