Chinese ritual bronze in the context of "Gui (vessel)"

Antiquities are objects from antiquity, especially the civilizations of the Mediterranean such as the Classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, Ancient Egypt, and the other Ancient Near Eastern cultures such as Ancient Persia (Iran). Artifacts from earlier periods such as the Mesolithic, and other civilizations from Asia and elsewhere may also be covered by the term. The phenomenon of giving a high value to ancient artifacts is found in other cultures, notably China, where Chinese ritual bronzes, three to two thousand years old, have been avidly collected and imitated for centuries, and the Pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, where in particular the artifacts of the earliest Olmec civilization are found reburied in significant sites of later cultures up to the Spanish Conquest.

A person who studies antiquities, as opposed to just collecting them, is often called an antiquarian.

Bronze is the most popular metal for cast metal sculptures; a cast bronze sculpture is often called simply "a bronze". It can be used for statues, singly or in groups, reliefs, and small statuettes and figurines, as well as bronze elements to be fitted to other objects such as furniture. It is often gilded to give gilt-bronze or ormolu.

Common bronze alloys have the unusual and desirable property of expanding slightly just before they set, thus filling the finest details of a mould. Then, as the bronze cools, it shrinks a little, making it easier to separate from the mould. Their strength and ductility (lack of brittleness) is an advantage when figures in action poses are to be created, especially when compared to various ceramic or stone materials (such as marble sculpture). These qualities allow the creation of extended figures, as in Jeté, or figures that have small cross sections in their support, such as the equestrian statue of Richard the Lionheart.

A jue (Chinese: 爵; Wade–Giles: chüeh) is a type of ancient Chinese ritual bronze vessel used to serve warm wine during ancestor-worship ceremonies. It takes the form of an ovoid body supported by three splayed triangular legs, with a long curved spout (liu 流) on one side and a counterbalancing flange (wei 尾) on the other. Many examples have one or two loop handles (pan 鋬) on the side and two column-shaped protuberances (zhu 柱) on the top of the vessel, which were probably used to enable the vessel to be lifted using leather straps. They are often ornately decorated with taotie decorations representing mythical beasts. They are in effect a small Chinese equivalent of the ewer. The name jue is not original, but derives from the Shuowen Jiezi, a dictionary of the 2nd century AD.

The vessel originated in Neolithic times as a pottery ware associated with the Longshan culture, between about 2500-2000 BC. During the Shang and Zhou dynasties of Bronze Age China, it became one of a number of designs of Chinese ritual bronzes. Pottery and lead copies continued to be made and used as grave goods or spirit utensils (mingqi). Most jue (like other Chinese bronzes) were created by casting molten metal in pottery moulds, but one jue appears to have been made using the much earlier method of hammering sheet metal that might have been introduced from western Asia, where bronze metallurgy is believed to have been developed 2,000 years before it appeared in China.

The He zun (Chinese: 何尊) is an ancient Chinese ritual bronze vessel of the zun shape. It dates from the era of Western Zhou (1046–771 BC), specifically the early years of the dynasty, and is famous as the oldest artifact with the written characters meaning "Middle Kingdom" or "Central State" — 中國: "China" — in a bronze inscription on the container. Today it is in the Baoji Bronzeware Museum in Shaanxi.