Qin Imperial Iron, Tomb M1 and the First Emperor's Mausoleum: Character, Context and Consequence

秦始皇铁器项目将率先对秦始皇陵墓中发现的铁器进行系统研究。秦始皇的纪念性建筑群世界闻名，经常被认为是秦帝国运作的缩影。它的兵马俑装备了数千件功能齐全的青铜武器，而相比之下，令人好奇的是，在公元前1千年的这个阶段，铁器在建筑群中并没有更加突出。然而，在陵墓遗址的M1墓中新出土的铁剑和一套铁盔甲现在提供了一个独特的新的分析优势，并促使我们对陵墓中其他数百件铁器进行更详细的研究，而不是迄今为止的尝试。这个项目的前提是，铁器实际上是秦国故事中一个非常重要但经常被遗忘的证据类别，它可以为欧洲和亚洲帝国转型的“轴心时代”的工业规模和范围变化提供重要的新见解。

The Qin Imperial Iron project will pioneer systematic study of iron objects found in the Qin First Emperor's mausoleum. The monumental complex of Qin Shihuang is famous worldwide and often evoked as an expression of the workings of the Qin Empire in microcosm. Its Terracotta Army was equipped with thousands of functional bronze weapons, while in contrast it remains curious that iron implements are not more prominent in the complex by this stage of the 1st millennium BCE. However, newly-excavated finds of iron swords and a suit of iron armour from tomb M1 at the mausoleum site now provide a privileged new analytical vantage point and prompt us to consider the hundreds of other iron implements from the mausoleum in far greater detail than has been attempted so far. This project begins from the premise that iron objects are in fact a very important but often-forgotten category of evidence in the Qin story, one that can provide significant new insight on changes of industrial scale and scope in an 'Axial Age' of imperial transformation across Europe and Asia.