Early China: A Social and Cultural History
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4 K. C. Chang, Shang Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 90–99.
5 For instance, in 1975, Virginia Kane first proposed to identify all eleven tombs with either two or four ramps with the eleven Shang kings from Pan Geng (King 18) to Di Yi (King 28), leaving the unfinished tomb no. 1567 to have been prepared for the last king, Di Xin, who was killed by the invading Zhou army. See Virginia Kane, “A Re-examination of An-yang Archaeology,” Ars Orientalis 10 (1975), 103–106, 108–110. K. C. Chang, while agreeing on the basic point that both tombs with two ramps and those with four are royal tombs, regarded the two zones of the cemetery as having contained the burials of the alternative generations of Shang kings starting with Pan Geng (west zone: generations 1, 3, 5, 7; east zone: generations 2, 4, 6). See Chang, Shang Civilization, pp. 187–188.
6 To be more specific, in this system: 1001 (Wu Ding) → 1550 (Zu Geng) → 1400 (Zu Jia) → 1004 (Ling Xin) →1002 (Kang Ding) → 1500 (Wu Yi) → 1217 (Wen Ding) → 1003 (Di Yi) → 1567 (Ding Xin).
7 See Roderick B. Campbell, Zhipeng Li, Yuling He, and Yuan Jing, “Consumption, Exchange and Production at the Great Settlement Shang: Bone-Working at Tiesanlu, Anyang,” Antiquity 85 (2011), 1279–1297.
8 On the discovery of Lady Hao’s tomb, see Elizabeth Childs-Johnson, “Excavation of Tomb No. 5 at Yinxu, Anyang,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 15.3 (1983), 3–125.
9 Max Loehr, “Bronze Styles of the Anyang Period,” Archives of Chinese Art Society of America 7 (1953), 42–53.
10 Robert Thorp, “The Archaeology of Style at Anyang: Tomb 5 in Context,” Archives of Asian Art 41 (1988), 47–69.
11 A “diviner group” is a group of names identified as diviners who usually pose the charge in the inscriptions on the same shell or bone. The significance of the role of the diviners is discussed in detail in Chapter 5.
12 Anyang Work Team of the Institute of Archaeology, CASS, “Survey and Text Excavation of the Huanbei Shang City in Anyang,” Chinese Archaeology 4 (2004), 1–28.
13 Oriental Archaeology Research Center of Shandong University et al., “Inscribed Oracle Bones of the Shang Period Unearthed from the Daxinzhuang Site in Jinan City,” Chinese Archaeology 4 (2004), 29–33.
14 See Robert Thorp, China in the Early Bronze Age: Shang Civilization (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 107–116.
5 Cracking the secret bones: literacy and society in late Shang
With the arrival of the late Shang with its political center relocated to the south of the Huan River in Anyang, the study of Early China has gained another footing – contemporary written evidence. We are now able to understand the past not only through the material remains it has left behind and to a limited degree through the retrospective documentation produced by later generations, but also through the eyes of the protagonists of history. The perspectives offered by such written evidence, though not without bias (as is true for all records which are the products of the human mind), are unparalleled in the sense that they are both the eyewitness record of the time they speak about, and also the least ambiguous presentation of events and institutions that are usually not directly evident in the material remains. In the case of the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions, particularly because they were the divination records of the Shang kings, they offer especially rich information about the concerns and activities of the king and the operation of the Shang royal court. But there are other areas in which we can only expect that they remain silent.
Writing and Social Contexts
For a very long time, the oracle-bone inscriptions from Anyang were regarded as the earliest system of writing in China. While this assumption has been challenged by the recent finding of possible writing forms on Neolithic pottery shards (Chapter 2), it nevertheless remains true that a precursor stage of the oracle-bone inscriptions has not yet been uncovered. Therefore, the perceived “sudden” emergence of the oracle-bone inscriptions raises a number of important questions. The first question is about the developmental history of the oracle-bone scripts. The majority position holds that because the oracle-bone scripts are a fully functioning system of writing, it must have taken centuries for writing to have reached this point of maturity. This view is widely held by most Chinese and Japanese scholars and by many in the West. The opposing position is that, as is true for any system of writing, the oracle-bone scripts are governed by strictly formational rules. As soon as such rules are invented and the principle of writing is learned, the whole system can be generated according to these rules in a relatively short period of time, perhaps over a few generations.1 While future archaeological discovery can probably bring this debate to a close, the recent discovery of multiple graphs written on the pottery jars from a site dated to the middle Shang period,2 most likely a sacrificial center located near the south bank of the Yellow River to the north of Zhengzhou, has at least brought to light the fact that writing was actually in use in the pre-Anyang period.
The more fundamental question is about the social contexts of writing. Because of the “sudden” appearance of the oracle-bone inscriptions as divination records that emerged from religious contexts, a strong view has been that writing at its initial stage performed mainly religious roles in China, in contrast, for instance, to the economic roles of writing in Mesopotamia or perhaps political roles in Egypt. From this perspective, it can even be argued that the need to convey messages to the spirits might have provided the first cause of the rise of writing in China. Moreover, it has been suggested by some that even the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou period, cast on the so-called “ritual vessels,” were actually messages addressed to the ancestral spirits, and this further strengthens the religious role of writing in China.3 However, in recent years, scholars have attempted to achieve new and fuller understanding of the social roles of writing in Early China. David Keightley has argued that during the late Shang a considerable amount of writing would not have been focused primarily on ritual and cult, and that a culture so capable of producing self-referential inscriptions on bones, bronzes, or ceramics must have been able to produce other types of writings referring to events that happened independently of the act and object of inscription.4 The latter point was discussed more fully by Robert Bagley who has suggested a number of contexts in which the writing might have been employed in later Shang such as communication between Anyang and the outlying cites of Shang, listing of people and goods, recording trade, royal campaigns, and hunting, and certainly family genealogy.5 Although there is a complete lack of evidence for writing related to these activities during late Shang, it has been sufficiently demonstrated that the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou time do offer a good number of references to written documents used in administrative, commercial, and other social contexts independent of religious purpose.6 Therefore, it is safe to say that despite their huge numbers, the oracle-bone inscriptions offer only a limited view of Shang society, a large part of which is still absent from the written records we have.
The language reflected by the oracle bones, hence the languages spoken by at least the elite population in Anyang, was characteristically Sinitic;7 that is, an archaic form of single-syllabic languages that is spoken today in its various regional dialectic forms in modern China. The scripts used on the oracle bones represent an important early stage of development of the Chinese writing system, exhibiting morphological principles that can be observed in the modern forms of Chinese characters. On the oracle bones, the graphs were hand-carved and display a higher level of freedom in writing than the inscriptions on Shang and Western Zhou bronzes. It is not unusual for anyone who is familiar with modern traditional Chinese characters to make out the meaning of a few graphs in the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions, but informed reading and comprehension of the contents of oracle-bone records demands considerable professional training. It has been recently argued that during the Shang, the learning of writing seems to have taken place within the context of individual workshops that served the
Shang king for the purpose of producing and preserving the divinatory records.8
Royal and Non-Royal Divinatory Traditions
The materials that were used for divination were of two kinds: (1) animal shoulder blades (scapulae), mostly from cattle, with some water buffalo; (2) turtle shell (plastron), which was the material used for the majority of divinations. The use of both types of materials for divinatory purposes goes back far in history with bones accounting for most of the cases during the Longshan period; the earliest divinatory use of turtle shells is found in Jiahu, dating back to the pre-Yangshao period (c. 6500–5500 BC). While there are good reasons to suppose that the shoulder blades of cattle used by the royal diviners were drawn from local sources, studies have shown that a large proportion of the turtle shells found in Anyang might have been imported from the far-outlying regions in the south.9 Before these materials could be used for divination, they were carefully prepared. In the case of cattle shoulder blades, the round joint was cut off and the long spine on the back of the bone was trimmed. In the case of plastrons, of which only the flat bottom shell is usable, the bridges connecting the top shell were carefully cut off. In both cases, oval holes intercepted on one side by a round hole would be carved out on the back of the bone or shell, making them ready for divination.
In the process of actual divination, a diviner would first pose a charge, or a question that makes clear the subject to be divined about. After this, a metal stick would be heated in fire to a high degree; when the metal stick touched the joint of the oval and round holes smoke would rise and the heat would necessarily produce a crack in the shape of the Chinese character bu 卜 (“to divine”) on the front of the bone or shell (Fig. 5.1). Then, in the case of royal divination, it was the king who would examine the crack and make the relevant prognostication. Afterwards, inscriptions would be carved onto the surface of the bone or plastron in places near the relevant cracks. Very often, the charges were posed in two ways – positive and negative – as the inscriptions that record the charges were placed on the opposing sides of the plastron, a phenomenon rarely appearing on the bones. It is also common that multiple pairs of charges could be posed (sometimes three or four times) with regard to a single matter, and the sequence of the charges can be well established by examining the date records in inscriptions that repeat the same content of divination. These facts became well known after the discovery of the renowned four largely complete plastrons in Anyang in 1929. Thus, a divination inscription in its fully stated form would include four parts: preface, charge, prognostication, and verification.
Example 1 (HJ: 00902): 1. Crack-making on the jimao day (#16), Que divined: “Will it rain?” The king prognosticated: “If it will rain, it will be on a ren day.” On the renwu day (#19), it really did rain.
2. Crack-making on the jimao day (#16), Que divined: “Will it not rain?”
Example 2 (HJ: 06834, large characters) (Fig. 5.1): 1. Crack-making on the guichou day (#50), Zheng divined: “From today to the dingsi day (#54), will we harm Zhou?” The king prognosticated and said: “Down to the dingsi day (#54), we will not harm (them); on the coming jiazi day (#1) we will harm (them).” On the eleventh day, guihai (#60), our chariots did not harm (them); in the dou period between that evening and jiazi (#1), we really harmed (them).
2. Crack-making on the guichou day (#50), Zheng divined: “From today to the dingsi day (#54), will we not harm Zhou?”
Example 3 (HJ: 00641): 1. Crack-making on the guiyou day (#10), Huan divined: “Will the servitors be captured?” The king prognosticated and said: “If they will be captured, it will be on a jia day or a yi day.” On the jiaxu day (#11), the servitors crossed (the river) in boats, and went to Zou. They were not reported. After ten and five days, on the dinghai day (#24), they were shackled. Twelfth month.
2. Crack-making on the guiyou day (#10), Huan divined: “Will the servitors not be captured?”
In the first case, the king’s prognosticated date was proven by the rain on the renwu day (#19).10 In the second case, the Shang chariots really did harm the enemy polity Zhou on the jiazi day (#1) as predicted by the king. In the third case, however, the runaway servitors were caught on neither a jia nor a yi day as the king predicated, but were captured on the dinghai day (#24), which in fact disproved the king’s prognostication. There is always the question about how the Shang king examined the crack and on what basis he made certain decisions, but this remains unknown. Inscriptions that were equipped with verifications are quite rare, and the decision to engrave such verified cases of divination on the shell or bone must have had special political and religious meanings; or certain specific matters may have been more important than others to the Shang king and the Shang state. In fact, the majority of the inscriptions do not even record the king’s prognostication (the rate is 1.2% for the Bin-group diviners), leaving virtually most of the charges unanswered on the bones or shells.11 Keightley takes this as an indication of the purpose of the inscriptions being simply a means to record the divinatory ritual itself that had taken place. However, there are certainly other possibilities. For instance, the king might have preferred his orally expressed prognostications not to be put into written form in order to avoid the possibility that he might be proven wrong, or perhaps the king preferred to keep the decision to himself, not even pronouncing it to the diviners. It was also suggested earlier, by Keightley himself and others, that the divinatory charges on Shang oracle bones and shells might not be questions after all (they should not be rendered as question sentences with “?” marks), but were straightforward statements which purport to command what may happen in the future. If so, there would be no need for prognostication since it is already expressed by the statements as “wishes.” However, there are prognostications on some bones and shells. In short, there are many aspects of the divinatory process that scholars, even with numerous divinatory records at hand, still do not fully understand.
Fig. 5.1 Example of a turtle plastron with divination records (HJ: 06834).
There is a total of some 133,092 pieces of oracle bones or shells available in various collections in or outside China, and nearly a half of them belonged to King Wu Ding, the most powerful Shang king in Anyang. The key to the dating of oracle-bone inscriptions is the name of the diviners; there are some 120 such names recorded on the bones and shells. By checking the occurrences of the names that appear on the same shells, indicating that these diviners had served the Shang king in more or less the same period, Dong Zuobin was able to divide them into five groups. Then, by looking into the temple names of the Shang kings mentioned in the inscriptions, he established dates for the five groups of diviners and the inscriptions engraved in their respective times (Fig. 4.8). With minor revisions of the date of some diviner groups originally proposed by Dong, the five-period scheme has been proven largely accurate in subsequent archaeological excavations and is generally accepted among scholars. This offered a solid ground for the study of Shang history in general as it enabled scholars to date with confidence the sources they use to study a variety of topics within the range of one or two kings.
However, for a long time scholars have suspected that among the existing corpus of oracle-bone inscriptions, there may have been some that were not the records of Shang royal divination, but were records of similar practices by other elites in the Shang capital. This point has now become crystal clear because of the discovery in 1991 (fully published in 2003) of some 1,583 pieces of oracle shells and bones to the east of Huayuanzhuang, south of the palace zone in Anyang (Fig. 5.2). This was the second major discovery of inscribed oracle bones since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the first being the discovery in 1973 of some 5,000 pieces of royal oracle shells within the palace zone. Stratigraphic evidence suggests that the new shells from Huayuanzhuang-east were buried in the late phase of Period I of Anyang according to the periodization of the archaeological remains. But in contrast to the royal divinations, the protagonist, the person who makes freque
nt prognostication on the Huayuanzhuang-east oracle shells, was a certain “Prince” (zi); based on the early date of the pit and the mention of certain names which also appear on the royal divinatory bones and shells, most scholars consider this person to have been a brother of Wu Ding (King 21).
Fig. 5.2 Inscribed turtle plastrons unearthed at Huayuanzhuang-east, 1991.
Thus, the Huayuanzhuang-east oracle bones in fact represent a divinatory tradition outside the mainstream practice by the royal diviners. Fourteen of these non-royal diviners appear on the bones and shells produced for the prince who actually also plays the role of a diviner himself on as many as twenty-six shells – something that the Shang king would never do. In a number of ways, the Huayuanzhuang-east oracle bones are distinctive. For instance, in many charges after the day number and before the character that means “to divine” (bu), terms such as “late afternoon” (ze) and “evening” (xi) would appear to further specify the time of divination within a day; this is not a feature in royal divination. Second, while on the royal bones and shells the inscriptions are placed side by side with the relevant cracks reading downwards, on the Huanyuanzhuang-east shells their layout was quite irregular, and in the majority of the cases, the inscription goes around the relevant crack. Third, the use of the term “used” or “not used” at the end of the divinatory record is very common in Huayuanzhuang-east; this usage is certainly not found on the royal bones and shells from the palace zone. Despite these differences, the ancestors to whom sacrifices are recorded to have been offered are identical to those recorded on the royal divinatory bones.