A Study On The Images Of Winged Beasts In Tombs Of The Northern Dynasties In Shanxi Province

As one of the major military towns during the Northern Dynasties,the Shanxi region was also the core of the Northern regime’s rule for nearly three centuries.A total of twentytwo Northern Dynasty mural tombs have been excavated in Shanxi,with burials spanning over one hundred and thirty years,through the Northern Wei,Eastern Wei and Northern Qi Dynasties.The preservation of the mural paintings in the 22 tombs varies,with the Sha Ling Mural Tomb(M7),Shuozhou Shuiquanliang Tomb,Taiyuan Xu Xianxiu Tomb,Taiyuan Lou Hie Tomb,Xinzhou Jiuyuangang Tomb,and Datong Northern Wei Lv Xun Tomb being better preserved,with a complex and diverse range of winged beasts,which are representative.Although they are of different ages,overall these tombs are associated with a development of inheritance and show a trend towards cultural fusion at the time.The images of winged beasts are part of the religious iconography of the Northern murals,which is condensed and is essentially an expression of the spiritual culture of the Northern society.In terms of origin,the ’winged’ feature suggests the rich imagination of our ancestors in their creative artistic activities,and this imagination,derived from the shared cultural subconscious of early human civilisations,led to different forms of winged beasts as civilisations developed and communication.The images of winged beasts reflect the diversity of approaches and motifs used in the creation of tomb murals during the Northern Dynasties,and the differences in the winged beasts in the murals of the various tombs corroborate the history of communication between the Central Asian,West Asian,northern steppe regions along the Silk Road and the Han Chinese culture of the Central Plains during the Northern Dynasties.Therefore,this paper selects the images of winged beasts in the tombs of the Northern Dynasties in Shanxi as the object of study.Based on the collation of the image materials and using the Pannofsky’s iconographic research structure,the paper conducts a three-stage study of the images of winged beasts in the tombs of the Northern Dynasties in Shanxi: a pre-pictorial analysis-the anthropological and cultural interpretation of the generation of the winged beast motifs and the social and cultural context of the Shanxi region.The focus is on the overall social context,identifying the cultural types that influenced the creation of the winged beast wall paintings in the tombs of the Northern Dynasties in Shanxi,and explaining the general symbolic meaning of the winged beast images;the iconographic study-describing the distribution of the winged beast images excavated so far in Shanxi,classifying them,and identifying the matrices of the winged beast images and their genealogy;image interpretation-the ontological characteristics of the images of winged beasts in the tombs of the Northern Dynasties in Shanxi and their cultural analysis.Through the iconographic study of winged beasts,the cross-regional cultural genes carried by different winged beasts are demonstrated,clear the style and cultural origins of the winged beast images in the Northern Dynasties tombs in Shanxi,and the cross-fertilization of religious beliefs,social culture and historical dimensions of the image art of the Central Plains,the Western Regions and the Northern minorities embodied in winged beasts is supported.So we can establish an iconographic structure of logical evidence for history.