by Li Feng
The importance of the Huayuanzhuang-east oracle bones lies in the fact that they opened a new window for us to look into the complexity of the culture of divination in Anyang. They suggest that the non-royal divinatory practices in Anyang did not have to adhere to the standards and conventions established by the royal diviners serving in the late Shang palace. In this regard, it is above all significant that the Huayuanzhuang-east divinatory shells represent a distinctive tradition at a location that was only about 300 m from the palace zone where the royal divinatory agencies were located and carried out divination on a far larger scale. Thus, the distinctive textual and linguistic features discussed above can only help to highlight the fact that divination was a highly secret proceeding. It is very possible that the diviners responsible for these records on the Huayuanzhuang-east shells might not have ever been exposed to the standards for texts and vocabulary employed in the Shang royal divinatory institution.
The level of variability in the culture of divination increases when we move beyond Anyang, to Zhengzhou in the south or to the Shandong region in the east. The former city during the late Shang was probably occupied by a branch of the Shang people, while the latter region was home to a number of Shang allies. In both regions, local characteristics are identified in the inscriptions on bones and shells.12 However, particularly in the Shaanxi region farther to the west, the local Zhou tradition of divination contemporary to Anyang was dramatically different from the Shang practice both in terms of the selection and preparation of bones, and of the language and calligraphy which the local diviners used to engrave the divinatory records (see Chapter 6). Certainly the Shang were not the only people who employed this sacred art to determine what may happen in the future. Studying this divinatory culture or cultures can offer us an important path to understand the religious and political institutions in Bronze Age China.
Shang Religion and Shang Royal Sacrifices
The most important topic addressed in the oracle-bone inscriptions was royal sacrifice, and this was closely related to the religious beliefs of the Shang people who actually had a very complex pantheon. For the Shang, the supreme deity was “High God” (Shangdi or di). There is considerable disagreement regarding the nature of the Shang God. While some scholars believe that this High God can be identified with the founding ancestor of the Shang people, possibly the legendary Qi, others think that he comes quite close to the notion of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. There are also scholars who think that the High God was at a stage of transition from an ancestral deity to the supreme and ultimate divine power. In the oracle-bone inscriptions, the Shang people seem to have been basically positive about the High God who had power over both natural and human phenomena. The High God is always the being whom the Shang kings asked for rainfall, for good harvest, and for protection in military campaigns. But there were also occasions that the Shang appeared uncertain about the will of the High God; there was the worry on behalf of the Shang king that the High God might send down some disasters. However, one thing is clear – there were never sacrificial offerings made to the High God, which implies that there was a fundamental difference between the Shang ancestors and the High God in Shang religion. In recent decades, however, scholars have come increasingly to the realization of the celestial basis for the concept of High God in Shang oracle-bone inscriptions. Two recent studies in particular have identified the High God with the celestial Northern Pole, the hollow and most secret area in the sky around which all stellar constellations revolve, thus drawing a direct connection between Shang religion and Shang cosmology.13 While this theory of the celestial origin of the concept of High God (di) seems to have been well grounded, by the end of the Shang dynasty, at least two Shang kings had come to assume this sacred title as Di Yi (King 28) and Di Xin (King 29).
Much less controversial are the various natural deities that frequently received sacrificial offerings from the Shang king. Most frequently mentioned on the bones and shells are the deities of Earth, River (Yellow River to the east of Anyang), and Mountain (the Taihang Mountain to the west of Anyang). To these three most important natural deities, the set of sacrificial offerings, including cattle, sheep, and pig, was offered together with the performance of the wood-burning ritual. There were also numerous minor deities related to particular locales. Thus, to the Shang, the landscape was not merely the location of the natural features, it was inhabited by the spirits, and the successful operation of the Shang state and the good fortune of the royal court would need to be ensured by enlisting their cooperation. Of particular interest is the cult of winds, which must have had tremendous impact on Shang agriculture. The Shang associated winds with particular directions and gave a name to each of the four directional winds. Thus the Shang king frequently made offerings to the four winds and asked them for a good harvest.14
However, the most regularly maintained cult was that of the Shang royal ancestors, to whom five different types of sacrifices (yi, ji, zai, xie, yong – all used in their verbal form in the oracle-bone inscriptions) were offered on scheduled times throughout the year. Scholars disagree on the meaning of the five terms and thus on the content of the actual offerings, but it is likely that most of them are combinations of the offering of material goods such as wine, animals, and humans, and the performance of music and/or dance in different ways. The offerings begin with the pre-dynastic ancestor Shang Jia (P1; see Fig. 3.4 above), the first of the Shang ancestors to have been named after one of the ten Heavenly Stems. As names of days, the ten stems also formed a Shang week. In a descending order, each of the five types of offerings was subsequently applied to ancestors on the Shang king list, and any ancestor received offerings made to him only on the day that is identified with his name. Thus, in the oracle-bone inscriptions, a record relating to the use of a five-type sacrifice can read like this:
Example 1 (HJ: 22779) (Fig. 5.3):1. Crack-making on the bingyin day (#3), the [king] divined: “[On the next day, dingmao], when the king [hosts Da Ding (King 2) and performs the zai sacrifice (type 3), will there be no harm]?”
2. Crack-making on the guiyou day (#10), the king divined: “On the next day, jiaxu (#11), when the king hosts Da Jia (King 3) and performs the zai sacrifice (type 3), will there be no harm?”
3. Crack-making on the dinghai day (#24), the king divined: “On the next day, wuzi (#25), when the king hosts Da Wu (King 7) and performs the zai sacrifice (type 3), will there be no harm?”
4. Crack-making on the jiachen day (#41), the king divined: “On the next day, yisi (#42), when the king hosts Zu Yi (King 12) and performs the zai sacrifice (type 3), will there be no harm?”
5. Crack-making on the [gengxu day] (#47), the king [divined: “On the next day], xinhai (#48), when the [king] hosts Zu Xin (King 13) and performs the [zai sacrifice] (type 3), will there be no harm?”
These are consecutive records of offering the zai-type sacrifice over a period of forty-four days, arranged on the same piece of bone from bottom up, to five ancestors on the king list, all in the main line, that is, direct ancestors of the king. In the sacrificial table constructed by the oracle-bone scholars, these kings were arranged across five weeks based on the circulation of the ten stems in royal genealogy. Certainly the zai sacrifice would continue to be applied to next generations of ancestors and each ancestor after receiving the zai sacrifice would continue to receive other types of sacrifice. When all sacrifices were subsequently applied to all ancestors, they just made one year. Therefore, the Shang people called one year “a sacrificial cycle.” The important point here is: this is the most important religious and political activity of the Shang king and the necessary way to maintain his power. In some other cases, however, the king also made irregular sacrifices to certain ancestors when the ancestors are detected to have caused the king misfortunes such as toothache or shoulder pain. The king’s duty to maintain such sacrifices, whether routine or irregular, to the deceased ancestors would in turn ensure the good fortune of the Shang state and the wel
l-being of the king himself and his family. Not only did the reigning king derive his power from his connection to the royal ancestral line and maintain it through continuing the offering of sacrifice, in fact the entire Shang state rested on the maintenance of the royal sacrifice.
Fig. 5.3 Example of consecutive records of royal sacrifice (HJ: 22779).
What did the Shang king actually offer to his ancestors? The most common offerings were wine and meat, including three types of livestock, cattle, sheep, and pigs, which constituted a set of standard offering. However, on not rare occasions, war prisoners by the name “Qiang,” a people located to the west of Shang, were also among the offerings to the ancestors. A typical luxury record goes like this:
Examples (HJ: 00301):Offering to Da Ding, Da Jia, Zu Yi (three deceased kings) hundred cups of wine, hundred Qiang prisoners, and three hundred cattle, three hundred sheep, and three hundred pigs.
Example (HJ: 00295):Offer three hundred Qiang prisoners to (father) Ding.
In the first record, 100 cups of wine, 100 Qiang prisoners, 300 cattle, 300 sheep, and 300 pigs were collectively offered to the three ancestors Da Ding, Da Jia, and Zu Yi. In the second case, Father Ding alone was to receive 300 Qiang prisoners. Since no massive burials of such domesticated animals killed for sacrificial purposes have been found in Anyang, it is likely that after the ritual offering, their meat was distributed among the Shang elites for consumption. Then, their bones were probably recycled to the bone workshops excavated by the archaeologists in Anyang (Chapter 4). Certainly, human victims did not go through this process of distribution for consumption for the value of their flesh; instead, they ended up in grouped earth pits specially prepared for their burials. More than 2,000 such sacrificial pits containing the skeletons of human victims have been found in Xibeigang around the royal tombs to the north of the Huan River.
The Shang Royal Lineage
The study of the oracle-bone inscriptions offers us an important chance to look into the ruling apparatus of the Shang state, particularly about the ways in which the Shang kings came to power, the core institution in an ancient state or kingdom. In this regard, the Shang had unique rules which regulated royal succession. Based on information from the oracle-bone inscriptions, it is possible for us to clarify how these rules were established and maintained, and were subject to changes over time. The rule of primogeniture, which was followed by most Chinese dynasties thereafter, was gradually established as the result of these changes. In order to understand this process, we need to take a closer look at the Shang king list (Fig 3.4).
Before the founding of the Shang dynasty, it seems likely that the Shang had followed a simple scheme of succession, or at least the ancestors were remembered as have come in a line of direct succession as we know them through the dynastic records of divination, also transmitted in Sima Qian’s The Grand Scribe’s Records. For six generations from Shang Jia to Shi Gui, it was always a son who succeeded his father who undoubtedly also had other sons; but the point is that only one son in a single generation had the chance to succeed to the royal throne. However, a new rule was adopted after Tang (or Da Yi, King 1) established the Shang Dynasty that the royal throne began to be passed among the brothers in the same generation. And when the youngest royal brother died, the throne was then given back to the oldest son of the oldest brother and was passed among his sons as the next generation of Shang kings. The reason for this interesting pattern of succession is not transmitted in the historical record, but since its beginning was associated with the founding of the Shang dynasty, it might be a reasonable explanation that the rule was created to ensure that the royal throne would always be passed onto an adult, important for the political consolidation of the Shang state.
For about twelve generations from Da Ding (King 2) to Lin Xin (King 24), this rule seems to have been essentially observed. But a careful look at the king list will identify three places where the number of kings counts backwards: (1) the generation of Jian Jia (King 11) and Zu Yi (King 12); (2) the generation of Xiang Jia (King 17) to Xiao Yi (King 20); (3) the two generations from Zu Geng (King 22) to Kang Ding (King 25). These are clearly times when the normative rule of succession established at the beginning of the dynasty was interrupted. That is, Zu Yi (King 12) as the younger brother of his generation refused to give the throne back to his older brother Jian Jia’s son, but passed it onto his own son, Zu Xin (King 13), who became the next king. The same was true with King Wu Ding (King 21) who directly succeeded his father Xiao Yi (King 20) who was the youngest of his generation. Interestingly, these two cases of irregular succession corresponded well with two major political changes in Shang history: Zu Yi is said to have transferred the Shang capital from Xiang, where his elder brother Jian Jia ruled, to Xing in the north; Wu Ding was the most powerful king in late Shang and the new archaeological evidence suggests that he was probably responsible for the move of the Shang capital from the Huanbei Shang City to the south of the Huan River. Wu Ding was also the sole king of his generation (which meant that he passed this power directly on to his own sons), and this had not happened in the previous eight generations.
The normative rule of a younger brother succeeding his elder brother to become king was restored after Wu Ding, but in each of the next two generations the younger brother, once he was the king, refused to return the throne to his elder brother’s family, again resulting in the order of the kings counting backward in the list. When Wu Yi (King 26) became the king, he did exactly what Wu Ding had done by simply refusing to give his throne to his younger brothers and passing it directly down his own family line. The next two kings all did the same. Thus, by the end of the Shang dynasty, the new rule (in fact, the pre-dynastic rule) that allowed a father to be succeeded directly by his son was firmly established.
Because of the complex situation in royal succession described above, in Shang ancestral worship a clear distinction was drawn between the main-line kings, whose son/sons became king, and the collateral kings, whose offspring fell off the king list soon after them. The two groups of kings were accorded different ritual offerings in the Shang system. For instance, only the main-line ancestors had their consorts worshipped side-by-side with them, not the collateral kings. But, as will be discussed below, the kingship might still come back to these collateral families later through the female line; that is, through marriages of their female members with the main-line kings.
For a very long time, scholars have wondered how the Shang kings acquired their names – the ten Heavenly Stems. The arguments have largely proceeded along the line that the Shang kings were given these names according to the designation of actual days (using also the ten Heavenly Stems) on which they were born, or that they were assigned a name corresponding to the days on which they died. The first position was further elaborated by Sarah Allan who sees the Shang as a people who, in the absence of historical accounts, largely conceived their own past in mythological terms. In her view, the Shang ruling lineage was in a totemic relationship with the ten suns as the Shang kings were considered to have been born of the ten suns. When a Shang king was born, he was assigned a stem name according to the date of his “birth ritual” (not the actual day on which he was born); this ritual thus classified him with a particular sun of which he was metaphorically born (the same word ri means both sun and day).15
Another theory proposed by K. C. Chang seems to account even better for the various phenomena that we observe in the oracle-bone inscriptions and archaeology. Chang started by looking into the distribution of the ten Heavenly Stems on the Shang king list and detected a number of regularities. For instance, the names “Ding” and “Yi” never appear in the same generation, but in alternate generations, and none of them appears in two consecutive generations. “Jia,” appearing in the same generation as “Yi,” never appears in the same generation as “Ding” or “Bing.” “Geng” and “Xin” could go with either group. From this, Chang proposed to divide the Shang kings into two groups:
* * *
Yi-groupDing-group
Yi Ding
Jia Bing
Wu Ren
Ji
* * *
This analysis offered a new basis for understanding the internal organization of the Shang royal lineage. It was hypothesized that the Shang royal lineage was actually organized into ten different branches, each bearing a unique stem name as its branch name. The ten royal branches were further united into two exogamous groups (Yi and Ding) that alternately occupied the throne of the Shang king. Chang gave some anthropological examples to show that some peoples in the South Asia, Pacific Region, and Africa had practiced such a system of “circulating succession.” He further explained that when a king from the Yi-group married a woman from one of the branches belonging to the Ding-group, the son or sons born of the marriage would be raised up in their mother’s branch; therefore, they would be considered members of their mother’s Ding-group, not their father’s. When a king died, he would be posthumously referred to by the stem name of his branch which would give him a position in the Shang royal sacrificial table to receive offerings from subsequent kings. In such a way, the kingship constantly shifted between the two large groups of the Shang ruling elites.16 As mentioned in Chapter 4, Chang further used this theory to explain the division of the Shang royal tombs into two large zones in Xibeigang, located to the north of the Huan River.
The Underdevelopment of the Shang Government
As far as the Shang royal government is concerned, Chang described it as essentially a gathering of not clearly differentiated roles filled by shamanistic officers in service of the king who was himself the “head shaman.” As such, bureaucracy was out of the question, and the Shang king ruled with his shamanistic power to communicate with the various deities relying on the assistance of the various animals whose images are depicted on the king’s bronze vessels. While differing on the issue of “shamanism,” the other authority on Shang in the West, David Keightley, agrees with the point that religious officials played a very central role and indeed formed the main body of the Shang royal government. It seems very likely that Shang governance depended essentially on the personal rule of the Shang king, who was assisted by a large group of diviners who were little more than his personal attendants. In recent years, Keightley has begun to bring the same approach he introduced to the study of Shang religion to the realm of actual governance,17 suggesting that although the Shang government remained centered on religious officers, the actual management of royal divination involving a large number of professional diviners indeed exhibited features of an “incipient bureaucracy.”18 However, this position is in fact very ambiguous, and there is a genuine question of whether religious institution, though important as the foundation of the Shang government, can be directly transferred into the institution of governance.
