THE BRONZE AGE OF CHINA

THE SHANG DYNASTY (CA. 1570 BCE- 1045 BCE)

The Bronze Age Shang Dynasty in China is roughly dated between 1700-1050 BC, and, according to the Shi Ji, it began when the first Shang emperor, T'ang, overthrew the last of the Xia (also called Erlitou) dynasty emperors. The Shang is the earliest Chinese dynasty for which we have written evidence. Shang civilization was a series of towns united under the Shang king. The Shang people arose from diverse Neolithic cultures in north China, and from around 1500 B.C., inhabited the area along the Yellow River in present-day Henan province. They belonged to a highly stratified society ruled by an aristocracy where kings were the political, military, and religious leaders. The Shang were an agricultural people who principally cultivated millet, they also built large cities, had a well-organized government administration, and often engaged in warfare to ensure territorial boundaries. The Shang directly controlled only the central part of China proper, extending over much of modern Henan, Hubei, Shandong, Anhui, Shanxi, and Hebei provinces. However, Shang influence extended beyond the states borders, and Shang art motifs are often found in artifacts from more-distant regions. The Shang city in Yanshi was a walled city. The walls were made from beaten earth measuring 1700m in length and 1200 m in width. There were 7 city gates. Within the city walls there was a palace city in the centre which was surrounded by tamped earth wall. There were underground drains. Within the city walls were the military and religious centers as well as the nobility residences. The buildings were identical and arranged in the same format. The center of the Shang domain was found in the eastern and north-eastern regions of Henan. All buildings in the city were rectangular and were made of mud with wooden beams. The king's residence was in the centre of the city which was built on a north-south axis. This indicates that the early Shang city was a highly developed capital with a strong defensive system, well planned palace complexes and elaborated drainage works. The Shang held their royal ancestors in high regard. Bronze was found in royal tombs as well as the skeletons of about three hundred servants who were to accompany the king to the heavenly world. Funery tablets were kept in the front of temples and all rituals were carried out in their presence. These tablets were thought to contain the souls of the ancestors. Every royal event was announced aloud in the temples to inform the ancestors. In addition, the diviners often consulted the ancestors by offering sacrifices and reading the cracks of burnt bones. Archaeological remains provide many details about Shang civilization. A king was the religious and political head of the society. He ruled through dynastic alliances; divination (his subjects believed that he alone could predict the future by interpreting cracks in animal bones); and royal journeys, hunts, and military campaigns that took him to outlying areas.

The Shang were often at war with neighboring peoples and moved their capital several times. Shang kings could mobilize large armies for warfare and huge numbers of workers to construct defensive walls and elaborate tombs. The Shang kings rule was based equally on religious and military power. He played a priestly role in the worship of his ancestors and the high god Di. The king made animal sacrifices and communicated with his ancestors by interpreting the cracks on heated cattle bones or tortoise shells that had been prepared by professional diviners. Royal ancestors were viewed as able to intervene with Di, send curses, produce dreams, and assist the king in battle. Kings were buried with ritual vessels, weapons, jades, and numerous servants and sacrificial victims, suggesting that the Shang believed in some form of afterlife. Shang China was ruled by hereditary kings who were also priests acting as intermediaries between the people and the spirit world. Their power was not absolute, being constantly limited by an aristocratic "Council of the Great and Small." The oracle bones reveal that the kings often appealed to the ancestral spirits in order to overcome the opposition of the council. The nobility spent much of their time hunting or in warfare. Game and captives were treated equally by nobility: they were sacrificed to the gods. Most warfare was directed against rebel cities or Barbarians. Warfare was more like a raid than anything else. Precious metals, food, and livestock, as well as people were taken from the place of warfare. The noble class was the core of the army. Other spots were filled in by slaves (captives). Shang kings and nobles lived in imposing buildings, went to battle in horse-drawn chariots resembling those of Homer's Greece, and were buried in sumptuous tombs together with their chariots, still-living servants and war captives. Warfare was frequent, and the chariot, a new military weapon, facilitated the spread of Shang power through North China. The power of the kings and nobles rested on their ownership of the land, their monopoly of bronze metallurgy, their possession of expensive war chariots, and the kings' religious functions. They were the descendants in the male line from a common ancestor to whom they rendered worship and who was usually a god or a hero, but sometimes a fish, an animal, or a bird. The chief deity, called God on High, was the ancestor of the king's own clan. There were regular animal sacrifices and libations of beer-like liquor were poured on the ground. The object was to win the aid or avoid the displeasure of the spirits. Shang society was characterized by settled agricultural life, cereal cultivation being the principal economic practice. They grew millet, wheat, and rice. The farm implements consisted of stone tools such as the spade, sickle, knife, along with wooden tools, 2 pronged or spade shaped; bronze ones were rare. The Shang peoples common fondness for drinking implies that agricultural production at that time must have been progressive enough to provide much grain for wine brewing. The common people were peasants who belonged to no clans and apparently worshiped no ancestors. Their gods were the elementary spirits of nature, such as rivers, mountains, earth, wind, rain, and heavenly bodies. Peasants were virtual serfs, owning no land but working plots periodically assigned to them by royal and noble landowners. They collectively cultivated the fields retained by their lords. The peasants often lived outside of the city, although there were a few within the walls of the city. Those within the city lived in pits and cellars. The common folk outside the city lived in villages. It is thought that they harvested

millet, barley, and perhaps rice. They used tools made of wood to work the land. The peasants operated on a "well-field" system where the land was divided into nine squares. The peasant would keep the products of eight squares, while the lord would take the products of the ninth square. In technology, the most important achievement was the development of bronze metallurgy and casting. Among the Shang bronzes, the most significant objects are ritual articles, including food containers such as the ding (tripod) and gui (bowl) and wine vessels such as the gu (breaker), jue (three legged drinking cup), zun (jar), and you (oval pot with a swing handle), all used in offering ceremonies and for banquets. Such bronze rituals represent an extremely high level of bronze industry both in technical and artistic attainment. The bronze industry required centralized coordination of a large labor force to mine, refine, and transport copper, tin, and lead ores, as well as to produce and transport charcoal. It also required technically skilled artisans to make clay models, construct ceramic molds, and assemble and finish vessels. The Shang people also developed a distinctive writing system employing nearly 5000 characters, some of which are still in use today. These characters represent individual words rather than sounds and consist of pictographs, recognizable as pictures of observable objects, and ideographs representing ideas. The writing system used by the Shang is the direct ancestor of the modern Chinese writing system, with symbols or characters for each word. This writing system would evolve over time, but it never became a purely phonetic system like the Roman alphabet, which uses symbols (letters) to represent specific sounds. Thus mastering the written language required learning to recognize and write several thousand characters, making literacy a highly specialized skill requiring many years to master fully. Most Shang writing is found on thousands of "oracle bones," fragments of animal bones and tortoise shells on which were inscribed questions put to the gods and ancestral spirits, which were thought to continue a close relationship with their living descendants as members of the family group. With the establishment of Shang rule over most of North China and the appearance of the first written texts, China completed the transition from Neolithic culture to civilization. Shang originally was the name of a nomadic tribe whose vigorous leaders succeeded in establishing themselves as the overlords of other tribal leaders in North China. Farming methods were primitive, not having advanced beyond the Neolithic level. Bronze was used for weapons, not tools or implements, and the peasants continued to reap wheat and millet with stone sickles and till their allotted fields with wooden plows. Religion established the underlying framework of Shang society with an emphasis on ancestor worship and a belief in a pantheon of gods headed by the supreme deity Di. The Shang used ritual ceremonies to communicate with their ancestors since the welfare of the living was contingent on the support and good will of ancestral spirits. Ancestors were consulted before any major undertaking. Their responses to the livings questions about war, hunting, or the harvest were relayed through divinations on oracle bones. Elaborate cast bronze food and wine vessels likewise were employed in ceremonial offerings and sacrifices. The masklike taotie motif often decorates the surface of these bronzes, and as some scholars interpret, reinforce the bronzes ritual function and connections to the spirit world. Labor-intensive bronze production was as symbolic of ruling authority as they were representative of Shang ritual ceremonies and burial traditions. As emblems of power and prestige, Shang bronze objects were interred in the tombs of the elite. The quantity and variety of finely created ritual vessels from this period attest to the existence of workshops of bronze production and the Shang peoples ability in large-scale mobilization of material and

human resources. Shang bronze casting technology distinguished itself with the piece-mold casting method, which differed from the lost-wax process, a procedure that the Chinese did not master until the fifthcentury B.C. The houses were of two types. Earth and wood constructions foundations were first prepared of beaten earth and then houses were constructed on them by setting stone bases, erecting pillars, fixing beams and thatching roofs; walls were made of tamped earth. It was also believed that the houses had straw thatch gable roofs. Another type of house was a semi subterranean with a square or round shallow pit dug into the earth, floor and walls baked with fire. The roof was conical or gable and thatched with straw. Shang pottery mainly consists of grey ware, which is made for the most part of wheel and occasionally in the mould, with cord marks as the commonest decorations through impressed and incised patterns. China was the earliest country in the world to raise the domestic silkworm and produce silk textiles. For the Shang period, a few pieces of silk fabric have been unearthed from graves, including plain silk, warp pattern monochrome damask in lozenge designs, along with some smart embroidery. All this reflects that the spinning and weaving techniques of Shang silk production reached a quite high level.