Keynotes 4  

Chinese Dynastic History

The Xia - Dynasty (2205-1766 BCE)

The Xia was long considered to be a mythical dynasty but since archaeological excavations in Erlitou, south of the Yellow River have been conducted and their finds dated, the historicity of the dynasty becomes more likely than ever. Perhaps the Xia developed the famous black pottery. They made the earliest attempts to cast bronze and created the earliest characters of the Chinese writing system. According to the archaeological evidence the Xia were located in southern Shanxi and western Henan.

Some scholars are convinced that a matriarchal system was prevalent in pre-dynastic China because recorded Clan names start with the character for woman.

The Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Lü (Lü shi chunqiu), a source from the 3^rd cent. BCE reports that “people lived in groups. One knew the mother but not the father; there were no separate families.”

The Shang - Dynasty (1766-1050 BCE)/ (1650-ca. 1050 BCE)

The Shang dynasty was a city centered culture. Cities were walled, had public buildings, altars, and were sites of aristocratic residences.

The Shang kings had political, economic, social, and religious authority. They made offerings to their ancestors who then interceded with the ‘Deity Above’ (Shangdi) on behalf of the king. This practice derived from shamanistic rituals.

The Shang king’s advisors created a calendar with months of 30 days and years of  360 days. The calendar was important for conducting the rituals of the seasons at the appropriate time and begin the agricultural works in accordance with nature.

The military aristocracy of the Shang went to battle in war chariots. In warfare, prisoners were enslaved: the least of the classes of Shang society.

Inscriptions are transmitted on ritual vessels made of bronze and on oracle bones. Both materials for inscriptions are characteristic for the Shang.

Bronze appeared about 2000 B.C.E. in China. (1000 years later than in Mesopotamia and 500 years later than in India). It was used for sacrificial vessels but especially for weapons on which the aristocracy had a monopoly in order to have control over their distribution.

Shang gui

Shang you

Sacrificial vessels were used in the family rituals performed in ancestor halls. Vessels found in tombs linked the ritual to the realm of the netherworld. They were also regalia of political power. Therefore one finds vessels from different periods in tombs. The amount of vessels that were found in tombs mirrors the status of the deceased. The vessels can be of different quality, pattern and size.

Bronze was of exceptional value and the successful casting of bronze difficult. The Chinese artisans used an elaborate modular technique which is unique among civilizations using bronze. While in other cultures bronze was cast with the lost-wax-method (with a mold that was destroyed in the end of the process) in China bronzes were cast with molds that could be reused in order to be able to produce bronzes with the same pattern repeatedly and in sets.

The artisans formed negative clay molds constructed of several pieces. The pattern appeared in the negative of the mold. They placed a core into the negative mantle and poured the liquid bronze into the space between the mantle and the core. The parts of the molds were composite, interchangeable parts combined into units.

Patterns were zoomorphic or abstract and arranged in registers and compartments on the vessel. This facilitated the production of the mould for the artisan and the identification of the status of the owner by other members of the nobility.

The production of sacrificial vessels was a highly organized process which required labor division. Division of labor favors uniformity which in the Shang was characterized by a high level of quality. There must have been a system of work coordination and supervision in order to make sure that quality standards were kept.

The Excavation of the Ruins of Yin:
(Yin is sometimes used as a synonym for the Shang dynasty.)

1909

1920         'wild', unofficial excavations

1924/25

1928:  Founding of the Academia Sinica, the  National Academy of Sciences of China. The Harvard educated archaeologist Li Ji (1895-1979) was entrusted with the excavations at Anyang (1928-1937).

In these excavations the archives of the department of the divination of the Shang court were discovered. They contained thousands of oracle bones which were incised with archaic Chinese characters. The names of the kings could now be compared with the names mentioned in later historical records.       

11 tombs of kings were found, among them the tomb of Fu Hao, a Shang queen, the only tomb that had not been plundered.  The tombs reveal that human sacrifices were common in the Shang: Hundreds of slaves, prisoners of war, and servants of the king were buried with him to serve him in the afterlife.

Shang cemetery in Anyang

Tomb of a Shang king

Next to sacrificial vessels oracle bones were found. But the first oracle bones had become objects of study before the systematic excavation of the Ruins of Yin and their academic analysis:

1899: Liu E (1857-1909) visited his sick friend, Wang Yirong (1845-1900) who needed a remedy against Malaria attacks. They bought tortoise shells at a traditional pharmacy in Beijing. When pounded into a fine powder according to traditional Chinese medicine the shells could be used as a remedy recommended to cure malaria.

The friends discovered characters that have been incised into the shell. They inquired where the apothecary had bought the shells and then Liu bought as many shells as he could collect from peasants around the city of Anyang. He copied the characters on the shells and finally published his collection in order to enable philologists to decipher the mysterious messages which later were donfirmed to be records of divination processes.

Map of the three earliest Chinese dynasties: Xia, Shang, and Zhou
The purple circle shows the core area of the Xia, the blue line encircles the maximum extends of the Shang dynasty. The dark brown area indicates the heartland of the Zhou dynasty, the lighter brown shows the extents of the Zhou, the yellow area shows the Chinese cultural influence by the 5th century BCE.

(Paul G. Bahn, The Atlas of World Archaeology. Oxford: Checkmark Books 2000, 117).