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Routledge Handbook of Early Chinese History

Paul R. Goldin

The Bronze Age before the Zhou Dynasty

Publication detailshttps://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315773605-4

Robert BagleyPublished online on: 17 May 2018

How to cite :- Robert Bagley. 17 May 2018, The Bronze Age before the Zhou Dynasty from: RoutledgeHandbook of Early Chinese History RoutledgeAccessed on: 15 Dec 2021https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315773605-4

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Preliminaries: scope, aims, and sources

In East Asia the earliest state-level societies that we know much about are those of the Yellow and Yangtze river valleys in the second millennium bc. In calling them states, we are diagnosing social organization from material remains: we take city walls, imposing building foundations, large-scale metal production, elite burials, and widely distributed artifact types to be material residues of highly stratified societies. Some of these features, city walls for example, have an ear-lier history, and a case for earlier states could be made. The third millennium Liangzhu culture of the Yangtze delta region is an obvious candidate. Toward the middle of the second millennium, however, the rise of a distinctive metal industry, and with it the characteristic artifacts of the Chinese Bronze Age, cast bronze bells and ritual vessels, was a new and consequential develop-ment. Writing may have been invented at about the same time, though we have no trace of first stages. The civilized societies to which metallurgy and writing direct our attention arose in the middle Yellow River valley, but by 1200 bc they had flourishing offspring throughout the Yang-tze valley as well. These societies, whose achievements were inherited by the first millennium Zhou civilization, are our subject.

The period of concern to us, roughly 1800–1000 bc, will for convenience be called the Early Bronze Age (EBA). For the earlier part of the period the dating of archaeological sites depends on radiocarbon measurements, which give absolute dates – calendar dates – but have uncertainties on the order of one or two centuries. Toward the end of the period we begin to rely on informa-tion taken from later texts. We try to fix the date of the Zhou conquest of Shang, an event that figures prominently in the texts, and then count generations backward from it. The conquest date endorsed by the state-sponsored Xia Shang Zhou Chronology Project is 1046 bc.1 “Ca. eleventh century bc” might be more realistic, but whichever we prefer, a date for the Zhou conquest is, in the material record, a date for an event at one city. It is a date for the supposedly punctual end of the Anyang settlement and hence for the end of the pottery sequence that archaeologists have constructed there. Other sites can be connected with the conquest date and the pottery sequence it terminates only by correlating their material culture with the material culture of Anyang. For an important tomb discovered a few decades ago at Xingan in Jiangxi, for example, neither radiocarbon nor written evidence is available. A date for the Xingan tomb can only be estimated by comparing its contents with the contents of Anyang tombs. As the best-dated and

3

THE BRONZE AGE BEFORE THE ZHOU DYNASTYROBERT BAGLEYTHE BRONZE AGE BEFORE THE ZHOU DYNASTY

Robert Bagley

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best-explored EBA site, Anyang is our reference point: we judge other sites and artifacts to be earlier than, later than, or similar to Anyang and its artifacts.2 Absolute dates are indispensable for some purposes. They enable us to compare unrelated or widely separated cultures. We depend on them, for example, to say that chariots in the Caucasus pre-date chariots at Anyang. But they do not have the resolution to sort out developments within the EBA. They cannot put the tombs of a royal cemetery in order or align a newly discovered site with a level in the Anyang stratigraphic record. All of archaeology’s detailed reasoning rests either on artifact comparisons or, within a single physically continuous site, on stratigraphy. These give relative dates.

The time of concern to us is the end of prehistory. At present the Chinese written record begins with the first Anyang oracle inscriptions, for which a date around 1200 bc has been shakily inferred from mentions of lunar eclipses in some of them. Because the oracle inscription corpus is small3 and restricted in provenance and content – one city mainly, and matters that its king divined about – we might suppose that the study of EBA states would not differ signifi-cantly from prehistoric archaeology. But this is far from being the case. Because the inscriptions mention kings’ names known from transmitted texts, the archaeology of the second millennium was from the start motivated and guided by late first millennium texts, and it has at times aspired to narrative history of a kind beyond the reach of the prehistorian. If this is now beginning to change, the reason is that the archaeological record has proved absorbing in itself. Our mental picture of the EBA is increasingly dominated by material culture, and scholars are increasingly preoccupied with matters that can be investigated through it – the process of state formation and the history of technology, to mention only two.

The sources relevant to our subject are both material and written. All have biases of several kinds. The material record has both a preservation bias (the soft parts of history, we might say, do not fossilize) and a sample bias (accidents of discovery, agendas of archaeological exploration, the practicalities of salvage archaeology). Whether contemporary or later, the written sources too have a preservation bias: the bulk of what was written has not survived, and what does survive does so partly by accident, partly (in the case of transmitted texts known only in Han recensions) by the active intervention of editors and scribes. The written record also has innate biases: authors have reasons for writing; editors interpret. Any inscription or text is shaped by its author’s purposes, knowledge, and perspective.4 Our inferences should be informed by aware-ness of all these biases.

The written sources for our period are second millennium inscriptions on oracle bones and bronzes and first millennium bronze inscriptions and transmitted texts. The oracle inscriptions, almost the only documents that survive from the EBA, have a very narrow bias. They see the world through the Anyang king’s eyes, and only that part of it that he divined about. Though they touch on many other matters, interactions with enemies and trading partners for instance, their principal concern is sacrifices to the king’s ancestors. Because the names of the people and places they mention can seldom be connected with archaeological finds and sites, they give us only a vague idea of the king’s view of the world and no idea at all of how his neighbors saw him. They do not answer our most basic questions about China in the last two centuries of the second millennium or even about everyday life at Anyang. What territory did the Anyang king rule? What other polities, large or small, near or distant, existed in his time? Did those neighbors view him as having special authority or standing, or was it later writers who for their own pur-poses represented him as a divinely sanctioned universal ruler? The Anyang king called himself “I, the one man.” How many of his contemporaries called him that? How many instead called themselves “the one man”? The answers scholars have given to questions like these have always owed less to second millennium evidence than to preconceptions absorbed from transmitted texts.

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When we study a period for which both material and written evidence are available, we need a reasoned way of combining bodies of evidence that are sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, sometimes incommensurable. Ever since the birth of scientific archaeology in the nineteenth century, students of the biblical and Homeric worlds have wrestled with this problem without ever arriving at a clear set of rules.5 Archaeology can contradict texts, for instance by showing that at the time Joshua is supposed to have destroyed Jericho’s walls, ancient Jericho had no walls. But its ability to verify narratives of human action is limited. Proving that an event described in a text could have happened is not the same as proving that it did happen. If ruined walls of suitable date were discovered at Jericho, could archaeologists confirm that they were destroyed by Joshua? Most ancient walls are now in ruins. Hasty correlations between texts and archaeological finds foreclose options, blinding both reader and writer to alternatives. The naming of sites and cultures can be especially insidious. The identification of a certain deeply stratified mound in Anatolia as the site of an ancient city called Troy may rest on good evidence. The moment we call the site Homer’s Troy, however, we import a host of beliefs about it, for instance that the city was sacked in Mycenaean times by invaders from Greece, and including, all too often, assumptions that we are not conscious of making.6 Best practice accordingly keeps the two lines of investigation separate to the extent possible, with the double aim of keeping inter-pretative options open and making transparent the basis on which any conclusion rests.7 Clear epigraphic evidence justifies connecting the Anyang site with a ruling family that later texts call Shang. When a site does not yield such evidence, it is advisable to refer to its material culture by an arbitrary modern name. The Liangzhu culture, for example, is named after the modern village where its distinctive artifact assemblage was first found and described.8

The Anyang oracle inscriptions were discovered around 1900, and western scientific archae-ology came to China in the 1920s. Before 1900, the only basis on which an ancient history for China could be constructed was texts transmitted from the Han period. A chapter title that invokes the Bronze Age rather than peoples or polities named in transmitted texts reflects a con-viction that as a guide to times before the Zhou period, the texts are less trustworthy than the material evidence unearthed by archaeologists. But as the material evidence has been gathered and interpreted under the guidance of the texts, the two are not easy to separate. To suggest what archaeology conducted in ignorance of the texts might have told us is beyond the ambitions of the present chapter. Instead, by sketching the history of EBA archaeology, the chapter tries to show how a picture of the past derived from transmitted texts is giving way to a picture inferred from material remains – a picture less schematic, more complicated, and much more spacious. Archaeology in China began as a search for more oracle inscriptions and then as an exploration of the city whose kings produced the inscriptions. As it continued, however, it began to uncover peoples and places unmentioned in any text. In the process it has slowly come to be driven less by a textual agenda and more by questions arising from its own discoveries. The chapter con-cludes by examining some key points of contact between archaeological findings and the image of pre-Zhou times that prevailed before the advent of archaeology.

A short history of early Bronze Age archaeology

The Anyang oracle inscriptions connect the traditional written record with material remains

In 1898 or 1899, inscribed ox scapulas and turtle plastrons, material we now call the Anyang oracle bones, came to the attention of the Beijing antiquarian Wang Yirong (1845–1900), who recognized the writing on them as an archaic form of the Chinese script. Scholars immediately

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began collecting and studying the bones, which at first were supplied to them by antique deal-ers. In 1908 Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940) discovered the dealers’ source. The bones were being dug up in northern Henan at a village on the Huan River near Anyang called Xiaotun. In an essay published two years later Luo noted the occurrence in the inscriptions of a dozen or so names that historians already knew from a king list given in Sima Qian’s Shiji (ca. 100 bc) and there ascribed to a dynasty called Shang or Yin. Taken together, Luo’s discoveries connected a dynasty previously known only from transmitted texts with tangible objects used and inscribed at its court. Most of the inscriptions are questions asked on behalf of the king about sacrifices to his predecessors. The king who asks the question is never named, but the kings who are to receive sacrifice are named and sometimes also addressed as “father/uncle” or “grandfather/ancestor.” By 1917 Wang Guowei (1877–1927) had reconstructed the genealogy of the kings from this information and had shown it to agree almost exactly with the Shang king list given by Sima Qian. The reconstructed genealogy contains twenty-nine kings. All but the twenty-ninth are mentioned in the inscriptions as recipients of sacrifice, but only the last nine ask questions. The oracle inscriptions therefore date from the reigns of the last nine Shang kings, and those nine kings lived at Anyang.9

Excavations at Anyang, 1928–37, 1950–present

The oracle inscriptions made the Anyang site an obvious target for the first government-spon-sored archaeological excavation in China. Work began in 1928 with a reconnaissance led by an oracle-bone scholar, Dong Zuobin (1895–1963). Systematic excavations began the next year under the direction of Li Ji (1896–1979), a Harvard-trained anthropologist, and continued until the Sino-Japanese war halted them in 1937. Work resumed in 1950 under a new government and goes on today. Archaeologists call the site Yinxu, the Waste of Yin, from an old name for the deserted capital, but in the oracle inscriptions it is called Da Yi Shang, Great City Shang.10

At Xiaotun, source of the oracle bones, Li Ji’s team found an area of palaces and temples. Little survived of the buildings besides rammed-earth foundations, but there were more than a hundred of these, many very large, some incorporating human sacrifices made during construc-tion. In 1934, alerted by reports of tomb robbing across the river, the archaeologists found a cemetery of more than a dozen enormous shaft tombs. Though they had been stripped by loot-ers ancient and modern, the tombs were surely royal. What little remained of their furnishings did not identify the occupants, but it was enough to connect artifacts of types long known to antiquarians, bronze ritual vessels above all, with the Shang period.

At the royal cemetery the excavators found human sacrifice on a frightening scale. In and near the great shaft tombs were sacrifices of two kinds that we might distinguish as specific indi-viduals or servants and anonymous human cattle. The former were victims buried in coffins or with grave goods of their own or with artifacts indicating the function they served in the tomb, for example guards with weapons or chariot drivers with their chariots. Of these a tomb might have several dozen. The anonymous victims were beheaded as the tomb was filled. Rows of headless bodies and rows of heads were laid out on stairs or ramps leading down into the tomb. Further victims were deposited in pits around the mouth of the tomb.

Sacrifices in and near the tomb were made during the burial ceremony. Victims were also offered later. In 1934–35 Li Ji’s team excavated more than a thousand sacrificial pits laid out neatly in east-west rows in distinct groups, all the pits of a group containing only complete skel-etons or headless skeletons or skulls, as though each group was a single sacrifice performed in a single way. In 1976 careful excavation of another 191 pits was able to distinguish twenty-two groups, the average group containing fifty victims, the largest consisting of forty-seven pits with

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more than 339 victims. Mutilation of victims was common. Some were cut in half at the waist or cut into as many as ten pieces, and a few children were bound and buried alive. In the oracle inscriptions the king asks constantly about offerings to his ancestors, sometimes about offerings to several ancestors jointly. When the offering they required was human sacrifice, he evidently made it at the royal cemetery, even if the ancestor was buried elsewhere (the 339 victims in forty-seven pits were offered by the first Anyang king). Royal religion in the Shang period revolved around human sacrifice to the king’s ancestors.

At Anyang Li Ji found a spectacular Bronze Age civilization that seemed to have no local precursor. It had a writing system and a bronze industry, both highly sophisticated, and it had features that seemed to point to western connections: horse-drawn chariots, knives and daggers of types native to the Eurasian steppe, and human sacrifice that called to mind Leonard Woolley’s discoveries a few years earlier at the Ur royal cemetery in Mesopotamia. Li’s western training had taught him that civilization had one birthplace, the ancient Near East, and that civilizations elsewhere were inspired by cultural contact, so he speculated that the Anyang civilization sprang into being full-grown when prehistoric cultures indigenous to East Asia received a fertilizing stimulus from outside.11

In the 1950s, when Anyang archaeology resumed after the founding of the People’s Republic, it did so in a new political and intellectual climate in which outside influence was no longer an acceptable explanatory mechanism. For several decades Chinese archaeology was to be confined both practically and imaginatively within the modern political boundaries of China. Within those boundaries it was immensely productive. The Yinxu site (meaning everything at Anyang that dates from the last nine Shang reigns) is still very unevenly explored, but a great deal is known about it. Remains are scattered over about 30 sq km. Besides the Xiaotun palace district and the royal cemetery across the river, excavations have revealed lesser settlements and cem-eteries and workshops for pottery, stone tools, bronze, jade, and carved bone. Studies of pottery typology have divided the occupation of the site into four stages, Yinxu 1–4. Any tomb or stra-tum that contains pottery can be assigned to one of these stages.

The first major postwar discovery at Anyang was an intact royal tomb found in 1976 not in the royal cemetery but at Xiaotun, near the palaces. Inscribed bronzes identify the occupant as Fu Hao, Lady Hao, a consort of Wu Ding, the first Anyang king. The immense wealth of her tomb, above all in jades and bronze vessels, came as a surprise to specialists. Spectacular bronzes of a sophistication that had been thought possible only at the end of the dynasty turned out to belong to the first Anyang reign. Clearly the bronze art had a long pre-Anyang history.

Another startling discovery was made in 1999 across the river from Xiaotun at a place the excavators call Huanbei. Yinxu had no city wall. Huanbei is a very large city with an unfinished square outer wall 2 km on a side. An inner wall about 500 by 800 m encloses the remains of sixty buildings, two of them enormous. To judge from pottery typology and a few bronzes, Huanbei was occupied for only a brief time just before the Yinxu occupation. The buildings of its inner city burned down. The excavators believe that after a fire destroyed its palaces, Huanbei was abandoned and its inhabitants moved across the river to build the city at Yinxu.

If this is correct, the king who oversaw the move may well have been Lady Hao’s husband Wu Ding, the first king whose presence at Anyang is attested by oracle inscriptions. Major con-struction at Yinxu, both in the palace district and at the royal cemetery, seems to have begun in his time. He also seems to have instituted the practice of carving inscriptions on divination bones and to have been the most enthusiastic diviner among the Anyang kings. More than half the known oracle inscription corpus comes from his reign (and more than half the human sacrificial victims). It is to Wu Ding, therefore, that we owe our first knowledge of a writing system that in his time was already fully developed, in the sense that a scribe at his court could

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probably have written anything he wished. As in later periods, everyday writing at Anyang was done with brush and ink on slips of wood or bamboo, but while slips are depicted in the oracle-bone character that means “document,” and brush-written ink inscriptions are known on a few durable objects (jades, potsherds), no actual slips survive from the second millennium bc. The earlier history of writing, the range of functions writing served at Anyang, and the geographi-cal extent of literacy are correspondingly uncertain. The oracle inscriptions obviously draw at times on other written records, however, and inscribed oracle bones found at an Anyang colony in Shandong show that there were scribes there who could have communicated with scribes at Anyang in writing.

It seems also to have been in Wu Ding’s time that bronze vessels began to be cast with inscrip-tions. The oracle inscriptions, the bulk of the Anyang epigraphic corpus, are written from the king’s point of view. Only the inscriptions on bronzes see the world through other eyes. Though the first examples are brief – little more than the name of the vessel’s owner or of the ancestor it was dedicated to – they confirm that the vessels were used by aristocrats for offering food and drink to their ancestors. Offerings were put into the tomb and presumably also, like the king’s sacrifices, made above ground at intervals after the funeral. Half a dozen vessels cast late in the dynasty have longer inscriptions announcing that the owner made the bronze to commemorate an award received from the king in acknowledgment of loyal service. The announcement, like the food or drink offered in the vessel, was no doubt addressed to the ancestor named at the end of the inscription, informing him that his descendant was doing his duty and maintaining the honor of the family. This inscription type, the written report to a superior of a transaction, was probably modelled on the administrative documents of a well-developed bureaucracy.12

The success of Li Ji’s excavations shaped the future of Chinese archaeology in two important ways. First, as Li recognized, the sophistication of the Anyang civilization posed a problem of origins. Li was willing to make stimulus from outside a part of the answer, but for a younger generation of scholars who were not, the need to find local antecedents was urgent. Second, the confirmation of Sima Qian’s list of Shang kings and the discovery of a Shang capital seemed to vindicate a whole tradition of classical learning. If the Shang dynasty was real, then the Xia dynasty must also be real, and its capitals too must be found. The Shang dynasty was confidently taken to be what Sima Qian believed it to be, one of a series of dynasties that each in turn ruled the whole of civilized China. This was an assumption with immediate implications for archaeo-logical finds in places other than Anyang.

A local antecedent for the Anyang civilization: excavations at Zhengzhou, 1950-present

Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, is located in the middle Yellow River valley 160 km south of Anyang. In 1950 a find of potsherds there drew the attention of archaeologists to a mound called Erligang. In 1952–53 they excavated the mound and distinguished two occupa-tion levels, Lower and Upper Erligang, which are now thought to belong to the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries bc. Typological study suggested that Erligang pottery was related to Yinxu pottery, but earlier. In 1955 four modest graves containing bronze vessels were excavated, and the bronzes too are predecessors of Anyang types. In the same year investigation of a rammed-earth city wall 500 m from the mound showed the wall to be a Lower Erligang construction: it contains Lower Erligang potsherds and its sloping base is overlapped by deposits containing Upper Erligang sherds. In the rammed-earth technique, invented in Neolithic times and used for walls and foundations throughout the Bronze Age, a thin layer of earth is poured between wooden forms and hammered until it rings, the operation being repeated until the desired

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height is attained. City walls built in this way are major constructions. The Zhengzhou wall is 22 m thick at the base and in places survives to a height of 9 m. It is 7 km long and encloses an area of about 400 hectares (100 hectares = 1 sq km). The outer wall at Huanbei encloses 470 hectares. Zhengzhou and Huanbei are the two largest walled cities yet known from the EBA.

Though the modern city of Zhengzhou sits atop the ancient one, making systematic exca-vation impossible, twenty rammed-earth building foundations are known inside the ancient wall, and workshops, habitation areas, cemeteries, and a second stretch of wall have been found outside it. Human sacrifice is in evidence, though not on the scale of the Anyang royal cemetery. No burial of an Erligang king has been found. Three major caches of bronze vessels have turned up at intervals over the last half-century but only a few bronze-bearing tombs, none approach-ing royal scale. The importance of the ancient city is declared chiefly by its size. Though it was surely the major city of the Erligang civilization, its material culture is better known from finds made elsewhere.13

To Li Ji the Chinese Bronze Age seemed to begin so abruptly that outside stimulus was required to explain it. The Erligang finds dispelled the appearance of abruptness by supplying local antecedents for Anyang building technology, human sacrifice, bronze casting, and burial forms, though not for the chariot or the Chinese writing system. The only writing yet found at Zhengzhou is ten graphs on a divination bone fragment that may be no earlier than the Anyang oracle bones (its archaeological context is unclear). There is good reason to believe that the writ-ing system was an Erligang invention, however, and in the 1990s a few potsherds, each bearing a brush-written character or two, were found at Xiaoshuangqiao, a site 20 km from Zhengzhou that may slightly postdate Upper Erligang. As for the chariot, Li Ji was surely right to connect it with the steppe.14

The Erligang finds were a clear demonstration that the Anyang civilization had a sophisti-cated predecessor. This established, archaeologists sought to give the city at Zhengzhou a his-torical identity, that is, to fit it into the received history that was taken to have been verified by the royal names in the Anyang oracle inscriptions. Since Anyang was the last capital of the Shang dynasty, Zhengzhou must be an earlier capital. But which? Received texts name several. Counting on pottery typology to help them choose, but with no inscription to confirm an identification, scholars have never been able to agree. They have also never considered the pos-sibility that Zhengzhou was not Shang at all. Certainly it is possible that the city was ruled by pre-Anyang Shang kings whose names we know from the Shang king list, but it is also possible that the early Shang kings lived elsewhere and that they were rivals of the kings of Erligang. Or perhaps the Shang dynasty was founded by a courtier of the Erligang king who usurped the throne and by way of justification invented the Shang king list – a list of ancestors who were not kings, who might even have been fictions, perhaps gods claimed as ultimate ancestors of the new royal house. These speculations are not idle. They highlight the hidden dangers of commit-ting ourselves to a storyline that does not emerge from archaeology. When we declare a site to be an early Shang capital, we declare that it was ruled by kings whose descendants at some point moved to Anyang. This seemingly innocent statement inserts archaeological sites into a narrative of successive capitals in which the rise of one city coincides with the decline or abandonment of another and in which the Shang kings had no rival capable of building a major city. It assumes continuity from the uppermost stratum at one site to the lowermost at another, and it imposes uncontested universal rule on an archaeological record that shows nothing of the kind.

Archaeologists at first supposed that Zhengzhou was abandoned after Upper Erligang, its population having moved to Anyang. As finds accumulated, however, it became increasingly clear that Upper Erligang was not continuous with early Yinxu. Bronze vessels intermediate between Erligang and Yinxu types have been found at Zhengzhou and elsewhere. Eventually the

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difficulty was dealt with by defining a “transition period” (this term is always a sign of confu-sion) to which Xiaoshuangqiao and Huanbei were later assigned. Zhengzhou, Xiaoshuangqiao, and Huanbei are today taken to form a sequence of Shang capitals. Yet pottery typology cannot establish the family names of the rulers of these places. In the absence of epigraphic evidence we should forgo political identifications of sites – identifications with names found only in far later texts – and speak in strictly archaeological terms of cultures defined by material artifacts. To do otherwise is to remove the ambiguity of the archaeological record by imposing a Han picture of the past on it.

Bronze Age beginnings: excavations at Yanshi Erlitou, 1959-present

In 1959 an archaeological survey searching for capitals of the Xia dynasty began exploring a site near Luoyang called Erlitou, which had yielded pottery of a type known also from early strata at Zhengzhou 85 km to the east. Excavations that continue to the present have revealed the largest settlement yet known from its time, about 1800 to 1500 bc according to current radiocarbon evidence. Pottery typology distinguishes four phases. By the end of the first, the settlement already covered 100 hectares, but metallurgy did not yet go beyond the manufacture of small implements such as knives. From this phase comes the only pre-Anyang evidence for a wheeled vehicle in China, wheel tracks a meter apart, half the axle length of an Anyang chariot. There is as yet no evidence for domesticated horses before Anyang times. During the second phase the settlement grew to 300 hectares. Remains include building compounds with courtyards and, within the courtyards, rich (royal?) burials containing jades, small bronze clapper-bells, cowry shells, and objects inlaid with turquoise. All or most of these luxury materials were obtained by long-distance trade. A bronze ax likely to be an import from the northern steppe belongs to this phase, as does a large turquoise workshop. A bronze knife of northern type comes from the third phase, during which additional large buildings surrounded by a rammed-earth wall were constructed. The cast bronze vessels that appear in graves of this stage are primitive ancestors of Zhengzhou and Anyang ritual vessels in shape and probably also in function. A few more ves-sels have been found in the fourth phase, but despite foundry remains said to cover one hectare, the current total from Erlitou is only eighteen, thirteen of them tripod cups of the type jue. Puzzlingly, a new city with palatial buildings and a wall around them was built just 6 km from Erlitou during the fourth phase. The excavators call this Yanshi Shangcheng, the Shang city at Yanshi, because its pottery resembles pottery from the Zhengzhou site. Some scholars take it to be the capital of the founder of the Shang dynasty, others interpret it as a fortress planted in the newly conquered Xia heartland by a king who resided at Zhengzhou. After phase four the Erlitou settlement shrank, and by the end of the Erligang period it had been abandoned.15

Pottery more or less resembling that of Erlitou has been found throughout the middle reaches of the Yellow River valley. In the sites from which it comes some archaeologists detect a three- or four-tiered settlement hierarchy that they take to signify a unified polity. Outside that area Erlitou artifacts and artifact types reached places as remote as Sichuan in the west (the Sanxingdui site), Liaoning in the northeast (the Lower Xiajiadian culture), and Wuhan in the middle Yangtze region (the Panlongcheng site). Such artifacts are likely to have spread by trade or exchange, followed sometimes by local imitation, but some kind of colonization might in some cases have played a role.

In material culture Erlitou is clearly a precursor of Erligang. Its excavators at first called Erlitou “Early Shang” and Erligang “Middle Shang,” but these identifications did not long go undisputed. For a time some observers argued that Erlitou was a Xia capital, others that the first

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two strata are Xia and the last two Shang. It is now universally regarded as Xia – it is “the capital of China’s first dynasty” – because radiocarbon dates have shown it to be too old to fall within the six centuries that tradition assigns to the Shang dynasty. Erligang has returned to being “Early Shang,” and “Middle Shang” now means the Huanbei site. These political identifications shift back and forth because none of them has any support from epigraphic evidence. A more obvious illustration of the methodological urgency of keeping texts and archaeology separate would be hard to find.16

Calling the Erlitou culture “Xia” attaches to it a set of preconceptions about the early sec-ond millennium political order in north China. We are invited to think of the formation of an Erlitou state as a process that brought a disordered Neolithic China under the unified rule of the first in a series of paramount dynasties. This amounts to adopting a center-periphery model with an active king at the center and passive subject peoples on the margins. The material record is mute, scanty, and ambiguous enough for such an interpretation to be easily read into it, and once it has been, the narrative has an appeal that makes discrepancies easy to overlook. But the credibility of the model has depended chiefly on ignorance of the periphery, an ignorance that archaeology in recent decades has begun to remedy.

Erligang was an empire: Panlongcheng, excavated in 1963 and 1974

In 1963 and 1974, alerted by repeated chance finds of potsherds, metal artifacts, and sec-tions of an ancient wall, archaeologists excavated portions of a site called Panlongcheng near modern Wuhan in the middle Yangtze region. They found a small city whose elite material culture – a rammed-earth city wall 1 km long enclosing 7 hectares, foundations of three large buildings inside the wall, and thirty-eight tombs outside – is indistinguishable from that of the Zhengzhou site 450 km to the north. The richest of the Panlongcheng tombs were identi-cal to Zhengzhou burials in form but larger and more lavishly furnished, containing bronzes and jades of the highest quality. They reveal that the Erlitou inventory of four or five bronze vessel types had by the end of Erligang grown to more than twenty. One of the tombs, the richest Erligang burial yet known, contained three sacrificial victims, twenty-three bronze ves-sels, forty bronze weapons and tools, jades, pottery, and glazed stoneware. It is significant that, unlike the bronzes and other luxury items, the pottery found at Panlongcheng is not all of Erligang type; some of it is local. The combination of Erligang elite culture and local pottery argues for an intrusive elite ruling indigenous commoners, in other words, for colonization or conquest by Zhengzhou. Like invaders of other times and places, the Erligang settlers brought with them all the experts they needed, from builders to bronze casters, to replicate their lives back home.

Panlongcheng is the first place outside the Yellow River valley where Erligang remains were recognized and the first hint of what is today known as the Erligang expansion. More than sixty sites with Erligang artifacts are now on record, and while about twenty cluster within 100 km of Zhengzhou, the remainder are scattered west into the Wei valley, east and northeast to Shan-dong, Hebei, and Beijing, southeast to Anhui, and south to Panlongcheng and other places in Hubei. Most of these sites have not been excavated, and at most of them we can only guess what motivated the Erligang presence. A thirst for exotic raw materials is a regular symptom of the rise of civilization, however, and in the south the most obvious resource is metal. The Yangtze region has rich copper deposits, several of which were mined in antiquity, and it is possible that Panlongcheng and other Erligang settlements in Hubei and southern Anhui were way-stations in a network that Zhengzhou depended on for copper.

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The Erligang expansion seems to be a phenomenon of the Upper Erligang period. It was sudden and short-lived, lasting perhaps only a few generations, but its impact was colossal. It disseminated the new civilization of the middle Yellow River valley to an enormous area of north and central China. It was, as one scholar puts it, the mechanism by which the early Bronze Age changed from a local to a regional phenomenon.17 As indigenous societies reacted to the encounter, new powers arose on the Erligang frontiers. Perhaps it was pressure from them that caused Erligang to retreat or collapse. The lands it briefly controlled were afterwards home to not one but many bronze-using cultures.

At its peak the Erligang empire must have occupied a larger territory than the Anyang kings ruled. Western Shandong may be the only Erligang conquest that was also an Anyang possession. At the Shandong sites of Jinan Daxinzhuang, Teng Xian Qianzhangda, and Yidu Sufutun, the culture of Anyang – tomb forms, human sacrifice, bronze vessels, and inscribed oracle bones – was closely replicated.18 In the south, by contrast, the Anyang kings had culturally distinct rivals throughout the Yangtze valley. The major, slowly unfolding revelation of the last half century of EBA archaeology is the impact of the Erligang expansion in the middle and lower Yangtze region.19

Civilized aliens in the Sichuan Basin: the Sanxingdui pits discovered in 1986

In 1980 archaeologists began investigating an ancient city wall at Sanxingdui, a village 40 km north of Chengdu in Sichuan. Measuring 40 m thick at the base and enclosing 350 hectares, the wall proved to be roughly contemporary with the Zhengzhou city wall. An Erligang-period city wall a thousand kilometers from Zhengzhou, in a region universally assumed to have been a cultural backwater until much later periods, was an astonishing discovery. But in 1986, while the archaeologists were at work inside the walled city, brickyard workers outside came upon two pit deposits that were still more astonishing. The pits, 30 m apart, date from the twelfth century bc. Close in time but somewhat different in contents, they are most easily interpreted as sacrifices of some sort, but both the artifacts themselves and the manner of their burial are very strange.

Pit 1, slightly earlier than Pit 2, contained cowry shells, thirteen elephant tusks, 300 objects of bronze, jade, and gold, and three cubic meters of burnt animal bones and wood ash. Since the contents of the pit all showed signs of burning while the pit itself did not, the deposit looks like the product of a ceremony in which animals were sacrificed, bronzes and jades deliberately bro-ken, and everything then burned and buried. The ceremony has no close parallel at Zhengzhou or Anyang, and many of the artifacts are of types never seen before, including life-sized bronze heads with facial features that look distinctly extraterrestrial.

Pit 2 was much richer. Its contents were found in three layers: a hundred jades and other small items at the bottom, large bronzes in the middle layer, and sixty elephant tusks on top. Among the bronzes are forty-one heads and a life-sized statue on a pedestal. Perhaps the heads were fitted onto wooden bodies (dressed in silk robes?) to make statues like the bronze one. At Erligang and Anyang, ritual centered on sets of functionally distinct bronze vessels, but in Pit 2 the only bronze vessels were a dozen of a single vase-like type called zun or lei. Moreover, unlike the bronze heads, whose clay core material confirms that they were locally cast, the ves-sels are obvious imports, most from the middle Yangtze region. They attest to trade between Sanxingdui and its neighbors downriver, and they also help secure the twelfth century date of the pits. But the most extraordinary objects in Pit 2 were the fragments of three bronze trees, the largest of which has been restored and stands 4 m high. Birds perch on its flowering branches; other small bronzes and jades found in the pit may have been attached to it. If the

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ritual in Pit 2 involved the sacrifice of bronze trees, perhaps the wood ash in Pit 1 was from the sacrifice of real ones.

In the Anyang oracle inscriptions Wu Ding divines about attacking a people or place written with a graph that may be related to the modern character shu, an old name for Sichuan province. The first report on the Sanxingdui pits accordingly suggested that Wu Ding was meditating an attack on the city at Sanxingdui 1100 km to the southwest. Equating Sanxingdui with oracle-bone Shu has the appeal that it incorporates a startling discovery at a remote location into an Anyang-centered picture of EBA China. Even if the equation were correct, however, the fact would remain that received texts left us wholly unprepared for a civilized city with a wildly distinctive material culture in twelfth century Sichuan. The discovery of Sanxingdui has made it impossible any longer to doubt that the bronze-using civilization born before 1500 bc in the middle Yellow River valley had by 1200 bc inspired local developments over a large region. It teaches us also that the textual record is never so misleading as when it is silent: its fictions are less dangerous than its omissions. The world of the texts is far smaller and far less varied than the world revealed by archaeology.20

The Xingan tomb (1989): bronze-using cultures arise beyond the Erligang frontiers

In 1989 a rich tomb was found at a place called Xingan in central Jiangxi, 300 km farther south than Panlongcheng. Pottery connects the tomb with a small walled settlement 20 km away at Qingjiang (now Zhangshu) Wucheng, excavated in 1973. The Wucheng site yielded glazed stoneware, a specialty of the lower Yangtze region that was traded to the north, as well as a few pots with strings of incised signs that look like writing. As for the tomb, despite its location well south of the Yangtze it is the second richest EBA burial yet found, second only to the tomb of the Anyang royal consort Fu Hao. To judge by their contents the two tombs are close in date, about 1200 bc, but their occupants had very different ideas about funerary ritual. Fu Hao’s tomb contained 195 bronze vessels, 273 smaller bronzes, 756 jades, and 11 pieces of pottery. The Xin-gan tomb contained 48 bronze vessels, 4 large bronze bells, over 400 bronze tools and weapons, 150 jades, and 356 pieces of pottery. The numbers testify that Fu Hao was wealthier than the Xingan tomb’s occupant but also that pottery had more prestige in the south than in the north. Most revealing is the inventory of bronze vessel types. Fully 105 of Fu Hao’s vessels are wine containers of the types jia, jue, and gu. These three types had been indispensable components of northern ritual since Erligang times, but in the Xingan tomb they do not appear at all. Of its forty-eight vessels, thirty-five are tripods for cooking food (ding and li). This difference alone is enough to establish that the tomb’s occupant was not a northerner. Unlike Panlongcheng, Wucheng was not a southern outpost of northern culture. The point is underlined by the four bells in the tomb. They are larger and finer than any bell of similar date in the north, and as we will see in the next section, they connect Wucheng/Xingan with bronze-using cultures else-where in the middle and lower Yangtze region.

The Xingan tomb is most important for the light its bronze vessels shed on the rise of civi-lization in the south. They have a clear time spread. A small number are standard Erligang types, giving us a starting date and source for the Xingan bronze industry. Most are a bit later, however, and they show Erligang types modified to suit local taste by the addition of such odd features as little tigers standing atop handles and surface patterns copied from local pottery. The latest of the bronzes are contemporary with Fu Hao’s tomb, and a few of them are obvious imports, suggest-ing that if contact with the north was disrupted at the time of the Erligang retreat, it had been resumed. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Xingan bronzes is the high quality

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of the local castings. The best of them are both technically and artistically the equal of anything made in the north. The most efficient form of technology transfer is the transfer of experts, and Xingan must surely have acquired its bronze technology in the form of skilled casters from an Erligang settlement like Panlongcheng.21

Metal technology is the part of the Erligang impact that has survived best in the material record, but a southern ruler who used Erligang bronze vessels had also adopted something of Erligang ritual and could have adopted much else, writing for example. We must not suppose, however, that before its encounter with Erligang the Wucheng/Xingan culture was backward or primitive. Its ceramics prove otherwise, as do its ability and eagerness to adopt Erligang metal technology. Its embrace of Erligang culture was selective, however, as the Xingan inventory of vessel types attests, and the vessels themselves show that local taste quickly made itself felt in design. The same scenario must have repeated itself many times throughout the middle and lower Yangtze region. Contact with Anyang, occasional or continuous, did not prevent civiliza-tions in the south from following very different trajectories of development.22

The Yangtze region: unplanned archaeology

At major sites like Anyang and Erlitou, archaeology is planned and ongoing. The first Anyang excavators chose a site they already knew to be the capital of nine Shang kings. Erlitou was chosen for investigation by an archaeological survey seeking Xia capitals. But most archaeology in China today is unplanned. Often it is salvage archaeology aimed at learning as much as pos-sible from a site found by a construction crew and about to be destroyed. Sometimes, as in the case of the Sanxingdui pits, an accidental discovery becomes the focus of ongoing excavation. But sometimes construction has destroyed a tomb before archaeologists are called in, and they must collect whatever objects and information they can from people who were present at the destruction. And sometimes we have only an artifact – an ancient bronze recognized by an alert worker at a metal recycling station, for example, or something looted from an unknown site and found on the art market.23 In all these forms unplanned archaeology is far from ideal, but it has been hugely important, for two reasons: it occurs on a vast scale, and it occurs all over China. It was chance finds accumulating over decades that gradually revealed civilized bronze-using societies in the south contemporary with the Anyang kings. Their existence had never been suspected by historians because transmitted texts do not mention them.

Over the past century unusual bronzes have turned up at many places in the middle and lower Yangtze region. Among them are celebrated items in museum collections. From Hunan province, for example, come an elephant in the Musée Guimet in Paris, a boar in the Hunan Provincial Museum, a drum and a tiger-shaped you in the Sumitomo Collection in Kyoto, and a zun whose shape incorporates a quartet of rams in the National Museum in Beijing. All five are large and finely cast objects of extravagantly inventive design, and most depict animals very naturalistically. Vessels in animal shape are found less often downriver from Hunan, but one artifact type unites the entire region from Hunan to Zhejiang. This is the bronze nao, a clapper-less bell mounted mouth-upward on a hollow stem and struck on the outside with a mallet or pole. Bells are more common and more imposing than bronze vessels throughout the middle and lower Yangtze region. Moreover, southerners were forming tuned sets of nao, and therefore using bells not for signalling purposes but for music, at least as early as the twelfth century. Bells rather than vessels must have been the dominant apparatus of southern ritual, a complete rever-sal of northern priorities. Nao are occasionally found in Anyang tombs, but at Anyang they are small, rare, and perfunctory in decoration. The only bells found in the Anyang tomb of Fu Hao are trifles by comparison with southern bells, and they are trifles also by comparison with her

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ritual vessels. They cannot have been ritual necessities for her. The central importance of large nao to cultures in the middle and lower Yangtze region defines a vast province sharply distinct from the civilization of the north, and distinct also from Sanxingdui, which has only yielded a few sets of small clapper bells.24

Xingan and two modest Zhejiang finds are the only instances yet known in which southern bells have been found in burials or in company with bronze vessels. In Hunan, at least, nao are typically found buried in pits, by themselves, and they are often enormous. The largest so far known weighs 220 kg. Casting such a bell was not a small undertaking. Massive bells and tuned sets were the products of cities, not villages, but the cities have yet to be found. The occupant of the Xingan tomb probably came from the nearby Wucheng settlement, but his three nao show none of the local features of his other bronzes and may be imports from elsewhere in the lower Yangtze region. Lacking archaeological context, not to mention written evidence, we have no information about the southern societies that produced and used these bells. For many scholars this has made it necessary to attribute them to the north. Though no large nao has ever been unearthed at a northern site, in a 1972 article the director of the national Institute of Archae-ology in Beijing explained nao unearthed in Hunan as possessions taken there by northern refugees, Anyang aristocrats fleeing the Zhou conquest.25 Two decades later the Xingan bronzes likewise were explained by a few scholars as northern imports despite their obvious connec-tion with local pottery. The instinct to attach archaeological finds to a text-based picture of an Anyang-centered world is abetted by the careless habit of applying the label “Shang” – the name of a ruling family attested only at the Anyang site – to sites and artifacts all over China. Without so much as a name to attach to a southern site, the testimony of mute artifacts can be hard to accept. But material evidence, however haphazardly acquired, has revealed whole civilizations missing from the written record. By the twelfth century bc societies distinct from Anyang in culture but comparable in sophistication existed all the way from Sanxingdui to the sea.26

Students of early civilizations have often contrasted a “Mesopotamia model” (a land of many independent polities occasionally united by short-lived empires) with an “Egypt model” (a land normally under one rule with occasional short periods of disunity). Current opinion holds that Egypt is probably the only real instance of the Egyptian model, probably because the topogra-phy of the Nile valley below the cataracts uniquely favors political unity.27 The ancient China described in received texts, a land in which legitimate rule passed from Xia to Shang to Zhou without hiatus for more than a millennium, would be the ultimate instance of the Egyptian model if it were not fiction. The archaeological record shows China instead to have been a Mes-opotamia of competing states united briefly by the Erligang empire and the early Zhou empire. But a history resembling Mesopotamia’s had little appeal for Warring States authors anxious to restore the perfect government of early Zhou. Their purposes were better served by a past in which unity was the norm and the disunity of their own time was the exception.

Predynastic Zhou: statesmen or barbarians?

Traditional history says that the Anyang kings were overthrown by invaders from the Wei River valley. For Warring States and Han writers, the Zhou conquest was an event of magical sig-nificance (depending on the writer, a cataclysmic battle or a bloodless transfer of allegiance): it was the moment when Heaven shifted its support from the degenerate last Shang king to the virtuous first Zhou king. The archaeological record shows no trace of magic, but it does bear the imprint of the reasonably swift creation of a Zhou empire that incorporated former Shang territory. Impressive bronze vessels of consistent design are found all the way across north China, distributed over an area much larger than the Anyang kings had ruled. Many of them moreover

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have finely written inscriptions mentioning honors, posts, or lands granted to Zhou lords by their king. A bronze cast by an officer named Li, for example, commemorates a gift bestowed on him by the first Zhou king in recognition of service rendered at the time of a Shang defeat. Li dates his inscription eight days after “King Wu attacked Shang” and concludes it by dedicat-ing the vessel (and thus addressing its inscription) to the ancestor who will receive offerings of food in it. Such inscriptions have late Anyang precedents, as do the awards they commemorate, but the Zhou inscriptions are longer, and we have many more of them. Evidently the ceremony of award and/or appointment to office was a fixture of the Zhou king’s transactions with his subordinates. Perhaps it was even the inspiration for the mandate of Heaven ideology, according to which Heaven appoints the king to office. It is in bronze inscriptions of the third Zhou king that we first hear mention of Heaven’s mandate. The contexts are too limited to tell us whether the expression meant anything close to what Warring States writers understood it to mean, but it clearly had something to do with the king’s claim to the throne.

In the pre-conquest Wei River valley we find no precedent for early Zhou inscribed bronzes. The precedents, in everything from calligraphy to court ceremony, and from ancestor ritual to casting technique, are at Anyang. Transmitted texts portray the founders of Zhou as wise statesmen, but the material record puts their forbears among the more backward of Anyang’s neighbors, in no way comparable to Sanxingdui, for example. An assessment written twenty-five years ago entitled “Statesmen or Barbarians?” came down firmly on the side of barbarians.28 The pre-conquest Wei valley acquired weapons, other small bronze items, and occasional bronze vessels from the Yangtze region and from nomadic neighbors to the north.29 From Anyang it acquired only two or three of the simplest and dreariest bronze vessel types (food vessels, not wine vessels).

Soon after the conquest, however, the Zhou cast technically impressive inscribed bronzes in the full range of Anyang vessel types, a change that suggests not only the acquisition of Shang technical expertise but also the adoption of Shang rituals. Technically virtuosic, beauti-fully inscribed bronzes, the officer Li’s for example, argue that the Zhou transplanted Anyang founders and scribes to their homeland. No doubt they appropriated much more of the Anyang civilization. Their claim to inherit legitimacy from Shang suggests as much. Yet it was from the south that they obtained tuned sets of bells, and the adoption of bell music into Zhou ritual was a radical departure from Anyang ritual. Communication with the middle Yangtze region, prob-ably along the Han River, is apparent before the conquest, but on the evidence of recent finds at Suizhou in Hubei it intensified immediately after. Traffic also went due south to Sanxingdui and the Sichuan Basin. Zhou connections with the south are very inadequately known, but they seem to have gone deep and to have been important for a very long time.

Some questions

Let us conclude with a few questions that the discoveries of recent decades have raised or made more pressing.

Writing and literacy: functions and extent

Though small and narrowly focused, the oracle inscription corpus exhibits a fully developed writing system that must have had an earlier history and wider uses. The evident complete-ness of the system, in the sense that an Anyang scribe could probably write anything he could say, implies a prior development in which a simple notational system invented to serve some restricted function (Erligang bookkeeping?) gradually expanded its linguistic capabilities as it

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spread to new functions. The oracle inscriptions also testify abundantly that writing was not con-fined to the diviner’s office, for besides summarizing more detailed records of divinations they often draw on other records that must have been kept in writing – bookkeeping that tracked such things as incoming raw materials, enemy dead and captured, and agricultural lands.30

Nevertheless, the almost complete absence of earlier inscriptions and of writing from con-texts other than divination and places other than Anyang leaves many questions unanswered. How many cities besides Anyang had writing? Did Erligang writing spread to all the places that Erligang bronze technology did? Inscribed oracle bones have been found at what looks like an Anyang colony in Shandong and in a late Shang or early Zhou hoard at Fengchu in the Wei val-ley. But it is easy to imagine Anyang functionaries communicating in writing with counterparts in many other places, or with their own agents in those places.

Were there cities where languages other than Chinese were written? Was writing in use at Sanxingdui? Do the strings of signs on a few Wucheng pots belong to a writing system different from the one we know at Anyang? There is cultural variation in the material record of the late second millennium that we do not see in the written record. Chinese speakers have a monopoly of the known written record. The Egyptian script was hardly ever used to write any language but Egyptian, but Mesopotamian cuneiform wrote at least seventeen languages from several dif-ferent language families. Did the Chinese language and script always have the monopoly that they enjoyed in the Han period, or was earlier diversity gradually eliminated by a dominant culture? The latter process certainly operated in the construction of ancient history.

Human sacrifice

The sacrifice of people like cattle to a king list presents several problems. The first is its rationale in its own time. Royal religion normally serves a legitimating ideology. In Mesoamerica, where human victims were sacrificed on a scale that exceeded even the Anyang king’s, enough is known about Aztec cosmology to suggest how the king’s subjects understood sacrifice to sustain Aztec society. But Anyang sources give no clue to the beliefs of Anyang viewers, and later sources do not even mention the victims at the royal cemetery. Sacrifice may have helped advertise the king’s monopoly of violence at a time when the populace was still being habituated to coercive authority, but it must have been justified to them in other terms.

A second problem posed by these sacrifices is their disappearance from memory. The Zhou did not copy them, as far as we know, but they cannot have been unaware of them. Early Spanish accounts give some idea of the terror Aztec sacrifice inspired. Sacrifice on the scale of the royal cemetery must have been ever-present in the consciousness of Anyang’s neighbors, who prob-ably supplied the victims. Yet it is not mentioned in any Zhou source. Nowhere do the Zhou express disapproval of it. When Zhou bronze inscriptions and transmitted texts that purport to be early Zhou explain the Shang dynasty’s loss of Heaven’s mandate, they reproach it with drunkenness, not human sacrifice. The inscription of the Da Yu ding, a bronze cast in the reign of the third Zhou king, seems to say that Yin (i.e. Shang) lost the mandate because its vassals and senior officers “became lax through wine-drinking. Therefore, Yin failed in discipline among its officials.”31

Perhaps the early Zhou do not mention human sacrifice because they did not see it as a reason for the Anyang king to lose the mandate. And perhaps references to excessive drinking allude to a debate over something that they did connect with legitimation, a debate between a party that favored adhering to pre-conquest Zhou ritual offerings, which centered on food, and a party that favored wholesale adoption of Shang offerings, in which wine had a larger place. If so, ongoing change in the repertoire of bronze vessel types suggests that the debate continued

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for much of the Western Zhou period. Meanwhile, Anyang human sacrifice fell from memory. Late Zhou and Han writers, including those who profess to recount the evil deeds of the last Anyang kings, are clearly unaware of it. Confucius, who deplored human sacrifice, assumed that the Shang kings were paragons of virtue but said that he followed the institutions of early Zhou because he did not know enough about Shang. His estimate of his knowledge was correct.

The south

The Anyang-period Yangtze region is urgently in need of study. Anyang bronzes found in the south and southern bronzes found in the Wei valley give us glimpses of contact between north and south, but if the Yangtze region was the north’s main supplier of metals, as seems likely, the bronzes were incidental to an enormous trade in raw material and whatever the north exchanged for it. Traffic up and down the Yangtze must have been equally busy. A shared pre-occupation with bells throughout the middle and lower Yangtze region argues for significant interaction among otherwise diverse local cultures. The Sanxingdui civilization of the upper Yangtze was sharply different from cultures downriver, but it did import bronzes from the middle Yangtze region, not bells but vessels of one particular type. Because our knowledge of the second millennium south is almost wholly dependent on chance finds, it is tantaliz-ingly sketchy, but the sketch shows a landscape crisscrossed by interregional traffic spottily but durably recorded by bronze artifacts. Trading stations must have been everywhere. The Anyang monopoly of surviving documents should not lull us into supposing that Anyang had a monopoly of anything else.

The south in the Western Zhou period is also poorly known. It clearly had relations of trade or exchange with the north, for it supplied early Zhou courts with sets of bells, no doubt accompanied by musicians who knew how to play them and the music the musicians knew. The evidence for a Zhou presence in the south is increasing but not always easy to interpret. Two hoards of spectacular early Zhou bronzes found decades ago in Sichuan were only a few kilom-eters from the Sanxingdui site. More recently two early Zhou cemeteries 25 km apart have been found at Suizhou in northern Hubei, one with inscribed bronze vessels naming marquises of Zeng and one with vessels naming marquises of E. The Zeng bronzes are mostly standard early Zhou types, but some of the E bronzes are bizarre local reinterpretations of Zhou types. Should we imagine a mixture of Zhou colonies and local polities in this region? And how much conti-nuity was there between second millennium southern cultures – the offspring of Erligang – and the southern states that figure prominently in the Warring States textual tradition? Were such states as Chu, Wu, and Yue local developments from second millennium predecessors or Western Zhou colonies or a combination of the two? In transmitted texts, states invariably originate as vassals enfeoffed by the early Zhou kings, but this all-too-familiar narrative of active center and passive periphery is at best an oversimplification. The vassals were not planted in empty lands.

Finally, why are the early civilizations of the Yangtze region missing from the transmitted texts? How did they disappear from memory? Did a northern ideology of cultural and dynastic legitimacy require writing the civilized south out of history and discarding texts that mentioned it or originated in it?

King lists and royal legitimation

The consensus that second millennium archaeology has validated first millennium accounts of Xia and Shang rests solely on the agreement of Sima Qian’s Shang king list with the list

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reconstructed from the Anyang oracle inscriptions. There may be something to be gained, there-fore, by considering his sequence of Xia, Shang, and Zhou king lists in the light of the more amply documented history of king lists in Mesopotamia and Egypt.32

The list shown in Figure 3.1 was carved on the wall of an Egyptian temple around 1300 bc. We see Sety, second king of the nineteenth dynasty, making offerings to a list of his predecessors, seventy-six kings going back to the first king of the first dynasty. (In Mesopotamia too a ritual is known in which the king venerates a king list.) Several points deserve notice here. Sety does not confine his offerings to the kings of his own dynasty. His claim to the throne is a claim to inherit the land of Egypt from an unbroken sequence of kings stretching back to the beginning of history. (Other Egyptian lists begin even earlier, with the names of gods and spirits: earthly kings inherit the land from gods. Divine remote ancestors are a feature of king lists in many cultures.) As other sources reveal, however, Sety’s list has been edited, by him or by his predeces-sors, in several ways. It omits kings deemed illegitimate, the eighteenth dynasty “heretic king” Akhenaten for example, and it omits whole dynasties of foreign rulers. It also omits periods of disunity, when Upper Egypt was ruled by one royal house and Lower Egypt by another. (Other lists deal with periods of divided rule by making concurrent dynasties sequential. In Mesopo-tamia too, dynasties that in reality were contemporary were either omitted from the Sumerian King List or rearranged to make them sequential.) Sety’s list is the embodiment of a fictitious unity, an assertion of continuous legitimate rule of the whole land, and it was transmitted to later generations not as part of a fuller chronicle but by itself because it was important in itself. For the king at least, it was the one essential fact about the past.

As the list on the wall of Sety’s temple shows, transmission of a king list need not entail the transmission of any other information. We possess the original of his list – countless tourists have seen it – and it is a self-contained document. From this it follows that the agreement of Sima Qian’s Shang king list with the list used by Anyang diviners has no bearing on the credibility of anything else he says about Shang. We cannot take his possession of a king list to guarantee that he possessed other information from the second millennium – or that the list itself is an accurate list of real kings.33

In Mesopotamia a text called the Sumerian King List (SKL), composed around 2000 bc, is known from multiple copies made by schoolboys. The list begins when kingship was handed

Figure 3.1 Stone relief in the Temple of Sety at Abydos, ca.1300 bc, showing Sety I and his son Prince Ramesse revering a list of their predecessors

Source: Auguste Mariette, Abydos, description des fouilles exécutées sur l’emplacement de cette ville . . . (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1869–1880).

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down from heaven. Kingship rotates among cities, each in turn made the seat of the sole legiti-mate dynasty by the gods.

Although it is simply a list, the SKL . . . locates the present in a long mundane stream of hegemony and power. As a historical source it is of little value, at least as far as early periods are concerned, because this is a text that is firmly rooted in the fictional notion of Mesopotamia as a single, unified polity that was always ruled from one city by one king who belonged to a specific dynasty. . . . The SKL describes an imperial ideal rather than an accurate state of affairs in the land, and therefore constitutes a perfect example of the use of history for the purposes of legitimating politics of the present rather than as a disinterested depiction of the past. . . . The notion of a single unified hegemonic state is projected into the past, erasing the history of small independent contemporary polities.34

The parallels with ancient China are evident. An ideology of rule needs a history that cor-roborates it, a history that shows “this is indeed the way the world works.” In China, late for-mulations of both the ideology and the history are familiar from transmitted texts. The ideology goes under the name “mandate of Heaven,” and the history that supports it is the sequence of dynasties Xia, Shang, and Zhou, each in turn legitimate ruler of civilized China. Legitimacy comes from Heaven, which judges a dynasty and transfers universal rule from a royal line that has declined in virtue to one that is worthier. A linear sequence of king lists, which shows that things have always been so, is a claim to inherit exclusive legitimacy from equally exclusive predecessors.

But no Shang or Zhou king ruled the whole of civilized China, nor was political change in ancient China driven by Heaven. On the contrary, both Heaven and its mandate were created by humans with human motives. To the extent that received history is a story edited or invented to substantiate an ideology, the story, like the ideology, has a history of composition. What pre-ceded the formulations we know from transmitted texts? Key terms occur in early Zhou bronze inscriptions, but in passages too brief to explain how their authors understood them. In these inscriptions we encounter the first mentions of Heaven (tian, a deity not mentioned in the Anyang oracle inscriptions, and an anthropomorphic one to judge by the graph used to write the word), its mandate or command or appointment (ming), and the title “Heaven’s son” (tian zi). A Zhou defeat of Shang is mentioned, and we read also that Heaven withdrew its support from Shang because of the drunkenness of Shang officials (incorrect performance of rituals?). Despite the relationship suggested by the title “Heaven’s son,” Heaven seems not to support a dynasty unconditionally. Apart from sober rituals, however, there is no mention of what it (or should we be saying “he”?) looks for in a king. To judge by the oracle inscriptions, the Anyang king’s success in all the affairs of state depended on his sacrifices; his ancestors do not seem to have required any other virtue from him. What Heaven required from the Zhou king may have been similar.

Two key elements of later formulations are not visible in the bronze inscriptions. One is the Xia dynasty. No Shang or Zhou inscription speaks of a dynasty before Shang.35 The earliest mentions of Xia are in texts written or edited more than a thousand years after the time it is sup-posed to have existed, and they mention it only to give the Zhou conquest a moral precedent: “Zhou overthrew Shang because Shang declined in virtue, just as Shang overthrew Xia when Xia declined in virtue.”

The other element missing from the inscriptions is an ethical concept of royal virtue. The inscriptions give no hint that royal legitimation was in the hands of moral philosophers. In

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transmitted texts, by contrast, continued possession of the mandate is contingent on the king’s virtue (de), and virtue is defined in moral terms, for instance as benevolent rule or concern for the well-being of the common people. In this form the ideology seems designed not for the king but for ministers exhorting kings. Was an ideology that originally required nothing from the king but service to the god at some point hijacked by ministers? When was an early Zhou claim to inherit from Shang elaborated into a cyclic theory of history? When and how were the complexities of the second millennium world reduced to a moralizing fable of good first kings and bad last ones, the “consensus history” of the transmitted texts?36

Such questions were not easy to ask before archaeology gave us glimpses of an alternative past. Archaeology in China began as an exploration of a traditional narrative, which it sought to confirm and amplify, but what has happened over the last half-century is an almost impercepti-ble transformation of its mission.37 From exploring the world described in the texts it has shifted to exploring the wider world that produced the texts. It is this rather than verification that is archaeology’s gift to the historian of ancient China.

Notes

1 Something of the flavor of this project, which announced its conclusions in 2000, can be got from six articles devoted to it in the Journal of East Asian Archaeology vol. 4 (2002). See also Thorp 2006: 23–5.

2 In this practice there lurks the danger that using Anyang as our standard for dating tempts us to think of Anyang as the source of the things being dated. It is a slippery slope from making correlations with Anyang to assuming derivation from Anyang.

3 By comparison, for example, with the early cuneiform corpus from Mesopotamia, which is also more diverse in content and authorship. The entire Anyang oracle-bone corpus can be transcribed in one volume of moderate size. In Mesopotamia more than 80,000 administrative documents have been published from the one century of the Ur III dynasty alone (2112–2004 bc).

4 This is a truism that historians embarrassingly often forget. Osborne (2003: 623) reminds us with an example: “Such accounts as we have of [Greek] religion as a ‘system’ almost all stem from philosophers keen to argue for a particular theological or philosophical position. Notoriously, for example, our full-est account of the rationale of animal sacrifice comes from a treatise advocating vegetarianism.” For all its shortcomings, the material record is free of such agendas. As a distinguished biblical scholar put it: “The Bible presents historical events in the light of a very specific religious interpretation, which archaeological situations do not possess” (H.J. Franken, quoted in Moorey 1991: 134). As for received texts transmitted to us from the Han period, they have been altered by Han editors to an extent that we have no way of estimating. Suppose that we had a Han editor’s transcription of an early Western Zhou inscription, the inscription of a now lost bronze vessel for instance. Even if we make the assumption – for which we have no evidence – that the editor’s intention was exact fidelity, could we trust him to have understood the inscription perfectly? Could we trust his choice of character forms? When Han editors added determinatives to the characters of pre-Han texts, they were interpreting. Can we be sure that our anonymous Han editor understood the inscription on the bronze as well as, say, Chen Mengjia would have?

5 P.R.S. Moorey’s A Century of Biblical Archaeology (Moorey 1991) offers much food for thought. See also Schaberg 2001 and, on the archaeologist’s longing for human narratives, Wang Haicheng 2013.

6 See M. I. Finley and the scholars responding to him in Finley et al. 1964. Most ancient cities burned to the ground more than once; archaeologists are seldom able to determine the cause of a fire. After more than a century of fervid claims for the truth of Homer, the cool agnosticism of the most recent scholarship is sobering (Jablonka 2011). Ancient texts that purport to be factual can, like modern nov-els, be fictions set in places that are real and elaborated around the names of people who really existed (Baines 2011 is instructive here, especially pp. 68–9). Though textual scholars often claim to be able to separate the “kernel of fact” from the “fictional embellishments,” they cannot give us a rule for doing so. Of course, for the reader who believes the text, archaeological proof is not really required. The believer accepts the narrative and goes to archaeology only for illustrations (a picture of a ruined wall).

7 Moorey (1991: 93–4) gives a spectacular example of complete fusion, and confusion, of biblical text and archaeology: no summary or sample can give the flavor of the paragraphs he quotes. Parallels in the

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literature of Chinese archaeology – passages in which it is impossible to guess what evidence, or even what form of evidence, lies behind particular statements – would be easy to find.

8 What archaeologists call a culture or an assemblage is generally defined as “a constellation of mate-rial traits that occur together consistently at different sites.” On the archaeological culture, its relation to pottery, and its interpretation in social terms, for example as the material expression of an ethnic group or a polity, see Trigger 1974; Wang Haicheng 2014b; Li Yung-ti 2014: 139–41. In archaeologi-cal parlance, Liangzhu is the type site of the Liangzhu culture, the site whose artifactual assemblage is taken to define the culture. In principle an assemblage can include everything from jades to buildings to burial forms, but in practice pottery is the archaeologist’s most reliable type fossil, for it is ubiquitous, indestructible, and variable enough in form and fabric to be a sensitive register of time and place. When archaeologists speak of “cultural remains” they often mean no more than “potsherds.” If pottery resem-bling that of the Liangzhu site is found at another site, the new site is said to be a site of the Liangzhu culture.

9 For the early history of oracle-bone studies see Li Chi 1977: chapters 1–2. For a general introduction to the inscriptions see Keightley 1999.

10 Li Ji describes the 1928–37 excavations in Li Chi 1977. For a summary account of those and later exca-vations see Bagley 1999: 180–208. See also Jing Zhichun et al. 2013 (especially for Huanbei); Thorp 2006; Liu & Chen 2012: chapter 10; Wang Haicheng 2015.

11 Cultural contact was under discussion already while the Anyang excavations were going on. When painted pottery that resembled Neolithic pottery from the Near East was found in northwest China in the early 1920s, it was widely taken to be of western origin; some equated it with the Xia dynasty. When distinctly different pottery was found at a site on the east coast in 1931, Li Ji and others took it to represent an indigenous contribution to the formation of Chinese civilization. See Bagley 1999: 127–30 and Bagley 2014.

12 Wang Haicheng 2015: 154. In Egypt and Mesopotamia the use of administrative forms as patterns for display inscriptions is well known.

13 On the Erligang site and civilization see Bagley 1999: 165–71; Steinke 2014a; Yuan Guangkuo 2013; Liu and Chen 2012: chapter 8; Thorp 2006: chapter 2.

14 On the origin of the Chinese writing system see Bagley 2004 and Bagley 2014: 43–5; on chariots and domesticated horses, Bagley 1999.

15 On the Erlitou site and civilization see Bagley 1999: 158–65; Liu and Chen 2012: chapter 8; Xu Hong 2013; Thorp 2006: chapter 1. On the Erlitou bronze industry and its relation to Erligang see Bagley 2014: 38–40. On Yanshi Shangcheng see Yuan Guangkuo 2013: 325–6, 328–9; Liu and Chen 2012: 278–80; Thorp 2006: 22–3, 67–73.

16 Liu and Chen (2012: 271) have recently advocated detaching Erlitou archaeology from Xia, but this remains a minority view; the Xia Shang Zhou Chronology Project has given state sanction to the three dynasties of textual tradition. On the dynastic model in second millennium archaeology see Li Yung-ti 2014.

17 Wang Haicheng 2014b: 68. 18 On Shandong see Fang Hui 2013; Liu and Chen 2012: 363–7; Bagley 1999: 219–21. 19 On the Panlongcheng site and the Erligang expansion see Bagley 1999: 168–71; Steinke 2014a, espe-

cially the chapters by Zhang Changping, Wang Haicheng, and John Baines (and, for copper mines, pp. 166–8 in the chapter by Steinke); and Liu and Chen 2012: 284–90. On Erligang in the north see Lin Yün 1986.

20 On Sanxingdui see Bagley 1999: 212–19; Bagley 2001; Sun Hua 2013. The city is believed to have declined around the eleventh century bc. A site called Jinsha in modern Chengdu is thought to be a successor.

21 Some scholars have insisted that the Zhengzhou king kept bronze casting a royal monopoly, prohibiting its spread beyond the capital to places like Panlongcheng, but this seems to be an a priori conviction, not an inference from evidence. At no point in the Bronze Age is a monopoly of metal technology visible in the archaeological record. Some of the finest Xingan castings are indisputably local. If the mastery of Erligang art and technology they display did not come from a place like Panlongcheng, 300 km to the north, where did it come from?

22 On the Xingan find and its implications see Bagley 1999: 171–5; Peng Shifan 2004; Steinke 2014b. 23 Notice that all these mechanisms are biased in favor of spectacular discoveries: construction crews do

not halt work because an exceptionally observant worker has noticed some clay mold fragments. The oft-repeated claim that bronzes cannot have been cast in the south because clay molds for them have

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not been found in the south is the most dubious of arguments ex silentio. It could be countered by observing that molds for southern bronzes have not been unearthed in the north either. Does this mean that they were cast nowhere?

24 On the lower Yangtze region see Steinke 2014b; on tuned sets, Bagley 2005: 79–83 and Bagley 2015: 67–73.

25 As late as 1997, a senior bronze specialist assigned Hunan nao to the Chunqiu period – i.e. eighth to fifth century bc – because he could see no place for them in the second millennium. When the same scholar exhibited the contents of the Xingan tomb at the Shanghai Museum in 1992, he left the three nao out of the exhibition. Even scholars who believe southern nao to be southern castings have usually assumed that they descend from Anyang ancestors and that they postdate those ancestors by whatever time seems necessary to account for a dramatic increase in size.

26 The recognition of civilized Anyang-period cultures in the south is owed to Virginia Kane (1974), who drew particular attention to the large bells that connect them all and distinguish them from the civili-zation of the north. Her work is updated in Bagley 1987, introduction, section 1.12, and Bagley 1999: 208–12; see also Steinke 2014b.

27 Baines 2014. 28 Rawson 1989. See also Bagley 1999: 226–31. 29 For connections between the Wei valley, the Hanzhong region of southern Shaanxi, and Xingan in

Jiangxi, see Bagley 1999: 178–80. 30 On the functions of Anyang writing see Wang Haicheng 2014a, especially chapters 4 and 6, and Wang

Haicheng 2015. On the role of functional context in the invention of writing see Damerow 1999; Postgate 1994: chapter 3; Bagley 2004. Scholars inattentive to the preservation bias of the archaeological record and unaware of what is involved in the development of full writing have sometimes suggested that our sample of early writing is complete – that writing was invented in the reign of Wu Ding and used only at Anyang and only for divination. For reasons suggested earlier and laid out in detail in the works just cited, this cannot be so.

31 Wang Haicheng 2014a: 50, Text 2.6. 32 On king lists in Mesopotamia and Egypt see Michalowski 2011 and Baines 2011. On king lists in gen-

eral see Wang Haicheng 2014a: chapters 1 and 2. 33 In other words, Sima Qian’s possession of a king list does not tell us whether other chronicles ever

existed. Shaughnessy (2011: 391) speculates that Western Zhou royal archives might have contained royal speeches and “sagas,” including “a year-by-year annalistic history with entries similar to the great-event notations found in bronze inscriptions” (on lists of year names compare Bagley 2004: 223, and Baines 2011: 57–9). But the ancient history recounted in transmitted texts does not seem to me to have the flavor of genuinely early annals or great-event year names (cf. Postgate 1994: 40). It reads more like a king list embroidered with invented anecdotes of the didactic/argumentative kind discussed in Schaberg 2011.

34 Michalowski 2011: 15. 35 One middle Western Zhou bronze inscription, that of the Bin gong xu, mentions the controller of floods

Yu, who in transmitted texts figures as the founder of the Xia dynasty. If the Xia story was elaborated around an already established culture hero, this would fit a familiar pattern in Chinese mythologizing.

36 See Wang Haicheng 2014a: chapter 2. Knoblock 1990 uses the term “consensus history” for the story of the past that was taken for granted by late Zhou and Han writers. His handy reconstruction of that history is marred by his enthusiasm for declaring parts of it to be vindicated by archaeology (and even by astronomy: claims that transfers of the mandate coincided with celestial events seem to accept that the heavens really do intervene in history – though only in Chinese history). The usefulness of the story Knoblock reconstructs lies in the fact that it was widely believed by late Zhou and Han writers. Whether we too should believe it is a question best kept separate.

37 On changes in the thinking of archaeologists see Li Yung-ti 2014.

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