by Morris, Ian;
The debate is mostly beside the point for the questions we are discussing here, but we cannot avoid it completely. For my own part, I tend to suspect that there really was a Xia dynasty, and that Erlitou was its capital, even if the stories about Yu are largely folktales. As we will see in the next section, whenever we can check them, it’s clear that later Chinese historians did rather well at transmitting names; I just cannot imagine Yu and the Xia being invented out of whole cloth.
Whatever the truth, though, Yu, the Xia, or whoever ruled Erlitou could command labor on a whole new scale, building a string of palaces and perhaps an ancestral temple on stamped-earth platforms in the new, closed-in style. One platform, supporting Palace I, must have taken something like a hundred thousand workdays to complete. A quarter of a mile from it archaeologists found slag, crucibles, and molds from bronze casting strewn across two acres. Copper had been known since 3000 BCE, but long remained a novelty item, used mostly for trinkets. When Erlitou was established around 1900 BCE, bronze weapons were still rare, and stone, bone, and shell remained normal for agricultural tools well into the first millennium BCE. The Erlitou foundry thus represented a quantum leap over earlier craft activity. It churned out weapons and craftsmen’s tools, which must have helped with the city’s success, but also produced remarkable ritual objects—bells like the earlier example from Taosi; plaques with inlaid turquoise eyes, animals, and horns; and ritual vessels a foot or more in diameter. The shapes invented at Erlitou (jia tripods, ding cauldrons, jue pouring cups, he pitchers for heating wine) became the East’s ultimate amplifiers for religious messages, displacing jade cong and dominating rituals for the next thousand years.
These great vessels have been found only at Erlitou, and if Chang was right that royal power flowed from the king’s claim to stand at the junction of this and supernatural worlds, bronze ritual vessels were probably as important to Erlitou’s power as bronze swords. The king of Erlitou had the loudest amplifier; lords of lesser guo might have concluded that it made sense to cooperate with the man the spirits could hear best.
For the king, though, bronze vessels must have been a headache as well as a tool. They were hugely expensive, requiring armies of craftsmen and ton upon ton of copper, tin, and fuel—all in short supply in the Yiluo Valley. In addition to carving out a small kingdom (guessing from the pattern of settlements, some archaeologists estimate that it covered about two thousand square miles), Erlitou may have sent out colonists to grab raw materials. Dongxiafeng, for instance, set in copper-rich hills a hundred miles west of Erlitou, has Erlitou-type pottery and great mounds of debris from copper smelting, but no palaces, rich graves, or molds for casting vessels, let alone the vessels themselves. The archaeologists may just have dug in the wrong places, but they have been looking there a long time; most likely copper was mined and refined at Dongxiafeng then sent back to Erlitou—the East’s first colonial regime.
ANCESTOR-IN-CHIEF
Backwardness may have advantages, but it has disadvantages too, not least that as soon as a periphery forces its way into an older core it finds itself confronting new peripheries similarly intent on forcing their way in. Erlitou was the most dazzling city in the East by 1650 BCE, its temples gleaming with bronze cauldrons and echoing with chimes and bells, but a mere day’s walk beyond the Yellow River would have taken an adventurous urbanite into a violent world of fortresses and feuding chiefs. Two skeletons found in a pit just forty miles from the big city show unmistakable signs of scalping.
Relations between Erlitou and this wild frontier may have been rather like those between Mesopotamia’s Akkadian Empire and the Amorites, with trading and raiding profitable to both parties—until something upset the balance. The upset in the East shows up in the form of a fortress called Yanshi, built around 1600 BCE just five miles from Erlitou. Later literary sources say that around this time a new group, the Shang, overthrew the Xia dynasty. The earliest finds from Yanshi combine Erlitou styles of material with traditions from north of the Yellow River, and most Chinese archaeologists (and this time many non-Chinese too) think the Shang crossed the Yellow River around 1600 BCE, defeated Erlitou, and built Yanshi to dominate their humbled but more sophisticated foes. Yanshi bloomed into a great city as Erlitou declined, until around 1500 BCE the Shang kings, perhaps deciding that they did not need to watch their former enemies quite so closely, moved fifty miles east to a new city at Zhengzhou.
Anything Erlitou could do, it seems, Zhengzhou could do better, or at least bigger. Zhengzhou had an inner city about the same size as Erlitou but also an entire square mile of suburbs with their own enormous stamped-earth wall. By one estimate this would have taken ten thousand laborers eight years to build. “They tilted in the earth with a rattling,” a later poem says of the construction of such a wall, “They pounded it with a dull thud. / They beat the walls with a loud clang, / they pared and chiseled them with a faint ping-ping.” Zhengzhou must have reverberated with rattles, thuds, clangs, and ping-pings. The city also needed not one but several bronze foundries, just one of which left an eight-acre waste dump. Zhengzhou’s ritual vessels continued Erlitou traditions but, naturally, were grander. One bronze cauldron buried in a hurry around 1300 BCE (perhaps during an attack) was three feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds.
Zhengzhou also expanded Erlitou’s colonialism. Four hundred miles away, beyond the Yangzi River, miners tore up the valleys of Tongling in search of copper, burrowing a hundred plank-lined shafts into the rock, disfiguring the landscape with 300,000 tons of slag. The objects they left behind (so well preserved that archaeologists have even found their wood and bamboo tools and reed sleeping mats) are just like those from the Shang capital. When Uruk-style material culture had expanded through Mesopotamia after 3500 BCE, some sites looked like they were cloned from Uruk itself, right down to their street plans; likewise, Shang colonists built a kind of miniature Zhengzhou, complete with palaces, rich burials, and bronze ritual vessels in fully developed Shang style at Panlongcheng, astride the easiest route from Tongling to the Shang heartland.
Only around 1250 BCE, though, do the Shang really come alive for us. According to legend, in 1899 (CE, that is) a relative of Wang Qirong, director of the Imperial Academy in Beijing, caught malaria and sent a servant to buy decayed turtle shell, a traditional Chinese remedy.* Wang’s sick relative was an educated man, and when he saw a row of symbols scratched on the shell his servant brought home he guessed that they were an ancient version of Chinese. He sent the shell to Wang for a second opinion, and Wang guessed that the inscription dated back to the Shang dynasty.
Buying more shells, Wang made rapid progress on decipherment, but not rapid enough. In summer 1900 popular anger against Westerners erupted in the Boxer Rebellion. The dowager empress backed the rebels and put imperial officials, including Wang, in charge of militia bands. The Boxers besieged the foreign embassy compound, but twenty thousand alien troops—Japanese, Russian, British, American, and French—descended on Beijing. Swept up in the disaster, his life in ruins, Wang, his wife, and his daughter-in-law poisoned themselves and jumped down a well.
Wang’s inscribed bones came into the hands of an old friend. Within a decade he, too, was dead, after disgrace and exile to China’s desolate west, but in 1903 he managed to publish the inscriptions as a book. It set off bone frenzy. Foreign and indigenous scholars scrambled to buy up turtle shells; one was offering three ounces of silver per inscribed word, at a time when laborers in Beijing were earning just one sixth of an ounce per day. The bad news was that this set off a rash of illicit digging, with armed gangs shooting it out in potato fields over fragments of ancient turtle shells. The good news, though, was extraordinary. Not only had Wang been right that these burned shells and bones were China’s oldest texts; but they also turned out to name kings who matched exactly those listed by the first-century-BCE historian Sima Qian as the last rulers of the Shang dynasty.
Antiquities dealers tried to keep the source of the bones secret, but
soon everyone knew they came from the village of Anyang, and in 1928 the Chinese government launched its first official archaeological excavation there. Unfortunately, it immediately ran into the same problems as the Peking Man excavations at Zhoukoudian. Warlords and bandits fought across the neighborhood; tomb robbers with homemade pistols had firefights with police; and the Japanese army closed in. The biggest-ever find of inscriptions, a pit containing seventeen thousand bones, was made just an hour before the 1936 excavation season was due to end. Archaeologists struggled for an additional four days and nights to get the artifacts out of the ground, knowing they might never be able to return. Most of their finds disappeared during the decade of war that followed, but the bronze vessels and inscriptions made it to Taiwan after the 1949 Communist takeover. And it was all worthwhile; the Anyang excavations transformed early Chinese history.
The excavations showed that Anyang was the final Shang capital, established around 1300 BCE. Its walled settlement, located only in 1997, covered nearly three square miles, but like Zhengzhou it was dwarfed by its suburbs. Temples, cemeteries, and bronze foundries sprawled across another dozen square miles, an area one-third the size of Manhattan. One foundry, excavated in 2004, covered ten acres, but at the core of this ritual landscape, dominating what was recorded in the inscriptions, was a different activity: the kings’ efforts to cajole their ancestors into helping them.
The excavated inscriptions begin in the long reign of King Wuding (1250–1192 BCE), and from the information they contain we can piece together the rituals that produced them. The king would put questions to his ancestors, summoning their spirits from their great tombs on the other side of the river that ran through Anyang. Pressing a heated stick against a shell or bone, he would interpret the cracks it produced, and specialists would inscribe the results on the “oracle bone.”
The rites made Wuding ancestor-in-chief, hosting parties for spirits of recently dead kings and corralling them into hosting their own ancestors, who in turn—for really serious matters—would host all the spirits on up to Di, the high god. The idea that the silent turtle could make the ancestors’ voices heard perhaps went back six thousand years to sites like Jiahu, discussed in Chapter 2, but the Shang kings of course made it bigger and better. Archaeologists have found more than 200,000 oracle bones at Anyang, and David Keightley, the leading Western scholar of the inscriptions, calculates some 2 million to 4 million were originally made, consuming a hundred thousand turtles and oxen. The rituals also involved binge drinking, perhaps to put the king and diviners into the right frame of mind for talking to spirits.
Shang kings tried to get on the right side of the spirits with spectacular funerals to mark their predecessors’ transition to ancestorhood. Eight royal tombs have been found, one for each king from 1300 through 1076 BCE, with an unfinished ninth for Di Xin, still on the throne when the dynasty fell in 1046. All were looted, but the cemeteries are still overwhelming—not so much for the few thousand tons of earth moved for each tomb, which were paltry by Egyptian standards, but for the real Shang funeral specialty: violence.
Ancient Chinese literature speaks of people “following in death” at elite funerals, but nothing prepared the Anyang excavators for what they found. Tomb 1001, probably Wuding’s resting place, contained about two hundred corpses—9 at the bottom of the shaft, each in its own pit with a dead dog and a deliberately broken bronze blade; 11 more on a ledge around the shaft; between 73 and 136 (it’s hard to tell from the hacked-up body parts) scattered on ramps into the tomb; and 80 more on the surface next to the grave. About five thousand sacrificial pits have been identified around the tombs, typically holding several murdered humans (mostly men, some with their joints worn down by hard labor) and animals (from birds to elephants). Nor did the doomed go quietly. Some were beheaded; others had limbs chopped off or were severed at the waist; others still were found bound and contorted, surely buried alive.
The numbers are staggering. The oracle bones mention 13,052 ritual killings, and if Keightley is right that we have found only 5–10 percent of the inscriptions, in all a quarter of a million people may have perished. Averaged out, that would be four or five per day, every day, for 150 years. In reality, though, they were bunched around big funerals in great orgies of hacking, screaming, and dying, when the cemeteries literally ran with blood. Nearly three thousand years later, Aztec kings in Mexico waged wars specifically to take prisoners to feed their bloodthirsty god Quetzalcoatl; the Shang may have done the same for their ancestors, particularly against people they called the Qiang, more than seven thousand of whom are listed as victims in the oracle bones.
Wuding and his colleagues, like great kings in the West, talked to spirits in another world while dealing death in this one. It was the combination of worship and war that made them kings, and the funerals that turned kings into ancestors were full of martial symbolism. Even after being plundered, tomb 1004 (perhaps for King Lin Xin, who died around 1160 BCE) still contained 731 spearheads, 69 axes, and 141 helmets; and when Wuding spoke directly to the high god Di, it was usually about fighting. “Crackmaking on day forty-one, Zheng divined,” says a typical oracle bone. “If we attack the Mafang, Di will confer assistance on us.”
By Western standards Shang armies were small. The largest mentioned in the oracle bones is ten thousand men, just a third the size of Ramses’ army at Kadesh. Place-names in the inscriptions also suggest that Wuding directly administered quite a small stretch of the Yellow River, plus a few far-flung colonies such as Panlongcheng. He apparently ran not an integrated, tax-paying, bureaucratically managed state like Egypt, but a looser group of allies who sent tribute to Anyang—cattle, white horses, bones and shells for divining, and even humans for sacrifice.
Sima Qian, the first-century-BCE historian who listed the Shang kings, made early Chinese history sound simple. After the sage kings, culminating in Yu the ditch digger, came the Xia, then the Shang, and then the Zhou (the three dynasties of the Three Dynasties Chronology Project). From them China developed, and nothing else was worth mentioning. But while archaeology has shown that Erlitou and Anyang were indeed peerless in their age, it has also shown that Sima Qian’s account oversimplified things. Like the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Xia and Shang had to deal with dozens of neighboring states.
Archaeologists are just beginning to unearth these other states’ impressive remains, especially in southern and eastern China. As recently as 1986 we had little idea that a rich kingdom had flourished around 1200 BCE far up the Yangzi River in Sichuan; but then archaeologists found two pits stuffed with treasures at Sanxingdui. There were dozens of bronze bells, a couple of six-foot-high statues of men with crowns and huge, staring eyes, and elaborate bronze “spirit trees” twice that height, their branches full of delicate metal fruit, leaves, and birds. The excavators had stumbled onto a lost kingdom, and in 2001 a major city came to light in nearby Jinsha. By some estimates, half of all the house and highway construction in the world in the 2010s and 2020s will happen in China, and there is no telling what the salvage archaeologists, racing to stay one step ahead of the backhoes, will turn up next.
We find it easy to think of the Hittites, Assyrians, and Egyptians as distinct peoples, because ancient texts preserve their different languages and we are used to the West being divided into multiple national states. In the East, though, Sima Qian’s story line that Chineseness began with the Xia and radiated outward makes it all too tempting to imagine these early states, which nowadays lie within a single modern nation, as “always” being Chinese. In reality, ancient East and West probably had rather similar networks of jostling states, sharing some beliefs, practices, and cultural forms while differing in others. They traded, fought, competed, and expanded. As our evidence accumulates, the processes through which social development rose in the ancient East and West are coming to look more and more similar. Perhaps there was once a wooden hall at Anyang holding letters on silk and bamboo like the inscribed clay tablets at Amarna in Eg
ypt, recording diplomatic correspondence with foreign rulers who spoke alien tongues. The king of Jinsha may have called Wuding his “brother” as they exchanged thoughts on whether to treat the rulers of Shandong as equals; and maybe Wuding even arranged to send some unsuspecting Shang princess as a bride to a petty court on the Yangzi, there to swelter and bear children far from her family and loved ones. We will never know.
THINGS FALL APART
I would like to bring von Däniken’s spacemen back into the story once more. Even if the collapse of Egypt and Mesopotamia after 2200 BCE had taken the aliens by surprise, as I suggested earlier, they would have felt nothing but satisfaction had they brought their flying saucer back to orbit the world of Wuding and Ramses II around 1250 BCE. This time their work really did seem to be done. Western social development had reached twenty-four points on the index, nearly three times where it stood in 5000 BCE.
The average Egyptian or Mesopotamian harnessed probably 20,000 kilocalories per day, as compared to 8,000 around 5000 BCE, and the biggest cities, such as Thebes in Egypt or Babylon, had maybe eighty thousand residents. There were thousands of literate scribes and burgeoning libraries. The greatest armies could muster five thousand chariots, and it would have been a fair guess that one state (maybe Egypt, or perhaps the Hittites) would soon create a core-wide empire. New states, with their own palaces, temples, and godlike kings, would develop in Italy, Spain, and beyond; then the empire in the core would swallow these, too, until one great realm filled the map in Figure 4.3. The East would continue tracking Western developments a millennium or two behind. It would probably go through disruptions like the West’s, and the West would probably face more upsets too; but like the earlier episodes, these would barely slow the rising tide of social development. The West would retain its lead, figure out fossil fuels within a couple of thousand years, and go on to global rule.
