In 1986, workman near the Chinese city of Chengdu (in Sichuan province) dug up some 200 relics of an unknown civilisation:
the bronze castings showed a high level of technical skill, but interestingly there was also this:
Elephants in China, and important to the elite that ordered the fabrication of the masks, some obviously large enough to be fitted to an elephant's head? Many more questions and few answers.
But there are some clues.
First, modern Sichuan Province is just to the north of modern Yunnan province which borders modern Burma which borders modern India, Thailand and Laos - which are all important ancient centres of elephant culture and worship.
Of even greater interest, is the fact that there are still wild elephants in China's Yunnan Province, not so far from Sichuan Province. How widely elephants ranged in this area of the China of two thousand years ago is not known.
Further, the entire area is an interface between Aryan-Indian civilisation and Chinese civilisation. So we could easily imagine that a little more than three millenia ago, before Abraham was, an elite (perhaps from the south),with attachments to a nascent elephant culture took control of the locality where the relics have been found. At that time the Shang dynasty was ruling central China, and some hundreds of years later (before Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians and the Jewish/Israelite elite deported to Babylon and Kongzi (Confucius) was teaching the nascent Chinese civilisation the right way to live), the elephant culture people of Sanxingdui collapsed.
So, if you can make it to Santa Ana, I can recommend this exhibition as opening your mind to the beginnings of a civilisation about which the Isrealite/Jews knew nothing.
The exhibition closes on March 15, 2015.
If you' like to know more, this is the Museum's web-site: http://www.bowers.org/index.php/exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/190-china-s-lost-civilization-the-mystery-of-sanxingdui
