The First Historical King of China
Around 1200 BC, in China, Shang craftsmen cast bronzes, Shang priests carve bones for divination, and the Shang king rules from Yin
AFTER THE MOVE of the Shang capital to Yin under the wily and flexible P’an Keng, the Shang Dynasty bumped along in more or less silence for a century or so. The next ruler who emerges as a personality is the twenty-second Shang king, Wu Ting, who probably ruled sometime around 1200 BC.
Wu Ting, according to the ancient history Shu ching (written hundreds of years after the fact, but before the time of Sima Qian, who used it as one of his sources), spent his formative years among “lower people,” the poor and the farmers. He then began his rule in complete silence: “He did not speak for three years,” the history tells us. “Afterwards, he was still inclined not to speak, but when he did speak, his words were full of harmonious wisdom. He did not dare to indulge in useless ease, but admirably and tranquilly presided over the regions of Yin until throughout them all, small and great, there was not a single murmur.”1
Silence, followed by taciturnity: this is an unexpected kingly virtue, not unlike P’an Keng’s claim that a shifting capital showed strength rather than weakness. The power of the Shang king during this time clearly did not depend on the kind of might wielded by the Hittite, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Egyptian rulers, with their constant stream of threatening and cajoling letters, their self-puffery, their boasting, their envoys and messengers and diplomats. The Shang authority had some other source.
But like Wu Ting, history is almost silent about the years when the Shang ruled in Yin. Rather than letters and tablets, the Shang left bits and pieces of houses, bones, and bronzes. These tell us something about the Shang way of life. They do not, in the end, tell us a tremendous amount about who the Shang rulers were.
THE MOST FAMOUS Shang artifacts—vessels, weapons, beautifully turned farming tools, ornaments—are those made of cast bronze. They stand as a testament to the Shang ruler’s authority. Like pyramid-building, the casting of bronze needed a king who could force multitudes of men to a nasty and labor-intensive job; in this case, digging ore out of the mines that lay in the hilly country north of the Yellow river.
36.1. Shang Bronze. A Shang cooking vessel, made of bronze from Ningxian, China. Photo credit Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY
The work of the miners and craftsmen produced, in the words of one scholar of ancient China, “one of humankind’s great artistic achievements.”2 No other ancient nation was able to cast bronze into such sophisticated forms.3 Bronze-hafted spears were set with turquoise and topped with blades of white jade; ornate bronze buckles fastened the bridles of horses; bronze masks gave their wearers snarling or comic faces. Vessels for food and wine, the most elaborate of the bronze designs, were shaped like dragons or oxen or other creatures, finished with elaborate patternings and handles. Some are engraved with names, others with signs to show the vessel’s use. Sometimes an inscription makes note of a year, or a festival.
This scattered information, brief though it is, testifies that the Shang people had progressed to using writing. In China, writing developed along the same pattern as in Mesopotamia and Crete: it began as marks of ownership as far back as 4000 BC and then became more complex. But Chinese script seems to have developed in complete independence from writing elsewhere in the ancient world. The earliest Yellow river signs were pictures, but the writing of China was the first to move beyond the pictorial by combining pictures: putting pictorial signs (called “ideograms”) together into “composite ideograms” which represented abstractions and ideas.4
By the time of the Shang court’s establishment at Yin, these “composite ideograms” were sophisticated enough to record divine answers to questions. In the ruins of the Shang capital, archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of signs engraved on bones; these served the Shang court much as entrails later served Greek priests and priestesses. A man or woman who sought guidance went to the Shang court to pose a question to the priests there. The priests brought out the cleaned and dried shoulder bones of cows or sheep (or, occasionally, a turtle shell), carved with patterns or marked with an inscription, and then touched the bone or shell with a heated metal point. When the bone cracked, the path of the crack through the pattern or inscription was “read” by the priests and interpreted as a message, sent by ancestors who now passed their wisdom back to the living. The priest carved the results of the inquiry into the bone or shell, in signs cut by a knife and filled with paint.5
The oracle bones show that the questions, no matter who asked them, were always posed in the name of the king.
THE KING WU TING is praised, by the ancient historian of the Shu ching, for his hard work, for his refusal to sink into luxury, and for the contentment he brought to his people: in all of his reign, “there was not a single murmur.” At the same time, the ancient philosophical text I ching (Book of Changes) describes Wu Ting, approvingly, as going on a three-year campaign against rebellious tribes to the northwest; and seven hundred years later, the Shih ching (Book of Songs), credits him with rule over an improbably enormous land:
Even the inner domain was a thousand leagues….
He opened up new lands as far as the four seas.
Men from the four seas came in homage,
Came in homage, crowd on crowd.6
These two portraits—the humble and hardworking man concerned for his people’s contentment, and the conqueror demanding homage—are oddly in tension. The role of the king seems to be shifting, and the chroniclers are uncertain whether he is to be a spiritual leader, holding to the virtues of the past, or a general taking charge of the country’s future.
We can say, without question, that the Shang king had gained considerably in his power since the move to Yin. In the royal cemetery, a little north of the capital city, the kings were buried in graves that were the reverse of Egypt’s pyramids. Rather than rising into the sky, the graves are enormous pits, dug so deep into the ground that years must have gone into their construction. In these pits are human sacrifices; not the intact bodies of loyal subjects who have gone to their deaths in faith that their king would lead them across the horizon into another world, but decapitated bodies.93 One grave has seventy-three skulls lined along the four ramps that sink down into it, with a cluster of fifty-nine skeletons (minus heads) on the southernmost ramp.7 In Yin itself, archaeologists have uncovered the foundation of an altar where the sacrifices were most likely made.
This suggests a great deal of autocratic authority on the part of the king, particularly since he was able to compel death even after his own. Yet Sima Qian also makes constant mention of court officials and ruling noblemen with clout of their own. Probably the area over which the Shang king exercised his imperiousness was fairly small. On the edges of this, his nobles and officials governed in his name—but acted more or less as they pleased. Farther out lay plains and valleys of settlements where the people sent tribute to the king to avoid arousing his anger, or simply knew that he existed, or perhaps didn’t know that he existed at all until armed men clattered through their village, seizing their goods in the king’s name.
The two conflicting portraits of the king might boil down to a simple reality: the Shang king was the spiritual head of all his people, but his real and earthly power existed inside a much smaller domain. Wu Ting himself could not reign without help. According to Sima Qian, he spent his three-year silence searching for an official who could serve as his right hand. Finally he found the assistant he was looking for: a sage named Fu Yueh, who was working as a common laborer in a city to the east of Yin. Only then did Wu Ting break his silence and take up his role as ruler. The king, his spiritual virtues notwithstanding, had to rely on others to carry out the governing of his people: not just the sage assistant, but also the noblemen who were actually in control of those farther-flung provinces of the Shang kingdom.
But this is all speculation, since the story of Wu Ting is built around frag
ments of bone and bronze, and tales set down a thousand years after the fact.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Rig Veda
Around 1200 BC, the arya of India spread into the river valleys and plains
LIKE THE SHANG DYNASTY OF CHINA, the rulers of India remain just out of sight beneath the surface of history. Occasionally a face glimmers beneath the ripples, but its features remain indistinct.
Those tribes who referred to themselves as arya had settled along the Indus, south of the mountains, remaining almost entirely in the western part of the continent. They had intermarried, in all likelihood, with the people they found there. They were prospering much more vigorously than their relatives who had gone west to triumph so briefly as the Mitanni. In the three hundred years since their arrival, the infiltrators had adopted lives that were patterned much more after the vanished Harappan culture than after the nomadic, tribal rovings of their distant past. Their wandering ways had begun to fade from memory; the Sanskrit word grama, the name for a settled and walled village, originally meant a wandering wagon-centered clan.1
The arya have not left much trace of these lives behind them, but by 1200 or so they had begun to make sense of their new incarnation as a settled people with myths of their own. The earliest collections of Indian hymns, the poetic Rig Veda, were composed in their own tongue. Like most ancient poems, those in the Rig Veda were set down in writing long after they were first told around fires, but they can still give us a glimpse of the world that the arya were building for themselves.94
For one thing, the Rig Veda was devoted almost entirely to explaining the nature and requirements of the Indian gods. Any people with complicated gods who make complicated demands stand in need of priests as well as warlords; they are on the edge of becoming a more complicated society. By the time of the later verses in the Rig Veda, the priests of the arya had become not simply specialists in god-care, but a hereditary class of specialists. Priests fathered sons who were trained to become priests, and who married daughters of other priests. The hymns in the Rig Veda were the first writings of the arya, and the priests their first true aristocracy.
The people who were in the process of becoming Indians were held together by a common philosophy and a common religion, not by political organization or by military might.2 So the Rig Veda tells us a great deal about the worship of the gods, but very little about the spread of the arya across the land that had become their home. The collection is divided into ten cycles, called mandala.3 Each mandala contains hymns in praise of the gods, and chants to be said during sacrifices and other rituals. The Indian gods are nature-gods, as is common to peoples who live in harsh environments and along fierce rivers (the Yahweh of Abraham is a notable exception): Varuna, the sky-god; Ratri, the spirit of the night; Agni, the god of fire; Parjanya, the rain-god who “shatters the trees” and pours down water on cattle, horses, and men as well; Mitra, god of the sun; and Indra, the calmer of chaos and the ruler of the pantheon, he “who made firm the shaking earth, who brought to rest the mountains when they were disturbed…in whose control are horses, villages, and all chariots.”4 (Indra, Varuna, and Mitra, incidentally, appear as witnesses in a treaty between the Mitanni king and Suppiluliuma, the Hittite empire-builder; this shows not only that the Mitanni were arya, but that the arya were worshipping these gods long before they separated and went their different ways to the west and south.)
Books II to VII of the Rig Veda, the oldest of the hymns, give us glimpses of political and military structure through the dim glass of ritual. The fire-god Agni is credited with attacking “walls with his weapons,” which suggests that as the arya flourished and spread, they made war on wooden-walled villages in their path by burning them.5 One hymn mentions a battle between “darkhued” peoples and the arya, a description which scholars seized on, a century ago, as proof that an inferior native people had been wiped out by light-skinned “Aryans.” But the seventh mandala describes a battle among ten arya kings against each other. The arya seem to have fought each other quite as much as they fought the other inhabitants of the river valleys and the plains beyond.
Apparently the years of the first hymns in the Rig Veda were a time in which not only a priest-clan, but also a clan of aristocratic warriors, had begun to form, a hereditary class of ruling chiefs who passed down power from father to son.6 But we can go no further than this; and so far, none of these priests and warrior-chiefs have names.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The Wheel Turns Again
Between 1212 and 1190 BC, the Assyrians fight with Hittites, Babylonians, and Elamites, while the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt collapses
BACK OVER A LITTLE FARTHER to the west, the patchwork Hittite empire was beginning to gape at the seams.
The Egyptian-Hittite treaty was still holding; Egypt governed the Western Semitic lands as far as Kadesh, while the Hittites claimed the cities farther to the north. When Rameses II died, well into his nineties, his elderly son Merneptah succeeded to the throne (he was the thirteenth son of Rameses II, since the tough old man had already outlived his first twelve male offspring).1 At the news of a new pharaoh on the throne, a few of the cities in the Egyptian provinces to the north tried their luck at a revolt, but Egyptian forces marched up and mashed them with little ceremony.2
The Hittites, meanwhile, had been struck by drought. Crops had been ruined, livestock were dying, villagers were tormented by hunger. One of the letters from the Hittite capital down to the Egyptian court suggests that, since the pharaoh has arranged to marry a Hittite princess, he had better come and get her; the Hittite stables had no more grain, and the herds of cattle set aside as her dowry would starve if not fetched right away.3
Hattusilis III had made his son Tudhaliya his Chief of Bodyguards, a position that proved his father’s complete trust in him (not necessarily a given in Hittite royal families).4 When Hattusilis III died, his son became King Tudhaliya IV. He inherited not just the throne, but a famine that was worsening by the year.
Tudhaliya IV sent down to Egypt for food, and Merneptah, now sitting on his father’s throne, honored the alliance; his own inscriptions remark that he sent enough grain “to keep the land alive.”5 A letter from Tudhaliya himself to one of his subject cities, directing it to provide ships to help transport the grain, reveals that a single shipment was 450 tons.6 The Hittite granaries were bare.
A king who has to beg foreign aid simply to keep his people alive is not in a good position, and the Hittites, precariously perched on top of the turning wheel of fortune, were on their way down. A country without grain is a country without money. A country without money inevitably delays paying its soldiers until the last possible moment. Underpaid soldiers are always less disciplined than well-fed and satisfied ones. The Hittite army was ripe for defeat.
Tudhaliya was a competent commander-in-chief and a seasoned warrior who had first gone out fighting in his father’s army at the age of twelve.7 But along with famine and poverty, he also had to worry about his throne. His father had usurped the crown, after all, and the kingdom was full of men with royal blood. “The descendants of Suppiluliuma, the descendants of Mursili, the descendants of Muwatalli, the descendants of Hattusili are numerous!” he complains in one letter.8
To prove his power as rightful king, Tudhaliya IV gave orders for the most massive building program of any Hittite king ever: new shrines; additions to the already-large palace complex; a new suburb of the capital city Hattusas that included twenty-six new temples and doubled the size of the old city.9 This was the sort of project expected of a great king, and may have been in imitation of Rameses II, who had just died. But although the new buildings trumpeted Tudhaliya’s royal authority, they also drained his treasury. In a kingdom already suffering from famine and poverty, Tudhaliya IV was pouring money into construction, and this left him even less royal silver with which to pay his soldiers.
The conquered peoples under Hittite rule clearly saw the army weakening year by year. Not
long into his reign, Tudhaliya learned that twenty-two cities along the western edge of his empire had joined together in an alliance against him. He marched west and broke up the coalition, but the vultures were already circling.10
Down to the southeast, the new king of Assyria saw an opportunity to expand. Shalmaneser I had already swallowed the old Mitanni lands. Now his son, Tukulti-Ninurta, launched an attack against the Hittite borders to his west.95
Tudhaliya carried his defense into the enemy’s land, and the two armies met on the plain of Erbila. If the Assyrian account of the battle is to be believed, Tudhaliya was not at all sure that he could win the fight. The Assyrian king wrote in a letter sent to an ally:
Tudhaliya wrote to me, saying, “You have captured merchants who were loyal to me. Come on, let’s fight; I have set out against you for battle.”
I prepared my army and my chariots. But before I could reach his city, Tudhaliya the king of the Hittites sent out a messenger who was holding two tablets with hostile words and one with friendly words. He showed me the two with a hostile challenge first. When my army heard about these words, they were anxious to fight, ready to set out at once. The messenger saw this. So then he gave me the third tablet, which said, “I am not hostile to the king of Assur, my brother. Why should we brothers be at war with each other?”
But I brought my army on. He was stationed with his soldiers in the city Nihrija, so I sent him a message saying, “I’ll besiege the city. If you are truly friendly to me, leave the city at once.” But he did not reply to my message.
So I withdrew my army a little ways back from the city. Then a Hittite deserter fled from Tudhaliya’s army and reached me. He said, “The king may be writing to you evasively, in friendship, but his troops are in battle order; he is ready to march.”
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 27