Water Basin

After walking around the museum for a while, I saw a lot of unbelievable works of art. I ultimately decided to do this paper on something Chinese because it was fresh in my mind and I don’t know anything about Japanese art yet. And as soon as I walked into Freer gallery 14, I saw this bronze bowl that I was almost certain I knew what it was for. Turns out I was wrong, but after I got a closer look, I figured it out. At first I thought it was a ritual bronze vessel from the Shang Dynasty, then I realized it looks a lot more like Archer Jing’s ritual bronze than any vessels we looked at. And sure enough, it was a ritual bronze with inscriptions from the Zhou Dynasty. So it was actually a ritual water basin called jian from the Eastern Zhou Dynasty made from bronze. I thought it was a good size with maybe two feet or more in diameter and maybe a foot and a half to two feet in height. The outside was very decorative all around and there were four handles that looked like monkeys with really large tongues. They may have been dragons or maybe even monsters like the “taotic designs” we learned about in class that was in one of the bronze vessels in the Shang Dynasty. I’m not an expert so I don’t know what it is, but it looks like it had some purpose. It reminded me of the Sarnath Capital with the lion in all four directions so maybe this is symbolizing the spread of their own culture or religion. There were rings around two of the handles that were on opposite sides and the other two did not have them and I don’t even have a guess for why that is. Looking inside of the jian was weird, after what I learned in class about Zhou’s lengthy inscriptions in their bronzes and after reading the title that said “with inscription”, I was expecting to see a plethora of writing. Instead I only saw like a line of maybe 8 characters of writing. I don’t know if that’s because of maybe it got worn out, or this is a different type of bronze than the lengthy inscriptions like the one