Shang dynasty

Shang Dynasty 商朝
1600 BC–1046 BC
Remnants of advanced, stratified societies dating back to the Shang period have been found in the Yellow River Valley.
Status	Kingdom
Capital	Anyang
Common languages	Old Chinese
Religion	Chinese folk religion
Government	Monarchy
King
Historical era	Bronze Age
• Established	1600 BC
• Battle of Muye	1046 BC
Area
1122 BC est.	1,250,000 km2 (480,000 sq mi)
Preceded by Succeeded by Xia Dynasty Zhou Dynasty

Shang dynasty
Chinese	商朝
Literal meaning	Shang Dynasty
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Shāng Cháo Wu Romanization saon zau Southern Min Hokkien POJ Siong-tiâu
Alternative Chinese name
Chinese	殷代
Literal meaning	Yin Dynasty
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Yīn Dài Wu Romanization in de Southern Min Hokkien POJ Tiâu-tāi

The Shang Dynasty (Chinese: 商朝; pinyin: Shāng cháo) or Yin Dynasty (Chinese: 殷代; pinyin: Yīn dài), according to traditional historiography, ruled in the Yellow River valley in the second millennium BC, succeeding the Xia Dynasty and followed by the Zhou Dynasty. The classic account of the Shang comes from texts such as the Classic of History, Bamboo Annals and Records of the Grand Historian. According to the traditional chronology based upon calculations by Liu Xin, the Shang ruled between 1766 BC and 1122 BC, but according to the chronology based upon the Bamboo Annals, they ruled between 1556 BC and 1046 BC. The results of the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project place them between 1600 BC and 1046 BC.

Archaeological work at the Ruins of Yin (near modern day Anyang), which has been identified as the last Shang capital, uncovered eleven major Yin royal tombs and the foundations of palaces and ritual sites, containing weapons of war and remains from both animal and human sacrifices. Tens of thousands of bronze, jade, stone, bone, and ceramic artifacts have been obtained. The workmanship on the bronzes attests to a high level of civilization.

The Anyang site has yielded the earliest known body of Chinese writing, mostly divinations inscribed on oracle bones – turtle shells, ox scapulae, or other bones. More than 20,000 were discovered in the initial scientific excavations during the 1920s and 1930s, and over four times as many have been found since. The inscriptions provide critical insight into many topics from the politics, economy, and religious practices to the art and medicine of this early stage of Chinese civilization.

Traditional accounts

Several events concerning the Shang dynasty are mentioned in various Chinese classics, including the Classic of History and the Commentary of Zuo. Working from all the available documents, the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian assembled a sequential account of the Shang dynasty as part of his Records of the Grand Historian. His history describes some events in detail, while in other cases only the name of a king is given. A closely related, but slightly different, account is given by the Bamboo Annals. The Annals were interred in 296 BC, but the received versions have a complex history and there are controversies regarding the various versions.

Sima Qian calls both the dynasty and its final capital by the name Yīn (殷), a popular term that has been synonymous with the Shang throughout history, and is often used specifically to describe the later half of the Shang dynasty. In Japan and Korea, the Shang are still referred to almost exclusively as the Yin (In) dynasty. However the word does not appear in the oracle bones, and seems to have been the Zhou name for the earlier dynasty.

Rise

Sima Qian's "Annals of the Yin" begins by describing the predynastic founder of the Shang lineage, Xie (偰) — also appearing as Qi (契) — as having been miraculously conceived when Jiandi, a wife of Emperor Ku, swallowed an egg dropped by a black bird. Xie is said to have helped Yu the Great to control the Great Flood and for his service to have been granted a place called Shang as a fief.

Once thought to be only a myth or legend. Unlike the Xia dynasty, which is still being heavily debated. Sima Qian relates that the dynasty itself was founded 13 generations later, when Xie's descendent Tang overthrew the impious and cruel final Xia ruler in the Battle of Mingtiao. The Records recount events from the reigns of Tang, Tai Jia, Dai Mou, Pan Geng, Wu Ding, Wu Yi and the depraved final king Di Xin, but the rest of the Shang rulers are merely mentioned by name. According to the Records, the Shang moved their capital five times, with the final move to Yin in the reign of Pan Geng inaugurating the golden age of the dynasty.

Fall

Di Xin, the last Shang king, is said to have committed suicide after his army was defeated by Wu of Zhou. Legends say that his army and his equipped slaves betrayed him by joining the Zhou rebels in the decisive Battle of Muye. According to the Yizhoushu and Mencius the battle was very bloody. The classic, Ming-era novel Fengshen Yanyi retells the story of the war between Shang and Zhou as a conflict where rival factions of gods supported different sides in the war.

After the Shang were defeated, King Wu allowed Di Xin's son Wu Geng to rule the Shang as a vassal kingdom. However, Zhou Wu sent three of his brothers and an army to ensure that Wu Geng would not rebel. After Zhou Wu's death, the Shang joined the Three Governors' Rebellion against the Duke of Zhou, but the rebellion collapsed after three years, leaving Zhou in control of Shang territory.

After Shang's collapse, Zhou's rulers forcibly relocated "Yin diehards" (殷頑) and scattered them throughout Zhou territory. Some surviving members of the Shang royal family collectively changed their surname from the ancestral name Zi (子) to the name of their fallen dynasty, Yin. The family retained an aristocratic standing and often provided needed administrative services to the succeeding Zhou Dynasty. The Shiji states that King Cheng of Zhou, with the support of his regent and uncle, the Duke of Zhou, enfeoffed Weiziqi (微子啟), a brother of Di Xin, as the ruler of Wei. Shang, the eponymous first capital of the former Shang dynasty, would become the capital of Weiziqi's state. In time, this territory would become the state of Song, and the descendants of Shang royalty reigning there as Dukes would maintain rites honoring the dead Shang kings until they were conquered by Qin in 286 BC. Confucius was said to have been a descendant of the Shang kings or priests through the Dukes of Song.

Guzhu (孤竹國), located in what is now Tangshan, was formed by another remnant of the Shang, and was destroyed by Duke Huan of Qi. Many Shang clans that migrated northeast after the dynasty's collapse were integrated into Yan culture during the Western Zhou period. These clans maintained an elite status and continued practicing the sacrificial and burial traditions of the Shang.

Both Korean and Chinese legends state that a disgruntled Shang prince named Jizi, who had refused to cede power to the Zhou, left China with a small army. According to these legends, he founded a state known as Gija Joseon in Northwest Korea during the Gojoseon period of ancient Korean history. However, the historical accuracy of these legends is widely debated by scholars.

Early Bronze Age archaeology

Main article: Shang archaeology

Before the 20th century, the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 BC) was the earliest Chinese dynasty that could be verified from its own records. However during the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD), antiquarians collected bronze ritual vessels attributed to the Shang era, some of which bore inscriptions.

Yellow River valley

The site of Yin, the capital (1350–1046 BC) of the Shang Dynasty, also called Yin Dynasty

In 1899, it was found that Chinese pharmacists were selling "dragon bones" marked with curious and archaic characters. These were finally traced back in 1928 to a site (now called Yinxu) near Anyang, north of the Yellow River in modern Henan province, where the Academia Sinica undertook archeological excavation until the Japanese invasion in 1937.

Archaeologists focused on the Yellow River valley in Henan as the most likely site of the states described in the traditional histories. After 1950, remnants of an earlier walled city were discovered near Zhengzhou. It has been determined that the earth walls at Zhengzhou, erected in the 15th century BC, would have been 20 metres (66 ft) wide at the base, rising to a height of 8 metres (26 ft), and formed a roughly rectangular wall 7 kilometres (4 mi) around the ancient city. The rammed earth construction of these walls was an inherited tradition, since much older fortifications of this type have been found at Chinese Neolithic sites of the Longshan culture (c. 3000–2000 BC).

In 1959, the site of the Erlitou culture was found in Yanshi, south of the Yellow River near Luoyang. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the Erlitou culture flourished ca. 2100 BC to 1800 BC. They built large palaces, suggesting the existence of an organized state.

Chinese historians living in later periods were accustomed to the notion of one dynasty succeeding another, and readily identified the Zhengzhou and Erlitou sites with the early Shang and Xia Dynasty of traditional histories. The actual political situation in early China may have been more complicated, with the Xia and Shang being political entities that existed concurrently, just as the early Zhou, who established the successor state of the Shang, are known to have existed at the same time as the Shang.

Other sites

The Erligang culture represented by the Zhengzhou site is found across a wide area of China, even as far northeast as the area of modern Beijing, where at least one burial in this region during this period contained both Erligang-style bronzes and local-style gold jewelry. The discovery of a Chenggu-style ge dagger-axe at Xiaohenan demonstrates that even at this early stage of Chinese history, there were some ties between the distant areas of north China. The Panlongcheng site in the middle Yangtze valley was an important regional center of the Erligang culture.

Accidental finds elsewhere in China have revealed advanced civilizations contemporaneous with but culturally unlike the settlement at Anyang, such as the walled city of Sanxingdui in Sichuan. Western scholars are hesitant to designate such settlements as belonging to the Shang dynasty. Also unlike the Shang, there is no known evidence that the Sanxingdui culture had a system of writing. The Shang state at Anyang is thus generally considered the first verifiable civilization in Chinese history. In contrast, the earliest layers of the Wucheng site, pre-dating Anyang, have yielded pottery fragments containing short sequences of symbols, suggesting that they may be a form of writing quite different in form from oracle bone characters, but the sample is too small for decipherment.

Late Shang at Anyang

Oracle bones pit at Yin

The oldest extant direct records date from around 1200 BC at Anyang, covering the reigns of the last nine Shang kings. The Shang had a fully developed system of writing, preserved on bronze inscriptions and a small number of other writings on pottery, jade and other stones, horn, etc., but most prolifically on oracle bones. The complexity and sophistication of this writing system indicates an earlier period of development, but direct evidence of that development is still lacking. Other advances included the invention of many musical instruments and observations of Mars and various comets by Shang astronomers.

Their civilization was based on agriculture and augmented by hunting and animal husbandry. In addition to war, the Shang also practiced human sacrifice. Cowry shells were also excavated at Anyang, suggesting trade with coast-dwellers, but there was very limited sea trade in ancient China since China was isolated from other large civilizations during the Shang period. Trade relations and diplomatic ties with other formidable powers via the Silk Road and Chinese voyages to the Indian Ocean did not exist until the reign of Emperor Wu during the Han Dynasty (206 BC–221 AD).

Court life

Bronzewares from the excavated tomb of Fu Hao

At the excavated royal palace of Yinxu, large stone pillar bases were found along with rammed earth foundations and platforms, which according to Fairbank, were "as hard as cement." These foundations in turn originally supported 53 buildings of wooden post-and-beam construction. In close proximity to the main palatial complex, there were underground pits used for storage, servants' quarters, and housing quarters.

Bronze gū ritual wine vessel

Many Shang royal tombs had been tunneled into and ravaged by grave robbers in ancient times, but in the spring of 1976, the discovery of Tomb 5 at Yinxu revealed a tomb that was not only undisturbed, but one of the most richly furnished Shang tombs that archaeologists had yet come across. With over 200 bronze ritual vessels and 109 inscriptions of Lady Fu Hao's name, archaeologists realized they had stumbled across the tomb of the militant consort to King Wu Ding, as described in 170 to 180 Shang oracle bones. Along with bronze vessels, stoneware and pottery vessels, bronze weapons, jade figures and hair combs, and bone hairpins were found. Historian Robert L. Thorp states that the large assortment of weapons and ritual vessels in her tomb correlate with the oracle bone accounts of her military career and involvement in Wu Ding's ritual ancestral sacrifices.

The capital was the center of a glittering court life. Over time, court rituals to appease spirits developed, and in addition to his secular duties, the king would serve as the head of the ancestor worship cult. Often, the king would even perform oracle bone divinations himself, especially near the end of the dynasty. Evidence from excavations of the royal tombs indicates that royalty were buried with articles of value, presumably for use in the afterlife. Perhaps for the same reason, hundreds of commoners, who may have been slaves, were buried alive with the royal corpse.

A line of hereditary Shang kings ruled over much of northern China, and Shang troops fought frequent wars with neighboring settlements and nomadic herdsmen from the inner Asian steppes. The Shang king, in his oracular divinations, repeatedly shows concern about the fang groups, the barbarians living outside of the civilized tu regions, which made up the center of Shang territory. In particular, the tufang group of the Yanshan region were regularly mentioned as hostile to the Shang.

Apart from their role as the head military commanders, Shang kings also asserted their social supremacy by acting as the high priests of society and leading the divination ceremonies. As the oracle bone texts reveal, the Shang kings were viewed as the best qualified members of society to offer sacrifices to their royal ancestors and to the high god Di, who in their beliefs was responsible for the rain, wind, and thunder.

Kings

Shang kings are conventionally referred to by posthumous names, of which the last character is one of the heavenly stems.

The earliest records are the oracle bones inscribed during the reigns of the Shang kings from Wu Ding. The oracle bones do not contain king lists, but they do record the sacrifices to previous kings and the ancestors of the current king, which follow a standard schedule. From this evidence, scholars have assembled the implied king list and genealogy, finding that it is in substantial agreement with the later accounts, especially for later kings in the dynasty.

The kings, in the order of succession derived from the oracle bones, are here grouped by generation:

Generation	Older brothers of patriarch			Line of descent	Younger brothers
17				大乙 Dà Yǐ
16				大丁 Dà Dīng
15				大甲 Dà Jiǎ	卜丙 Bǔ Bǐng
14				大庚 Dà Gēng	小甲 Xiǎo Jiǎ
13				大戊 Dà Wù	呂己 Lǚ Jǐ
12				中丁 Zhōng Dīng	卜壬 Bǔ Rén
11			戔甲 Jiān Jiǎ	祖乙 Zǔ Yǐ
10				祖辛 Zǔ Xīn	羌甲 Qiāng Jiǎ
9				祖丁 Zǔ Dīng	南庚 Nán Gēng
8	象甲 Xiàng Jiǎ	盤庚 Pán Gēng	小辛 Xiǎo Xīn	小乙 Xiǎo Yǐ
7				武丁 Wǔ Dīng
6			祖庚 Zǔ Gēng	祖甲 Zǔ Jiǎ
5			廩辛 Lǐn Xīn	康丁 Kāng Dīng
4				武乙 Wǔ Yǐ
3				文武丁 Wén Wǔ Dīng
2				帝乙 Dì Yǐ
1				帝辛 Dì Xīn

Notes

Bronze working

Houmuwu Ding made in the Shang Dynasty is the heaviest piece of bronze work found in China so far

Main article: Chinese ritual bronzes

A late Shang dynasty bronze ding vessel with taotie motif

Chinese bronze casting and pottery advanced during the Shang dynasty, with bronze commonly being used for art rather than weapons. As far back as c. 1500 BC, the early Shang Dynasty engaged in large-scale production of bronze-ware vessels and weapons. This production required a large labor force that could handle the mining, refining, and transportation of the necessary copper, tin, and lead ores. This in turn created a need for official managers that could oversee both hard-laborers and skilled artisans and craftsmen. The Shang royal court and aristocrats required a vast amount of different bronze vessels for various ceremonial purposes and events of religious divination. Ceremonial rules even decreed how many bronze containers of each type a nobleman or noblewoman of a certain rank could own. With the increased amount of bronze available, the army could also better equip itself with an assortment of bronze weaponry. Bronze was also used for the fittings of spoke-wheeled chariots, which appeared in China around 1200 BC.

Military

A bronze axe of the Shang dynasty

Bronze weapons were an integral part of Shang society. Shang infantry were armed with a variety of stone and bronze weaponry, including máo spears, yuè pole-axes, gē pole-based dagger-axes, composite bows, and bronze or leather helmets. The chariot first appeared in China during the reign of Wu Ding. Oracle bone inscriptions suggest that the western enemies of the Shang used limited numbers of chariots in battle, but the Shang themselves used them only as mobile command vehicles and in royal hunts. A crucial factor in the Zhou conquest of the Shang may have been their more effective use of chariots.

Although the Shang depended upon the military skills of their nobility, Shang rulers could mobilize the masses of town-dwelling and rural commoners as conscript laborers and soldiers for both campaigns of defense and conquest. Aristocrats and other state rulers were obligated to furnish their local garrisons with all necessary equipment, armor, and armaments. The Shang king maintained a force of about a thousand troops at his capital and would personally lead this force into battle. A rudimentary military bureaucracy was also needed in order to muster forces ranging from three to five thousand troops for border campaigns to thirteen thousand troops for suppressing rebellions against Shang authority.

Gallery

• Late Shang artifacts
• 
  Jade ring in the shape of a dragon
• 
  Jade carved deer
• 
  Jade carved fish
• 
  Jade carved tiger
• 
  Bronze gefuding guǐ vessel
• 
  Bronze yuefu you vessel
• 
  Bronze pou vessel with four ram heads
• 
  Bronze zūn ritual vessel
• 
  Bronze guang ritual ewer
• 
  Bronze pot with lid and handle
• 
  A late Shang, ritual bronze wine vessel (zun) in the unusual shape of an owl with a domed head for its lid
• 
  Bronze yuè axe
• 
  Shang/Zhou sculpture, 14–10th century BC
• 
  White pottery with a carved geometric pattern

See also

• Chinese sovereign
• Chinese mythology
• Historical capitals of China

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

• Bagley, Robert (1999). "Shang archaeology". In Loewe, Michael; Shaughnessy, Edward L. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Ancient China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 124–231. ISBN 978-0-521-47030-8.
• Chang, Kwang-Chih (1980). Shang Civilization. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-02885-7, ppbk.
• Chang-Qun, Duan, Xue-Chun, Gan, Wang, Jeanny and Chien, Paul K. (1998). Relocation of Civilization Centers in Ancient China: Environmental Factors. Allen Press on behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
• Chen, Yan (2002). Maritime Silk Route and Chinese-Foreign Cultural Exchanges. Beijing: Peking University Press. ISBN 7-301-03029-0.
• Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, Anne Walthall, James B. Palais (2006). East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-618-13384-4.
• Fairbank, John King and Merle Goldman (1992). China: A New History; Second Enlarged Edition (2006). Cambridge: MA; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01828-1
• Keightley, David N. (1978). Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. University of California Press, Berkeley. Large format hardcover, ISBN 0-520-02969-0 (out of print); A 1985 paperback 2nd edition is still in print, ISBN 0-520-05455-5.
• Keightley, David N. (1978b). "The Bamboo Annals and Shang-Chou Chronology". Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 38 (2): 423–438. JSTOR 2718906.
• Keightley, David N. (1999). "The Shang: China's first historical dynasty". In Loewe, Michael; Shaughnessy, Edward L. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Ancient China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 232–291. ISBN 978-0-521-47030-8.
• Keightley, David N. (2000). The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200–1045 B.C.). China Research Monograph 53, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California – Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-070-9, ppbk.
• Lee, Yuan-Yuan and Shen, Sin-yan. (1999). Chinese Musical Instruments (Chinese Music Monograph Series). Chinese Music Society of North America Press. ISBN 1-880464-03-9
• Li, Chu-tsing. "The Great Bronze Age of China," Art Journal (Volume 40, Number 1/2, 1980): 390–395.
• Lin, Ershen (19 July 2007). "A Critical Review on the Rise of Civilization, the Formation of the State, and Early Slavery". draft. The Science & Philosophy Forums (2005–2008). Retrieved 3 Mar. 2009. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• Needham, Joseph (1986). Science and Civilization in China: Volume 4, Part 3. Taipei: Caves Books, Ltd.
• Sawyer, Ralph D. and Mei-chün Lee Sawyer (1994). Sun Tzu's The Art of War. New York: Barnes and Noble Inc. ISBN 1-56619-297-8
• Shen, Sinyan (1987). "Acoustics of Ancient Chinese Bells". Scientific American. 256: 94.
• Sun, Guangqi (1989). History of Navigation in Ancient China. Beijing: Ocean Press. ISBN 7-5027-0532-5.
• Sun, Yan (2006). "Colonizing China's Northern Frontier: Yan and Her Neighbors During the Early Western Zhou Period". International Journal of Historical Archaeology. 10 (2): 159–177. doi:10.1007/s10761-006-0005-3.
• Thorp, Robert L. "The Date of Tomb 5 at Yinxu, Anyang: A Review Article," Artibus Asiae (Volume 43, Number 3, 1981): 239–246.
• Valenstein, Suzanne G. and Maxwell Hearn. "Asian Art, by Martin Lerner; Alfreda Murck; Barbara B. Ford," Recent Acquisitions (Metropolitan Museum of Art) (Number 1985/1986, 1985): 72–88.
• Wang, Hongyuan 王宏源 (1993). The Origins of Chinese Characters 漢字字源入門. Sinolingua, Beijing, ISBN 7-80052-243-1, ppbk.

Further reading

• Timperley, Harold J. The Awakening of China in Archaeology; Further Discoveries in Ho-Nan Province, Royal Tombs of the Shang Dynasty, Dated Traditionally from 1766 to 1122 B.C.. 1936.

External links

• Shang Dynasty at Washington State University
• Zhengzhou Shang City Site