7 replies to this topic

[l0ckx]

in Valerie Hansens's The Open Empire (p33), she states,

"The oracle bones allude to a devine hierarchy headed by the supreme deity Di, who controlled the outcomes of battles. other important gods controlled the Yellow River and Mountains. Underneath Di and the nature gods stood the ancestors of the royal family. The long-dead outranked the more recently dead, who in turn outranked the Shang king. Because the Shang believed one could communicate more easily with those in nearby tiers, the king could not approach Di directly, but he could communicate with his recently dead kin in a reciprocal relationship. the king needed their help to rule, but they needed his offerings, sometimes numbering several hundred cattle to stay powerful. The king made offerings to his ancestors in a specific ceremony. because the junior and senior ancestral spirits also had a similar relationship, the newly dead ancestors were then thought to perform the same ceremony for their more senior kin. Only the senior kin could pass on the king's request to Di."

and

"According to the oracle bones, the Shang king ranked first in human society. As the head of the royal lineage, he conducted sacrifices to the ancestors from which he, and other members of the lineage, claimed descent. Although modern Chinese are justly famous for their strong sense of family, one looks in vain for information about family structure under the Shang. The little evidence that survives pertains to the royal house, and historians of the period use the term lineage to denote a group of people claiming descent from a common ancestor. It is quite possible that different family structures coexisted in different regions and even within the Shang kingdom..."

1. what were the names of the nature gods?
2. was the king the only one who believed in his ancestors being able to "help" him?
3. Did commoners partake in any oracle bone divinations, sacrfices, ancestor worship, or praying?

Why different family structures do you suppose existed and how was land distributed? Feudal system, like the zhou?

[lifezard]

dear lockxx

1. what were the names of the nature gods?

this might not be a perfect answer , but the nature gods i think will be 土 'tu' or earth (相土 in shiji）, 河 ‘he' river particularly the yellow river, 岳 'yue' mountain and 冥 ‘ming'

2. was the king the only one who believed in his ancestors being able to "help" him?

do u mean particularly divination by oracle bones? if so, at least at anyang, we only have evidence of oracle bones by the king... howver, oracle bones are also found st other sites not least pre-dynastic zhou

3. Did commoners partake in any oracle bone divinations, sacrfices, ancestor worship, or praying?

Why different family structures do you suppose existed and how was land distributed? Feudal system, like the zhou?

can't answer on 3. but i would supposed that the shang had a sort of system mildly similar to zhou (feudal u would say?).. i can't say more for now

[l0ckx]

can't answer on 3. but i would supposed that the shang had a sort of system mildly similar to zhou (feudal u would say?).. i can't say more for now

so you're saying that the shang had feudal lords as well? maybe they paid tribute or their services at times of war for the king? This would lead me to ask, was there private ownership of lands during the shang, or did the king lay claim to it all?

[lifezard]

so you're saying that the shang had feudal lords as well? maybe they paid tribute or their services at times of war for the king? This would lead me to ask, was there private ownership of lands during the shang, or did the king lay claim to it all?

I think 1st of all, the Shang, as were the Zhou definitely regarded all the land under the Heaven as being the property of the King, all things as belonging to the King the Shang in spite of the smaller domain they ruled... that s ideology of course... which is not necessarily true in practice

as for the feudal system, from the oracle bone records sub-lineages of the royal clan were definitely enfeoffed in towns and received land and slaves from the kings, like the Zhou times, then there were also clans or tribes also.. notably the Si clan of Xia times survived well into the Zhou times.. there was no reason to assume they did not exist durng Shang times

the one difference though I thought was that Shang king was much more in control of his lords than the Zhou ever did (even during the heydays of western Zhou), the sub-clans and foreign tribes never became powerful enough to challenge Shang until Zhou appeared...and that is one strength i thought Shang had over the Zhou

[Kenneth]

3. Did commoners partake in any oracle bone divinations, sacrfices, ancestor worship, or praying?

It seems most likely there would be lower end prayers or humble rituals since this is only human, but true ritual vessels were the trappings of the elite in the Shang period. The huge expenditure in bronze of the complex and ornate vessels meant that only people of authority could commision them. The large bronzes of this period are even more dramatic than in later periods when rituals might be enacted on a smaller scale with more humble sets of vessels.
This grand and large aspect of Shang bronzes is thought to be because the vessels were viewed from a distance (this being suggested by Jeesica Rawson IIRC), and hence large and bold was important.** Later smaller vessel and simplified versions came about over the period of the Zhou suggesting more household affairs.
In the Shang period both in terms of cost of bronze, and the ancestral ruling families function, and this theory of the larger vessels being used in viewed-group rituals, it means such was out of the reach of commoners.
The 'chain of command' that was just outlined suggests a commoner even with all the trappings would have little means or effect in petitioning the primary dieties or the supreme god via his low class ancestors about his petty concerns.
Royal authority could hinge on this ability to communicate on behalf of their people. This concept would not be unlike the Mayan nobility. It is also a way of elevating yourself above the common masses and justifying an elavated status like a priesthood in the middle-ages.
The oracle ones deal with affairs of state through to royal hunts. Although scapulmancy was practiced before the Shang and may have even been attempted by commoners with a firebrand and a bone the complex and extravagent rituals, as well as appealing to the spirits on anything of consequence, would most certainly be the exclusive domain of the well-resourced and the mighty.


**
Large bronze vessel (Ding)

Shaanxi museum, my wife & retired senior curator Mr. Wang.

[Kenneth]

Francois just sent me this;

Just a small observation about the two pictures you posted on the Shang thread... The second one (which your wife watches) is a Ding, but the first one should probably better be called Fangding, ie square ding, as Dings are usually tripods.

[Tan Wei]

I thought that it was only Shamans and Kings that could worship Di?Much of Chinese history says that only the Emperors could only worship God.

[somechineseperson]

On the differences between the Shang and the Zhou:

The Zhou Dynasty was, most scholars now agree, an aristocratic-feudal state. Though it was still somewhat different from early European feudalism in two principal ways:

1) clear, explicit private ownership did not develop strongly during the early Zhou, the elements of public or collective ownership was more prominent.

2) early Zhou feudalism was "more primitive" than early European feudalism. (Note however that early Zhou China was the world's earliest feudal society, predating European feudalism by 1500 years) It still possessed a lot of "primitive communist" elements in some areas, e.g. most "natural products" of the forests and mountains belonged to everyone for free. (Later Confucian scholars were not completely wrong for harking back to the Western Zhou as an "ideal age", because it really did have some "primitive communist" elements that were completely lost by the era of brutal warfare during the Warring States)

Theoretically in both the Shang and the Zhou the monarch owned all land. However, in practice the Zhou king's hold over his territories was more loose and Zhou China was consequently more "federalised" into local and regional units. This is however, when viewed from a progressive historiographical perspective, a social and political advance relative to the Shang, not a weakness. Due to its stronger element of feudal organisation, Zhou China as a whole possessed significantly more power than Shang China and in the early centuries of the Western Zhou period, China was able to expand its territory from Gansu in the west to Shandong in the east, and from modern-day Beijing in the north to the Yangtze valley in the south, and was able to politically controlled these areas in a firmer way.

Of course, by the start of the Eastern Zhou, the much looser feudal structures had initiated a period of civil war lasting centuries. Yet in the larger scheme of things this eventually paved way for the rise of bureaucratic-feudalism in China (a form of feudalism superior to both Zhou feudalism and European feudalism, in fact, historically Chinese bureaucratic-feudalism from the Qin to the Qing was the most advanced form of feudalism in human history) with the unification of the country under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BCE.

Another difference is that the late Shang had significantly more slaves than the Zhou ever did, as one can witness from the large number of human sacrifices at Anyang, which were absent at the early Western Zhou sites at Haojing. The late Shang was an early slavery society, but before it could develop further (if it did, eventually it would progress into something more akin to later Greco-Roman slavery society), it was finished off by Zhou feudalism.

In terms of cultural super-structure, there was a very significant shift in political theology from the Shang to the Zhou. Pedantically, one could say both the Shang and the Zhou believed in the same "high god", i.e. Di or Shang Di, since the logograph for Di appears in Zhou-era writing as well. But during the Zhou, the "high god" was mostly referred to as Heaven, or "Tian", which only appeared very rarely on Shang oracle bones. This suggests that the Zhou idea of God was much more naturalistic and inclusive, initiating the beginnings of natural-philosophical inquiry into nature. Also, the Zhou introduced the concept of the Mandate of Heaven into political philosophy, which was very progressive at the time. There was also a fundamental change in the method of divination, from oracle bone and shell to Yijing and yallow sticks, which are much more mathematised and systematic, and also in the predominant form of writing medium and style employed, from oracle bone script inscribed on bones and shells in a more "erratic" manner during the Shang to bronze script inscribed on bronzeware in a more neat manner during the early Zhou.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia....ndate_of_Heaven

Edited by somechineseperson, 29 April 2009 - 07:32 PM.