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By 5000 BCE agricultural communities had spread through much of what
is now called China, and there were agricultural villages from the Wei
River Valley eastward, parallel with the great Yellow River (Huang
Ho), which flowed out of the Kunlun Mountains to the deciduous forest
and loess soil region of the North China Plain. Where people were free
of forest and had access to water they grew millet -- as early as 5500
BCE -- while they continued to hunt deer and other game, to fish and
gather food. And they raised dogs, pigs and chickens. They built
one-room homes dug into the earth, with roofs of clay or thatch: pit
homes grouped in villages.  They had spinning wheels and knitted and
wove fibers. And they made pottery decorated with art.

Flooding along the Yellow River was worse than it was along the Yangzi
River to the south. Along the Yangzi River, through the Hubei basin
and on the coastal plain to Hangzhou Bay, farming had also developed,
but people along the Yellow River had to work harder at flood control
and irrigation, and perhaps this stimulated a greater effort at
organization. At any rate, the North China Plain became the largest
area with a relatively dense population.

Where people were producing more food than they needed to survive,
warriors had the incentive not only to plunder but also to conquer.
And conquering kings arose on the North China Plain as they did in
West Asia. The first dynasty of kings in the North China Plain has
been described as belonging to the Xia family -- whose rule is thought
to have begun around 2200 BCE. But the first dynasty of which there is
historical evidence is that of the Shang family, who are thought to
have begun their rule around 1750 BCE. The Shang clan came out of the
Wei River Valley just west of the North China Plain. By force, the
Shang unified people along the North China Plain, building an empire
in much the same way as other conquerors: by leaving behind a garrison
force to police local people, by turning a local king into a
subservient ally free to manage local matters, and by taxing the
conquered.

The Shang, Religion and Writing

Around 1384 BCE the Shang moved their capital to Yin. By now,
alongside Shang kings were nobles and aristocrats. As a regular
pastime the Shang kings and nobles hunted in organized game drives.
Kings and aristocrats had splendid homes with walls of pounded earth
or earthen bricks while common people continued to live in their pit
homes of earlier times. A Shang king was chief priest, and he had an
administrative bureaucracy, with councilors, lesser priests and
diviners. As with other warring civilizations, slaves were taken, the
slaves laboring at growing crops. And women in Shang civilization were
subservient to men, with aristocratic women enjoying a greater freedom
and equality than common women.

During the Shang dynasty, the civilization along the Yellow River had
canals for irrigating crops. Communities had drains that ran water out
of town. They made beer from millet. They extended their trading and
used money in the form of cowry shells. Shang merchants traded in
salt, iron, copper, tin, lead and antimony, some of which had to be
imported from far away. As early as the 1300 BCE a bronze casting
industry had developed. This was later than the rise of bronze casting
in Europe and West Asia, but it was the most advanced in the world.

Writing

It was around 1300 BCE that the first known writing appeared in Shang
civilization -- writing that developed more than three thousand
characters, partly pictorial and partly phonetic. This writing was
done on plate-like portions of the bones of cattle or deer, on
seashells and turtle shells and perhaps on wood. They were
inscriptions concerned with predicting the future. By applying a
pointed, heated rod to a bone or shell, the item cracked, and to which
written symbol the crack traveled gave answers for various questions:
what the weather was going to be like, would there be flood, would a
harvest succeed or fail, when might be the best time for hunting or
fishing, questions about illness or whether one should make a journey.

The people of Shang civilization appear to have had the same religious
impulses as others. They saw nature as numerous gods using magic, gods
called kuei-shen, a word for ghost or spirit. They had a god they
thought produced rain. They had a god of thunder and a god for each
mountain, river and forest. They had a mother god of the sun, a moon
goddess, and a god of the wind. Like others who worked the soil, they
had a fertility god. They believed in a master god who had a palace in
the center of heaven and who rewarded people for being virtuous. And
their gods had faces that were more Asian in appearance than Western.

Like priests in West Asia, the priests of Shang civilization made
sacrifices to their gods, attempting to bribe them, believing that the
gods could exercise either benevolent or malevolent magic. The
frequency of floods and other calamities led the people of Shang
civilization to believe that some gods were good and others demonic.
And they believed in an evil god who led travelers astray and devoured
people.

The people of Shang civilization believed in an invisible heaven that
people went to when they died. Shang kings told their subjects that
heaven was where the ancestors of Shang kings dwelled. Aristocrats
were concerned with their status and boasted about their ancestral
roots. They kept records of their family tree, and they saw their
ancestors as going back to gods who often took the form of animals --
gods who became family symbols like the totems that were to be
familiar in the Americas. The common people, on the other hand, had no
surnames and no pedigree and did not participate in ancestor worship.

Aristocrats believed that humans had a spirit that was created at
conception. They believed that this spirit both continued to reside in
one's body after death and ascended to the invisible world where the
spirits and the dead dwelled. Aristocrats believed that in this
invisible world their ancestors resided in the court of the gods and
had powers to help guide and assist their living descendants.
Aristocrats saw their ancestors as needing nourishment. At gravesites
they offered food and wine to their deceased family and ancestors -- a
ritual that males alone were allowed to perform, adding to the
preference for the birth of a male into a family. They believed that
if offerings to the dead were discontinued, the spirits of the dead
would become lost and starving ghosts who, in revenge, might do evil.
When an aristocrat wanted a special favor from an ancestor, he
supplemented the offerings by sacrificing animals. And, like Abraham,
the Shang knew of human sacrifice. If a king wanted a special favor
from the gods, he might sacrifice a human.

Shang Violence and Splendor

To the east, north and south of Shang civilization were those the
Shang saw as barbarians, including the farming people along the Yangzi
River. Shang kings sent out armies to repulse invaders, and the Shang
kings went beyond their domains to plunder and to capture foreign
peoples needed for sacrifice to their gods. Uncovered tombs of kings
from the Shang period indicate that they could put into the field as
many as three to five thousand soldiers. Found buried with the kings
were their personal ornaments and spears with bronze blades and the
remains of what had been bows and arrows. Buried with the kings were
also horses and chariots for transporting soldiers to battle. And with
the kings in death were his charioteers, dogs, servants and people in
groups of ten -- people who had been ceremonially beheaded with bronze
axes.

Zhou Empire, Religion and Human Sacrifice

Shang rule was threatened by forces from outside and from within its
empire. To the west of Shang civilization, in the Wei River Valley,
lived a pastoral people called Zhou who led an alliance that included
other tribal peoples neighboring Shang civilization. While the Shang
king, Zhouxin, was occupied by a war against tribal people to his
southeast, rebellions broke out among people that Shang monarchs
before him had conquered. The Zhou and their allies saw the Shang
king's troubles as an opportunity to move against him, and in 1045 BCE
they overpowered him at the battle of Mu-ye and had him beheaded.

A dynasty of Zhou kings began ruling what had been Shang civilization.
They claimed that all lands belonged to heaven, that they were the
sons of heaven and therefore that all lands and all people were their
subjects. Seeing the lands they had conquered as too vast for one man
to dominate, the Zhou kings divided these lands into regions and
assigned someone to rule each region in their name, choosing for this
position a close family member, a trusted member of their clan, or the
chief of a tribe that had been allied with them against the Shang.

Each local ruler had at his disposal all the lands around him. He had
his own militia. And from the Zhou kings the local rulers received
gifts such as chariots, bronze weapons, servants and animals. The
local rulers received the title of lord (gong). Local rulers passed
their positions to their sons, their titles of lord becoming
hereditary. And to control their areas better, the lords made
sub-lords of those who had dominated the common people before they
arrived. A hierarchy of status and obligations emerged among families
and within families, with older brothers ranking higher than younger
brothers, with rules of succession as to which of the males would head
his family. If a married aristocrat became infatuated with another
woman, rather than drive his wife from his home he could bring the
other woman into the family as a concubine, where she would rank
beneath his wife.

Zhou kings told those they had conquered that they, the Zhou, had
ousted the ancestors of Shang kings from heaven and that heaven was
occupied by their supreme god, a god they called "The Lord on High,"
who, they said, had commanded the downfall of the Shang kings. Like
emperors in West Asia, Zhou kings claimed that they ruled by divine
right. They claimed that they represented on earth the "Lord on High"
and that it was their duty to mediate with the Lord on High, to
perform appropriate sacrifices and to maintain a proper relationship
between heaven and their subjects. They claimed that any opposition to
their rule was opposition to the will of heaven.

It was from the Zhou kings that local lords received the right to act
as a priest: to perform sacrifices, to have certain hymns sung and
certain dances performed, the right to propitiate the gods of local
mountains, streams and of the soil and crops. Meanwhile, local
aristocrats continued to keep track of their ancestral heritage. They
married with religious rites and sanctions while common folk continued
to have no such marriages, no surnames or recorded ancestors. They
merely lived together and were recognized as a couple by their
neighbors.

As in India and West Asia, with time came a mixing of the religions of
the conqueror and conquered. Zhou rulers admitted into their pantheon
of gods some of the gods of Shang civilization. The worship of various
gods from the Shang period continued, including gods of grain, rain
and agriculture -- one of whom was believed to have had a virgin
birth. Among these gods was a god of the Yellow River who had the body
of a fish but the face of a man.

In Zhou civilization, people continued their attempt to appease the
gods by giving them gifts. Those who could afford it sacrificed
cattle, sheep, pigs or horses. The sacrificing of humans diminished
from what it had been under the Shang kings, but Zhou kings had their
wives or friends join them in the grave, and each year a young woman
was offered as a bride to the river god. This latter sacrifice began
with sorceresses choosing the most attractive woman they could find.
They dressed the girl in satin, silk and jewelry and put her on a
nuptial bed on a raft.  They floated the raft down river. The raft
sank and the girl drowned, gone as a gift to the invisible world of
the river god.

Copyright © 1999 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.