Where Was The World: Shang Dynasty
Shang Dynasty:
Let’s begin by setting the stage. To put it like the colloquial hockey-playing Canadian teenager, the rest of the world was buzzing while the Jews were enslaved in Egypt. We just don’t tend to talk about anything more than a thousand kilometres outside the Levant region.
Moshe hit that rock and wasn’t allowed into the land of Israel, but no one said anything against hopping onto a high-speed camel and heading 6,000 kilometres east for in China. It’s unlikely that he and the Jewish people would have been welcomed, but history opens a big what-ifs can of worms.
Around the year 1600 BCE, the Shang Dynasty was formed. The dynasty ruled over the Yellow River Valley for over 550 years, before the Zhou Dynasty, a rival kingdom, overthrew the Shang in the Battle of Muye around 1046 BCE. This half-millennium was a cornerstone of Chinese civilization, characterized by advances in bronze metallurgy, written language, and political structure.
Ancient Chinese political structure consisted of a kingdom with some sort of pseudo-feudal structure, where a network of city-states was centred around a capital. The king would rule from the capital, which would move from time to time. The king would delegate power to local rulers (rulers tended to be clan leaders or tribal chief), who would manage outlying regions, owing allegiance to the king.
If you weren’t a noble or an aristocrat, you didn’t get off as easily. Most of the population were peasants and laborers, often farmers, who worked the land owned by nobles. These classes were heavily taxed to support military campaigns and construction projects. Slavery was also common, where slaves captured during military campaigns against rival tribes or neighboring regions were used for labor and sacrifices.
Among the king’s roles pertaining to maintaining order amongst the regions, and leading both the state and religious practice, he also acted as supreme military leader. Archeological evidence suggests that warfare during this period was characterized by chariots and bronze weapons. This period marked the final stretch of the bronze age, and arguably the greatest abuse of bronze to institute power in battle and government.
China during the Shang Dynasty had incredible bronze technology. Bronze is an alloy of 8 parts copper to 1 part tin, and was used to fashion weapons, parts of chariots, and ritual vessels, which all played an important role in the material culture of the time. China had long been casting and welding bronze to produce works of incredible beauty as well as utility. During the Shang Dynasty, however, China introduced a piece-mold method of casting, distinct from the lost-wax method commonly used in the Middle East at the time.
As the name suggests, lost-wax casting was a casting method implemented by creating a clay mold around a wax sculpture. Once the clay had hardened, the wax was melted, leaving a hollow cavity for the molten bronze. After the bronze had cooled, the mold was destroyed to reveal the cast object. This method allowed for intricate shapes, but due to the necessary destruction of the mold to retrieve the casted bronze, the method was difficult to scale. Piece-mold casting was a solution best-fit for scalability. To cast bronze via piece-mold, a clay or stone model of the desired object is created, then a mold is made by pressing soft clay around the model. Once hardened, the mold is cut into pieces to remove the model, then the mold is reassembled and secured together to create the desired cavity for the bronze cast. Bronze is then poured into this new cavity. The cast is then separated to reveal the hardened bronze object, but with this method, the object used to create the mold is preserved, and the mold can also be reused, allowing for a new wave of repeatable precision designs.
The Dynasty used their bronze-casting prowess to arm its soldiers with weapons (tipped spears, swords, and arrowheads to name a few), craft parts for state-of-the-art chariots at scale, and decorate its nobles and elite with beautiful bronze pots and equipment.
Science and technology flourished in a handful of areas. China developed chariot technology under the dynasty, studied astronomy, advanced agriculture, and developed a sophisticated system of writing, often referred to as oracle bone script, that is continued to this day.
Writing in the Shang Dynasty emerged as a tool for ritual and divination, primarily used to communicate with the divine or ancestral spirits. This writing is said to have likely evolved from earlier symbolic or proto-writing systems, as seen in Neolithic pottery markings. Shang writing is said to come from oracle bones as the predominant medium, where turtle shells or ox scapulae were used for divination. The king was seen as the chief mediator with the divine, and diviners worked under the king’s direction and performed much of the technical work involved in divination. This system of writing used pictograms for representing objects (e.g., a sun symbol for “sun”), ideograms for representing abstract concepts (e.g., a pair of lines to mean “above”), and used compound characters that would combine elements to create more complex meanings (e.g., a tree and a sun together to mean “east”).
By the end of the dynasty, thousands of distinct characters were used, primarily for recording royal genealogies and events, agricultural schedules, religious rituals and sacrifices, and warfare and hunting activities. Bronze vessels were also a less common medium for writing, where inscriptions often commemorated important events or honored ancestors. Other materials, such as bamboo or silk, may have been used for writing but have not survived due to their perishability.
This writing system was the underpinning of religion at the time. Oracle bones were used for ancestor worship, which was a central aspect of Shang religion. Ancestors were believed to influence the living and mediate with deities. Animal and human sacrifices were also conducted to appease spirits, deities, and ancestors, especially during rituals involving the king.
The Shang Dynasty also set the precedent for urban development at the time. The way the cities functioned as centers of power, culture, and governance in ancient China and had broader influences on the concept of urbanization globally. While the Shang’s influence was most direct in the development of East Asia, its urban planning principles and practices reflected broader trends in the evolution of early cities worldwide. The Shang constructed fortified cities with earthen walls for defense purposes, royal palaces, and ceremonial platforms dedicated to ancestor worship and rituals which highlighted the connection between governance and spirituality.
These cities served as administrative, religious, and military hubs. There was no separation between church and state. Urban centers served as markets for the exchange of goods like bronze tools, weapons, and luxury items. Artisans and craftspeople, including bronze workers and potters, were concentrated in cities, making urban areas centers of technological and cultural innovation.
Then by the late 11th century BCE, the Shang faced internal strife, economic challenges, and external threats. In 1046 BCE, The Zhou Dynasty, a rival kingdom, overthrew the Shang in the Battle of Muye. According to tradition, the last Shang king, King Zhou (Di Xin), was a tyrannical ruler whose mismanagement contributed to the dynasty’s downfall.
The Shang Dynasty laid the foundation for many aspects of Chinese civilization, including centralized rule, written language, and religious practices. Much of this influence was absorbed into global civilization. This dynasty marked the beginning of a continuous historical record in China, with the Shang’s achievements influencing the succeeding Zhou Dynasty and all subsequent Chinese dynasties.