The Shang dynasty: oracle bones, ancestors and the first Chinese writing

Lesson A ended with the color of the Yellow River and the soft loess soil that made the first farming possible along its banks. That story took us through many thousands of years of slow change. Now we reach the moment when the story becomes something new. For the first time, Chinese people speak to us in their own words. They do so through burned and cracked bones, and what they say is mostly questions to their dead relatives. This is the world of the Shang dynasty. First, a word about the word "dynasty." A dynasty is a line of rulers from one family, where power passes from parent to child, or from brother to brother, over many generations. Chinese history is usually told as a long series of dynasties. The Shang is the earliest one for which we have both writing from its own time and large-scale archaeology. That combination makes it the true beginning of Chinese history in the strict sense. Let us start with a problem of evidence. Later Chinese writers, especially the great historian Sima Qian, who wrote the Shiji around 100 BCE, gave a list of Shang kings and described the dynasty as ruling for centuries. The Shiji is a huge history of China from legendary times to his own age. But Sima Qian wrote about a thousand years after the Shang ended. In the early twentieth century, some skeptical scholars asked a fair question. Was the Shang real, or was it a legend, like many ancient kingdoms in other cultures? A source written a thousand years later is a weak witness. Historians call a document written by someone who lived at the time a primary source. They call later accounts secondary sources. Sima Qian was a secondary source for the Shang, and a very distant one. Excavation answered the question. At a site called Yinxu, near the modern city of Anyang in Henan province, archaeologists found the ruins of a large capital city. The name Yinxu means "the ruins of Yin," and Yin was another name for the late Shang. Excavations began in 1928 under the Academia Sinica, the leading research institution of China at that time. Li Ji and Dong Zuobin were prominent among the scholars. Work continued after 1949 and continues today. What came out of the ground showed that the Shang was not a legend. Now the dates, which need care. The traditional dating, drawn from later texts such as the Bamboo Annals and the Shiji, places the Shang at roughly 1600 to 1046 BCE. The Bamboo Annals is a chronicle found in a tomb in the third century CE, and historians dispute how reliable it is. The start of the dynasty is uncertain. The best-supported dates belong to the late Shang, when the capital was at Anyang. That period begins around 1250 BCE, in the reign of King Wu Ding, and ends around 1046 BCE, when the Zhou people conquered the Shang. The year 1046 comes from a Chinese government research effort called the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project. Other scholars argue for dates near 1045 or 1050. So when you meet these numbers, treat them as good estimates, not as exact facts. You may also hear of an earlier dynasty, the Xia, which later tradition says came before the Shang. We do not have contemporary written records of it. A site called Erlitou, with large palace foundations and early bronze work, is linked to the Xia by some Chinese scholars. Others point out that without writing from that time, we cannot know what its people called themselves. So the identification is debated and unproven. This lesson stays with what we can show. The Shang rulers did not always live in one place. Tradition says the capital moved several times. Archaeology supports the general picture of large early centers. One is Zhengzhou, a walled city dating to roughly the 1500s BCE, with massive earthen walls. Another is Huanbei, near Anyang, which may have been an earlier capital. The last and best known is Yinxu itself. A walled city is a city surrounded by a defensive wall, and building one needs a great deal of organized labor. The walls of Zhengzhou were built by a technique called rammed earth. Workers packed layers of soil into wooden frames and pounded each layer hard until it became almost as solid as stone. Shang builders used this method for city walls, for house floors, and for the foundations of palaces. It is a good example of how a society with only simple tools could still do enormous work, if it could gather and direct many people. At Yinxu, archaeologists found rammed-earth foundations of large buildings, which they call palace-temple complexes. The name shows something important. For the Shang, the home of the ruler and the place of worship were not clearly separate. They also found workshops where craftsmen made bronze objects, bone tools, and pottery. And they found the royal cemetery at a place called Xibeigang, with huge tombs for kings. These tombs held great wealth. They also held the bodies of human beings who had been killed to accompany the dead king. We will come back to this, because it is central to understanding Shang religion. First, bronze. Bronze is a metal made by mixing copper with tin, and sometimes lead. It is harder than pure copper and can be poured into a mold. The Shang became masters of bronze casting. Their method is called the piece-mold technique. A craftsman made a model of the object in clay, then pressed wet clay around it to make a mold. The mold was cut into sections and removed. The sections were then fitted together again around a clay core, leaving a gap between them, and melted bronze was poured into the gap. This method let the Shang make vessels with extremely detailed decoration, often with animal faces and swirling patterns. The art historian Robert Bagley has written at length about how this casting method shaped the style of the vessels. Why does bronze matter for history, beyond its beauty? Because of what the Shang made with it. Most of the famous bronzes are not tools or farm equipment. They are ritual vessels, containers for food and wine used in offerings to the dead. Bronze weapons existed too, and bronze was surely important for war. But a great share of the metal went into ritual. This tells us what the Shang elite valued. Making bronze needed copper and tin ore, fuel, skilled workers, and many people to dig, carry, and tend the furnaces. Only a ruler with strong control over labor and resources could do this on a large scale. So bronze shows us power. And the power was spent largely on ritual for the ancestors. Keep that in mind. Chariots tell a related story. In burials at Anyang, archaeologists found chariots with horses, buried together. Chariots were light two-wheeled vehicles pulled by horses, used by elites for war and for hunting. Most scholars think that horses and chariots came to China from the Eurasian steppe, the vast grassland that stretches across northern Asia. But the exact route and the way the technology spread are still discussed. What we can say is that the Shang elite adopted chariots, and used them as symbols of status as well as tools of war. One tomb gives us an unusually clear view. It belonged to a woman named Fu Hao. Her tomb was found at Anyang in 1976, and it was almost untouched by robbers, which is rare. Inside were more than 1,600 objects. These included many bronzes, a large number of jades, and cowrie shells. The cowrie is a small sea shell that was used as a kind of valuable, and perhaps as money, though historians are careful about calling it money in our sense. Fu Hao was a consort of King Wu Ding. A consort is a wife of a ruler. But she was not just a wife. Oracle inscriptions name her as a leader of military campaigns. The king asked his ancestors about her expeditions. This is a good reminder that real evidence can break our easy expectations about the ancient world. At least one elite Shang woman held serious military command. Now we come to the heart of the lesson, the oracle bones. First, the word "oracle." An oracle is a way of getting answers from gods or spirits, or the answer itself. Oracle bones are bones used for exactly that. The Shang used two kinds. One was the plastron of a turtle, which is the flat belly shell. The other was the scapula of an ox, which is the shoulder blade. Both could be cleaned and smoothed. The method is well understood from the bones themselves. A diviner, a person who performs divination, prepared the bone. Divination means trying to learn hidden knowledge, especially about the future, by ritual means. The diviner drilled or chiseled small hollows into the back of the bone. Then he touched a hot rod to the hollows. The heat made the bone crack with a sharp sound, and the cracks spread on the front. The cracks often had a shape like a sideways letter T, and the Chinese character bu, meaning to divine, may be based on that shape. The king or a diviner then read the cracks as a yes or no from the ancestors. What makes these bones priceless to historians is that the Shang then wrote on them. They carved the question into the bone. Sometimes they added the prediction, called the prognostication, which was the reading of the cracks. And occasionally they added the verification, a note recording what actually happened later. These notes are rare, but they matter. They show that the Shang did not simply write down wishes. They sometimes checked results. What did they ask about? The range is wide and very human. They asked whether to make a sacrifice to a certain ancestor. They asked whether the harvest would be good and whether rain would come. They asked about military campaigns against neighboring peoples. They asked about hunting trips and royal journeys. They asked about illness, including toothaches. They asked about dreams and what they meant. They asked about childbirth, including whether a royal child would be a boy. And they asked whether the coming ten days would be lucky. The Shang used a ten-day week, which is one reason ten matters so much in their naming system, as we will see. One famous kind of inscription concerns childbirth. The bones record that a royal wife gave birth, and that the outcome was not good, because the child was a girl. These lines are blunt, and they show how the king's family valued sons. But we should read them carefully. They reveal the attitudes of the royal house, not necessarily those of all Shang people. Historians estimate that about 150,000 or more inscribed pieces are known today. Many are small fragments. Across them, scholars can distinguish roughly 4,000 to 4,500 different characters. Of these, about a third to a half have been deciphered with confidence. That means a large part of the script is still not understood, though many of the unread signs are personal names or place names, which are hard to translate. The story of how the bones were rediscovered is itself interesting, and it needs caution. The traditional account says that in 1899 Wang Yirong, an official and scholar of the Qing dynasty, was ill. The Qing was the last imperial dynasty, ruling China until 1912. His medicine included so-called dragon bones, which were fossil-like bones ground into powder and sold in Chinese pharmacies. Wang noticed scratched marks on them, and recognized them as ancient writing. The story is dramatic. But historians now say that later retellings added many details, so we should not treat the exact tale as certain. What is clear is that around 1899 Chinese scholars realized that these bones carried very old writing. Liu E, a writer and collector, began gathering them and published rubbings in 1903. A rubbing is made by pressing paper onto a carved surface and rubbing it with ink so that the carving appears as a white pattern on black. Then came the detective work. Luo Zhenyu, another scholar, worked out that the bones came from a village called Xiaotun, near Anyang. He did this between about 1908 and 1910. Villagers had been digging up the bones for years, and many had been sold or ground up as medicine. That is a painful irony. Some of the earliest written records of China were destroyed as medicine before scholars understood their value. The scholar who did the most to link the bones to later history was Wang Guowei. He studied the names of royal ancestors in the inscriptions and reconstructed the Shang royal family tree. When he compared it with the list in Sima Qian's Shiji, he found it matched to a surprising degree. There were small differences, but the list was largely accurate. This was a striking result. It means that Sima Qian, a thousand years later, had preserved real information. It also teaches a good lesson about method. Skepticism was reasonable, but so was respect for tradition. Only the evidence could decide, and the evidence supported the old text. Next, Dong Zuobin built a system to date the inscriptions. He divided them into five periods, using several clues. These included the names of the diviners who appear on the bones, the titles of the kings, and the style of the writing. Later scholars refined his scheme. The English-language scholar David Keightley, who wrote much about the bones, was especially important in explaining them to readers outside China. Because of this work, historians can say not just that a bone is Shang, but roughly which reign it belongs to. Now we turn to what the bones reveal about religion, which is the center of Shang life. The Shang worshipped their ancestors. Ancestor veneration means showing respect and giving offerings to dead family members, who are believed to still have power. For the Shang, the dead were not gone. They were active. They could bless the living with good harvests and healthy children, or they could harm them with sickness and disaster. The royal ancestors had special names. They were named by day-names, based on the ten heavenly stems. The stems are a series of ten signs used to name the days of the ten-day week. So a king might be called Da Yi, "Great Yi," or Zu Jia, "Ancestor Jia." The sign in the name matched a day on which that ancestor would receive offerings. This created a ritual calendar. The kings made regular cycles of sacrifices, so that each ancestor was honored on his assigned day in turn. Through such a cycle, the whole year was filled with duties to the dead. That is a remarkable sign of how organized Shang religion was. Above the ancestors stood a higher power called Di, sometimes called Shangdi. Di seems to have controlled the weather, the harvests, and success in war. The ancestors did not command Di. But they could speak to him on behalf of the living, acting as intercessors. An intercessor is someone who pleads with a more powerful being for another person. Scholars disagree about Di. Some think he was a true high god, a single supreme being. Others think the word named a more general, collective power, not clearly a person. The inscriptions are short and technical, and they do not explain beliefs. So we must be honest. We can see what the Shang did, but not always what they thought. Sacrifice was the main way to reach these powers. The Shang offered grain, wine, and animals such as oxen, sheep, and dogs. They also offered human beings. Many of the victims were war captives, and inscriptions often name a group called the Qiang, a people living to the west of the Shang. Archaeologists have found the remains of thousands of sacrificial victims at Anyang, in the royal cemetery and in other ritual areas. Some were buried with their heads and bodies separate. Some were buried alongside chariots, or in the tombs of kings. The Shang saw this as a duty owed to powerful beings, not as simple cruelty. But we should not soften the facts. The scale was large, and the victims were people with no say. This religion also shaped politics. The king was the chief diviner. That means he was the main person who spoke to the ancestors and interpreted their answers. Many bones show the king himself reading the cracks and declaring the result. David Keightley argued that this made divination a tool of power. In his view, by presenting himself as the one person who could communicate with the ancestors, the king strengthened his claim to rule. This is called legitimation. To legitimate power means to make it seem rightful and accepted. Not every scholar accepts the full force of this argument. Some stress that the Shang kings seem to have been truly worried and truly sincere. The two views are not necessarily opposed. A king can believe in his rituals and also benefit from them. Now the writing. This is the part of the lesson that gives it its title. The oracle bone script is the earliest large body of Chinese writing that we have. Before we go further, a definition. Writing, in the strict sense used by historians, is a system of visible signs that records spoken language, so that another person can read and recover the words. Simple marks or pictures that do not record a language are not true writing. This matters because older marks exist in China. At a site called Jiahu, dated to around 6600 BCE, archaeologists found symbols carved on turtle shells. At Banpo, a farming village, potters scratched signs on pots. Some enthusiasts call these the earliest Chinese writing. But most historians do not accept this. The signs are too few and too isolated, and we cannot show that they record language. So the oracle bones remain the first writing we can be sure of. And here is a key point. The oracle bone script was already a mature system. It was not primitive or experimental. It already had thousands of characters, and it could record complex sentences. A system this developed does not appear overnight. So historians infer that writing in China had a longer history before the bones, which we cannot see. Why can we not see it? One possibility is that earlier writing was done on perishable materials, things that rot away, such as bamboo strips. There is a clue in the later Chinese character for "book," which looks like strips of bamboo tied together. Bamboo and wood do not survive well in the soil, so a whole early tradition of writing may have vanished. This is an inference, not proof, but it is reasonable. How did the script work? Chinese writing, from the start, mixed several principles. Some characters were pictographs, which means they are simple pictures of things. The sign for sun was a circle with a mark in it, and the sign for horse showed a horse. Some were ideographs, which are signs that show an idea, often by combining images. And some used phonetic loan. That means that a character for one word was borrowed to write a different word that sounded the same. For example, a sign for a simple object could be reused for an abstract word with the same sound, which is hard to draw. This trick is the key step toward recording speech and not just things. There was a fourth type, the phonetic-semantic compound, which was already common on the bones. Such a character has two parts. One part hints at the meaning, and the other hints at the sound. This became the most important way to build new characters in later Chinese history, and today the large majority of Chinese characters are of this type. So the bones show a system already moving along the path that Chinese writing would follow for three thousand years. That continuity is remarkable. The oracle bone characters are clearly the ancestors of later Chinese characters. A trained reader today can recognize many of them, because their shapes developed gradually and not by sudden replacement. The language they record is an early form of Chinese, not the same as modern Chinese, but part of the same long line. Compare this with Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mesopotamian cuneiform, whose original scripts died out and had to be rediscovered by scholars. Chinese writing has never been lost. That helps explain why Chinese people have long felt such a strong link to their ancient past. Writing also appears on the bronzes. Many vessels carry short inscriptions, often a clan sign, a mark that identified a family group, or a dedication to an ancestor. These were usually brief in the Shang. Longer bronze inscriptions came later, under the Zhou. But even the short ones connect writing to the ritual world. In early China, the first uses of writing we can see were religious and royal, not commercial or literary. That differs from Mesopotamia, where many early texts were records of grain and goods. It may be partly an accident of survival, since bamboo records of administration would have rotted. But it fits the Shang focus on ritual. What about the Shang state itself? Here historians are more cautious. A state is an organized political community with a government that claims authority over a territory and its people. Was Shang a state of this kind? The kings clearly controlled a core region around the capital. Around it were allied polities, and others that were hostile. One enemy named in the inscriptions is the Fang, against whom the king organized campaigns. Many historians see the Shang not as a modern-style bureaucracy, a government run by trained officials with fixed roles, but as a network of alliances centered on a ruling family and its aristocratic clans. The king gave and received loyalty, and he could call on allies for soldiers and labor. How tightly the king controlled this network remains debated. The economy rested mainly on agriculture, as lesson A would lead us to expect. The main crop was millet, a hardy grain well suited to the loess soils of the north. Wheat and rice were grown to a lesser extent. Bronze production was controlled by the elite. And the state could mobilize large numbers of workers for building and soldiers for war. This was a society of farmers, supporting a small ruling class that spent its surplus on ritual, war, and monuments. A surplus is the extra food and goods a society produces beyond what it needs to survive. Without that surplus, there would have been no bronzes, no walled cities, and no diviners. Finally, the end of the dynasty. According to later Zhou sources, the last Shang king was Di Xin, also called King Zhou, with a different Chinese character from the dynasty of the same sound. These texts say that he was a tyrant, cruel and corrupt, who lost the right to rule. They say that King Wu of the Zhou people defeated him at a battle at Muye. The idea behind this story is called the Mandate of Heaven. It means that Heaven gives a ruler the right to rule, but withdraws it if he behaves badly. We will meet this idea again, because it became central to Chinese political thought. But we must be careful. The accounts of Di Xin were written by the victors, the Zhou, who needed to justify their conquest. A conqueror has every reason to blacken the defeated. So the picture of a monstrous last king is probably moralized, shaped to fit a lesson. Historians do accept that the Zhou conquest happened, and that it ended the Shang. But how bad Di Xin really was, we cannot say. The Shang did not leave a record of their own defeat. So what have we learned? The Shang gives us China's first firm ground. It shows a society with cities, bronze, writing, and a strong ruling family. And it shows that this power rested on a belief that the dead were still present and that the king could speak to them. The evidence is rich, but it is also narrow. Most of it comes from royal and elite contexts, so we know much about kings and little about ordinary farmers. Good historians keep that limit in mind. The Shang fell around 1046 BCE, but its writing did not. The Zhou people who conquered it took over the script, the bronze tradition, and many ritual ideas. They also brought something new, the claim that Heaven itself had chosen them. In the next lesson, we follow the Zhou, and we see how that claim reshaped Chinese ideas about power, duty, and the right to rule.