Bronze Age China - Shang dynasty [1600 ~ 1045 BC]

Submitted by gimhae_pyeongya t3_xuyk74 in history

Shang dynasty [1600 ~ 1045 BC] is fascinating because it is really mythical but still was a real historical entity testified by both ancient scripts and archeological findings - the same way Mycenae or Troy was

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  • Primordial bronze age civilization before the "moralization" of the Chinese civilization
    • Many of its bronze artifacts look kind of Latin American - abstract, intimidating, a little bit crude. Probably this was the time when a small number of ruling families, for the first time, started exerting absolute power over the vast majority of people (including slaves captured from wars) based on technology and weaponry. The aesthetics of many artifacts focus on the sheer display of power (scary faces, for example)
    • An archetypal Shang bronze artifact: a bronze ritual vessel https://imgur.com/a/l0L0t22
    • There's also many pop theories about human sacrifice during the Shang dynasty. Some historians' work seem to support that such rituals had indeed happened (in the form of the execution of slaves or war prisoners) (link)

** In the following Zhou dynasty, the display of power is a lot more moderated by sophistication and moral virtues. Human sacrifice disappeared, even though the practice of burying slaves alive with a dead ruler lasted until later period.

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  • Primitive writing - pyromancy, divination, and oracle bones
    • Oracle bones (link) are another fascinating artifacts. The origin of the Chinese characters is very mystical - "oracle bone scripts", a form of early logogram (similar to hieroglyphs), were carved on turtle shells and ox bones that were used in divination
      • The divination process (pyromancy): "Divination questions were carved onto the bone or shell in oracle bone script using a sharp tool. Intense heat was then applied with a metal rod until the bone or shell cracked due to thermal expansion. The diviner would then interpret the pattern of cracks and write the prognostication upon the piece as well"

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  • Archeological discovery - I think this is a beautiful story on its own!
    • The 19th century: the oracle bones were used as medicine by local farmers (in the old Shang territory) who discovered them from ground.
    • 1899: a Chinese scholar named Wang Yi-rong (influenced by the "evidential scholarship" in the Qing dynasty which was again influenced by Western science) first recognized that oracle bone scripts might be a very ancient predecessor of the Chinese characters
      • News of the discovery of the oracle bones created a market for them among antiques collectors, and led to multiple waves of illegal digs over several decades
    • 1910: The source of the oracle bones was eventually traced to a village - different scholars hypothesized that that place might be the capital of the mythical Shang dynasty
    • 1917: A scholar named Wang Guowei deciphered the oracle bone inscriptions of the names of the Shang kings and constructed a complete Shang genealogy (which matched with the existing ancient historiography)
    • 1928-37: The first archeological excavations of the hypothetical capital of the Shang dynasty were led by an archeologist named Li Ji, known as the father of Chinese archeology. The team uncovered the remains of a royal palace, royal tombs, and more than 100,000 oracle bones

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>And go to the hall of our prince,
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>There raise the cup of rhinoceros horn,
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>And wish him long life, - that he may live for ever.

** The ancient stories and poems of China are full of exotic plants, animals and tribes - because the Southern part of the Chinese landmass was covered with forests, and non-Han ethnic people in tribal societies lived there.

** The Verses of Chu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu_Ci) is also a fascinating collection of songs from a Southern state of Chu (1,030~223 BC), which was a mixture of Han Chinese migrants and various ethnic tribes

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  • "Pond of wine, forest of meat": The demise of the Shang dynasty and Shang-Zhou transition
    • The legend has it that the last king of Shang and his "beautiful yet wicked" wife Daji were corrupt, tyrannical and even sadistic
    • They had a pond filled with wine, and a forest full of hanging roasted meat in their garden. Naked women and men chased each other in an orgiastic fashion. The famous idiom "Pond of Wine, Forest of Meat" comes from a later "Records of the Grand Historian" (written in 91 BC)
    • The people of Shang revolted eventually, and a new Zhou dynasty was established (also known as Yin-Zhou revolution) (There's a whole Japanese manga about it - link lol)
      • The new Zhou dynasty had more modest and moralistic culture, which would influence the later Chinese dynasties for a very long time. They established a strict primogeniture (father-son succession) system that had not been the case during the Shang dynasty.
      • The house of Shang survived though. Some of them revolted after the fall of their dynasty, but others were granted land. The state of Song was ruled by the Shang descendants as a vassal state of Zhou. There was more brother-to-brother succession of the throne in the state of Song, compared to other Zhou states.

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I'm an East Asian person, and I grew up knowing a few hundred Chinese characters and idioms originating from China's ancient past. So these stories are always fascinating to me. I hope someone finds this interesting!

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Comments

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wjbc t1_iqyhlm0 wrote

You always have to be careful about claims that one dynasty is more modest and moral than its predecessor, since it's likely the historians or storytellers in the new dynasty writing about the old one. The oracle bones and tombs from the Shang Dynasty suggest it was highly bureaucratic, meticulous about keeping records, and orderly in arranging the tombs. There's no archaeological evidence of lakes of wine or forests of meat or mass torture.

Many modern historians believe the last king in the Shang Dynasty was as reasonable and intelligent as most rulers and not as decadent and cruel as following dynasties portrayed him to be. China is justifiably proud of its long history, but modern archaeology and historical research has often cast doubt on the reliability of written records, let alone popular folklore and literature.

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gimhae_pyeongya OP t1_iqyws6j wrote

I agree - it's just such a story so deeply ingrained in the 2,000 years of the dominance of the Confucian ideology, so I just released it as I remember it. Most East Asian people (in Sinosphere) would recognize the idiom

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HappyFailure t1_iqymj0v wrote

I'd heard that there was a find of something that could reasonably have been the lake of wine. Trying to google on it, I end up getting directed to Wikipedia, but I guess it boils down to an artificial pond/lake that doesn't seem to have been used for drinking water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Terrace_Pavilion

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ddrcrono t1_iqyww81 wrote

This is just an off-the-cusp thing but my understanding is that some research has found a correlation between the complexity of moral/religious systems and the size/complexity/density of society. It makes more sense since keeping track of people individually gets harder / there's more anonymity / you have problems you wouldn't have had in a sparser setting. I'm not sure I'd say more moral in this case, though.

There are also some writers like Steven Pinker who actually uses violent crime, etc. statistics to argue that the world has gotten more moral / good over time. (I find this somewhat tenuous in that it might just be that we're better at making people not want to do bad things, rather than them actually being morally superior).

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wjbc t1_iqz02jd wrote

Yes but Pinker’s argument has nothing to do with individual rulers.

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ddrcrono t1_iqz19s6 wrote

>moral

In Pinker's case, he's talking about society and statistics in general, but I think it's generally the case that individuals grow up within and are affected by a society - the most immoral anyone can "get away" with being in one place and time is different than another.

That particular point aside, I actually got the impression that OP was talking about moral standards in general and using the sorts of things rulers did as examples to highlight the state of affairs.

My general train of thought here is that if society and/or rulers were held to higher standards over time that it would be analogous to the arguments that Pinker makes, or more generally, to the overall idea that morality develops over time. (You don't need to think specifically about Pinker for this, as it's a point that's been made elsewhere in different ways).

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DaKeler t1_iqz7ae6 wrote

Would you mind providing sources for those modern historians?

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wjbc t1_ir04s6k wrote

I’m getting this from a lot of sources. It’s just a general trend among ancient Chinese historians.

For example, Records of the Grand Historian is the first of China's 24 dynastic histories and was written in the early 1st century BC by the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian. But it covered a 2,500-year period! That’s why modern historians don’t take everything in it as gospel.

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Atharaphelun t1_iqz0in1 wrote

>The house of Shang survived though. Some of them revolted after the fall of their dynasty, but others were granted land. The state of Song) was ruled by the Shang descendants as a vassal state of Zhou. There was more brother-to-brother succession of the throne in the state of Song, compared to other Zhou states.

Confucius himself was in fact a descendant of the ruling house of the State of Song himself, and by extension, the royal Zi clan of the Shang dynasty. All of Confucius' descendants in our time, therefore, have traceable lines of descent going all the way back to the royal clan of the Shang dynasty.

>They established a strict primogeniture (father-son succession) system that had not been the case during the Shang dynasty.

Just to clarify, the term primogeniture just means the oldest child inherits. The term you're looking for is agnatic primogeniture, in which the oldest son inherits, as opposed to cognatic primogeniture, in which the oldest child regardless of gender inherits, or enatic primogeniture, in which the oldest daughter inherits.

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DaKeler t1_iqz74wy wrote

Yes! Confucius descended from the second to last king of Shang, Di Yi (帝乙), whose youngest son succeeded and ruled (incompetently) until the Zhou famously, and rather dramatically, overthrew and killed him.

Di Yi's first and second sons successively were the ones granted land by the new Zhou government according to the "Two Crownings and Three Respects" system (二王三恪) to carry on the rites of Shang. The first son's line tapered off after a while, but second son's line was the one that gave rise to most of the remaining rulers of Song and, more importantly, was the one that ultimately produced Confucius.

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Ac4sent t1_iqzaasr wrote

Have always been interested in what was going on in East Asia during the bronze age and post neolithic.

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blarryg t1_iqyybkr wrote

I miss the Bronze age -- those were fun times! :-)

I'm interested in whether the collapse of the Eastern Meditteranean (and wider?) bronze age had echos or similar patterns back in Asia? The collapse was around 1200 BCE

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DaKeler t1_iqz8cj4 wrote

Oh, this is what I actually wrote my master's thesis on! In short, mostly no.

There was no traumatic reduction of socioeconomic complexity during the bronze-iron transition in China (in fact, it was very much the opposite) in contrast to areas such as Greece and Anatolia circa 1200 BC. However, the introduction and proliferation of iron-working technology did non-critically contribute to a destructive geopolitical feedback loop, so I guess there's a small morsel of parallelism in terms of violence.

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gimhae_pyeongya OP t1_iqz09hd wrote

Not that I know of. However, the iron age in China manifested in the chaos of "the Spring and Autumn period (about 770~470 BC)" and "the Warring States period (about 470~220 BC)" - Confucius and many other Chinese philosophers were born in this time

The Shang-Zhou bronze age was considered as the "good ol' time" by many Chinese philosophers in the Spring and Autumn / Warring States period, for example.

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pheisenberg t1_ir0qq86 wrote

According to John Kay, the Shang were one polity of many in that day. They weren’t a unified state yet, they were a collection of allied settlements bound by family ties and ritual. There were other settlements of different communities interspersed with Shang sites, perhaps similar to how 5th century Britain was spotted with ex-Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse villages.

But Kay also says Chinese writing today traces back to the Shang writing system, as well as some other cultural elements such as bronze working. So they were especially influential, if arguably not quite “Chinese” yet.

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Im-John-Smith t1_ir2syy0 wrote

I learned something about the Shang house dynasty in elementary i like the box it’s looks pretty cool bro, are like they’re descendants still alive tho

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Wanghaoping99 t1_irrhxqw wrote

Like the answer for the descendants of Charlemagne, the answer is technically a yes, after countless generations of intermarriages, the genetic heritage will spread to a given size of the population. It is possible that even today there are those who still bear the heritage of the royal house, though they would likely not be of any significance . Even the Aisin Gioros are now little more than salarymen. It would be impossible to trace a specific lineage that far back with complete certainty. No record has lasted that long. So no, there is not some secret elite family like with the ex-royalty of Europe that we could confidently consider to be the continued direct familial legacy of the Shang.

One interesting point is that the traditional Chinese accounts actually had the succeeding Zhou dynasty appoint the Shang as dukes of a small fief rather than outright purge them, so this lineage supposedly survived long enough to produce some of the dynasties of the various kingdoms that emerged during the Zhou's collapse.

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