Late Shang

The Late Shang, also known as the Anyang period, is the earliest known literate civilization in China, spanning the reigns of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, beginning with Wu Ding in the second half of the 13th century BC and ending with the conquest of the Shang by the Zhou in the mid-11th century BC. The state is known from artifacts recovered from its capital at a site near Anyang now known as Yinxu and other sites across the North China Plain. One of the richest finds was the Tomb of Fu Hao at Yinxu, thought to belong to a consort of Wu Ding mentioned in Shang inscriptions.
Most Shang writing takes the form of inscriptions on oracle bones used for divinations on behalf of the king. Shang ritual focused on offerings to ancestors, enabling modern investigators to deduce a king list that largely matches that of the traditional histories of Sima Qian and the Bamboo Annals. The inscriptions also give insight into royal concerns such as weather, the harvest, warfare with neighbouring polities, and mobilizing workers for warfare or agricultural work.
The Late Shang shared many features of the earlier Erlitou and Erligang cultures, including the rammed earth technique for foundations of rectangular walled compounds. Bronze casting reached new heights of decoration and a volume unmatched elsewhere in the world at that time. Workshops in the capital produced ceramics and carved stone and bone for a variety of ceremonial, decorative or utilitarian purposes.
Besides writing, new features of the Late Shang included horse-drawn chariots, massive royal tombs and human sacrifice on an unprecedented scale, both in divination rituals and in royal burials.

Discovery

The traditional account of early Chinese history is found in the Historical Records compiled by Sima Qian.
In this account, after a series of sage rulers, China was ruled by a succession of dynasties, the Xia, Yin, Zhou and Qin, culminating in the Han dynasty of Sima Qian's own time.
In the early 20th century, the earlier parts of the textual account were challenged by the Doubting Antiquity School led by Gu Jiegang.
At about the same time, archaeological discoveries confirmed the historicity of the last nine Shang kings, and found earlier cities in the Yellow River valley.

Excavations at Anyang

In 1898, the scholar Wang Yirong realized that the markings on ancient bones being sold by Chinese pharmacists were an early form of Chinese characters.
By 1908, Luo Zhenyu had traced the bones to the village of Xiaotun on the northwest outskirts of Anyang in modern Henan province.
The area was quickly recognized as the last capital of the Shang dynasty and named Yinxu 'ruins of Yin' from the name Yīn used by Sima Qian for the Shang dynasty and by the Bamboo Annals for the dynasty and its last capital.
However, the name does not appear in the oracle bones, which refer to the state as Shāng, and its ritual centre as Dàyì Shāng.
In 1928, Dong Zuobin located the pits from which the oracle bones had been dug.
The Academia Sinica undertook archaeological excavation of the site until the Japanese invasion in 1937, resuming in 1950.
A permanent work station was established on the site in 1959.
The city covered an area of some, focussed on a complex of palaces and temples on a rise surrounded by the Huan River on its north and east, and with an artificial pond on its western side.
Further caches of oracle bones were discovered nearby.
The area immediately to the south of the palace district contained craft workshops and the residences and cemeteries of the Shang elite.
The rest of the city consisted of lineage-based settlements or neighbourhoods, with graves close by residential areas.
More workshops, handling bronze, pottery, jade and bone, were concentrated in at least three production zones: south of the palace district, east of it across the river, and in the west of the city.
The Anyang site had no city wall, and a canal or moat around the central district became blocked in the later reigns, suggesting that the Shang felt no danger of invasion.
On the other side of the river, to the northwest, a royal cemetery was found on the Xibeigang ridge. Shang kings were buried in large ramped tombs with extensive human and animal sacrifices.
The royal tombs had been systematically looted, but in 1976 an undisturbed medium-sized tomb was discovered in the southwest part of the palace district.
Many of the grave goods recovered were inscribed with the name of Fu Hao, a military leader and consort of Wu Ding known from the oracle bone inscriptions.
The Tomb of Fu Hao yielded some of bronze vessels, weapons and tools, as well as hundreds of jades and other worked stones, bone carvings and pottery.
In 1999, the remains of a walled city of about were discovered across the Huan River from the well-explored Yinxu site.
The city, now known as Huanbei, contains a palace-temple compound, in which the foundations of two compounds have been excavated.
Huanbei was apparently occupied for less than a century and deliberately destroyed by fire around the time of the construction of the Yinxu complex.
Chinese archaeologists now assign the city to a Middle Shang period.

Precursors

Encouraged by the partial confirmation of Sima Qian's account of the Shang, archeologists embarked on a search for earlier capitals.
Postwar excavations uncovered earlier urban centres in the area just south of the east–west stretch of the Yellow River.
Erlitou, in the valley of the Luo River, flourished in the early part of the 2nd millennium BC.
It was succeeded in the middle part of the millennium by the Erligang culture, centred on a large walled city at Zhengzhou and expanding across an area stretching as far south as the Yangtze River.
Chinese archaeologists usually identify the Erlitou and Erligang cultures with the Xia and early Shang dynasties respectively, despite the lack of direct evidence.
Around 1300 BC, for reasons that are still unclear, most of the Erligang walled settlements were abandoned and new regional developments from the culture arose.
By this time, the sophisticated bronze casting techniques developed by Erlitou and Erligang had spread to, and been further developed by, a string of local cultures along the Yangtze river, from Sanxingdui in the Sichuan basin to Feijiahe near Dongting Lake and Wucheng in the Gan River valley.
In the north, intermediate pottery types from before the rise of the Late Shang have been found at sites such as Xiaoshuangqiao and Huanbei.
Several features of Late Shang material culture were already present at Erlitou and further developed during the Erligang period.
These include the rammed earth construction technique for walls and foundations, which had been used since the Neolithic Longshan culture, and rectangular walled compounds containing pillared halls around a courtyard.
Casting of bronze vessels began on a limited scale at Erlitou.
During the Erligang period, casters developed a technique of stepwise casting that permitted shapes of arbitrary complexity.
Human sacrifice was also practised in the Erlitou and Erligang cultures, though on a much smaller scale than seen at Anyang.
Other inherited features included the use of jade, the dagger-axe as a standard weapon, burial practices, and pyromancy using tortoise plastrons and ox scapulae.
The most prominent innovations of the Late Shang – writing, horse-drawn chariots, massive tombs and human sacrifice on an unprecedented scale – all appeared at about the same time, in the reign of king Wu Ding.
The Shang script is believed to be an indigenous development.
In contrast, the sudden appearance of horses and chariots similar in form to those used across the Eurasian steppe, with all the associated technology, is thought to represent an import from the northwest.
In a band of highlands stretching from the edge of the Tibetan plateau, through the Ordos Plateau and on to the northeast lay a series of cultures that transitioned in the early second millennium BC from an agricultural economy to a mixed agropastoral or fully pastoral economy.
These cultures served as an interface between the plains cultures and those of the Eurasian steppe, and had been the vector through which bronze metallurgy reached the North China Plain in the early second millennium BC.
Other novel features of the Late Shang include bronze mirrors and animal-headed bronze knives derived from these northern-zone cultures.

Writing

The earliest attestation of the Chinese language dates from the Late Shang period.
The vast majority of surviving Shang texts are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones, with a smaller number of bronze inscriptions and carvings on other materials.
Some of the pictographs suggest that the Shang also employed brush writing on bamboo and wooden slips like those known from later periods, but none of these materials have survived.
The oracle bone script consists of an early form of Chinese characters, with each graph representing a word of early Old Chinese.
Over 4,000 graphs have been catalogued, though the exact number depends on which are considered graphic variants.
A little over 1,200 words have been identified with certainty, but this set includes the core of the Chinese lexicon.
A further 1,000 characters consist of identifiable components, but have no agreed interpretation.
Most of the unknown characters are thought to represent proper names.
The grammar of the language is broadly similar to that of Western Zhou bronze inscriptions and received texts.
As in later forms of Chinese, the basic word order is subject–object–verb, with adjectives and adjectival phrases preceding the nouns they modify.
The script provides little information on the sounds of the language, but several cases in which a character is borrowed or modified to write a different word are consistent with current theories on the sounds of Western Zhou Chinese.