LATE SHANG DYNASTY, CIRCA 14TH-MID-11TH CENTURY BC

The owl is a decorative motif which commonly appears on bronze vessels from the Shang dynasty. The bronze vessels can be made in the form of an owl or covered with owl motifs, a phenomenon which is paralleled in jades. Fu Hao’s tomb contains a pair of bird-form bronze vessels. An owl-form zun in the British Museum, dated to the Shang dynasty, is illustrated by William Watson, Ancient Chinese Bronzes, London,1962, pl. 13a. Two other owl-form zun dated to the Shang period are housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Hakutsuru Museum, Kobe, and are included in ibid. pls. 36b and 36c.
This rare early jade carving is inspired by owl-form bronze vessels of the same period. A closely related jade owl of larger size (6.5 cm. high) and with a pair of rounded ears was found in Fuhao’s tomb in Anyang, illustrated in ‘Shang. Western Zhou’, Zhongguo yuqi quanji (Compendium of Chinese Jade), vol. 2, Hebei, 1993, p. 65, no. 82. The Fuhao jade owl also has a drill hole on the underside and two holes on the back of the head. Archaeologist Zheng Zhenxiang suggests that the item could have been used as a pendant or a mount. (see ibid., p.247, no. 82) Several other owl-form jade carvings were found in the Fuhao tomb, such as: a celadon jade owl with plain surface illustrated in Jades from the Yin Sites at Anyang, Beijing, 1981, fig. 66 (402); two fully-embellished examples illustrated in ibid., figs. 54 and 56 (465); another with ram’s horns illustrated in ibid., fig. 55 (508); and one with a tiger’s head illustrated in ibid., fig. 56 (990). It is important to note that a large marble carving of an owl (34 cm. high) was found in Tomb 1001 in the Shang Kings’ burial ground in the Xibeigang, Anyang, and is illustrated in A Harvest of New Scholarship, Taipei, 1998, p. 32, no. 15.