Some shang antecedents of later Chinese ideology and culture.

• Author: Goldin, Paul R.
• Position: Essay

Although the Shang dynasty sometimes seems archaic and alien from the point of view of later periods, there are important elements of Shang culture that persevered in recognizable forms, even after allowing for adaptation to new historical realities, beyond the Zhou conquest in 1045 B.C. These points of continuity being generally underappreciated, five of the most salient are sketched below, in the hope of spurring renewed interest in China's first historical dynasty: the ritual use of writing, particularly as a mode of communication with the spirit world; the status of Chinese as the sole written language; the notion that some days are auspicious and others inauspicious; a patrilocal and patrilineal family structure that nevertheless accommodated mothers within its ritual order; and "the Deity's command" (di ling). In keeping with the genre of "brief communication," the examples adduced are illustrative rather than exhaustive; a full study of these themes would require an entire monograph. Although the Shang dynasty sometimes seems archaic and alien from the point of view of later periods, there are important elements of Shang culture that persevered in recognizable forms, even after allowing for adaptation to new historical realities, beyond the Zhou conquest in 1045 B.C. These points of continuity being generally underappreciated, five of the most salient are sketched below, (1) in the hope of spurring renewed interest in China's first historical dynasty. In keeping with the genre of "brief communication," the examples adduced are illustrative rather than exhaustive; a full study of these themes would require an entire monograph.

1. THE RITUAL USE OF WRITING, PARTICULARLY AS A MODE OF COMMUNICATION WITH THE SPIRIT WORLD

   If the Shang used writing in any connection other than the ancestral cult (especially oracle-bone divination), (2) there is scant evidence for it. In contrast to Mesopotamia, for example, where writing was used from the start to keep accounts and record debts or transactions, (3) for the Shang there are few, if any, examples of mundane applications of writing. Surviving Shang inscriptions on bronze, jade, stone, (4) and the like are almost always indicative of some ritual use. (5) Perhaps one could argue that other types of documents would have been committed to perishable materials, unlike the bone and shell used for oracular inscriptions, and consequently that the overwhelmingly hieratic nature of the surviving examples of writing is the result of a selection bias, (6) but Adam Smith's recent study of scribal training at Anyang shows that the regimen prepared scribes to write oracle-bone inscriptions and oracle-bone inscriptions only. (7) However commerce was conducted and recorded, it does not seem to have required the participation of cultic scribes.

   This evidence supports a general model in which literacy expanded over time from the highly limited sacral milieu at Anyang to the livelier situation in early imperial times, when the state systematically trained legions of scribes to gather and scrutinize administrative data (alongside military personnel who must have received some rudimentary instruction), but gradually lost its exclusive control of literacy, as people with varying degrees of training began to write for private purposes. (8)

   But the sacral uses of writing endured. Oracle-bone inscriptions seem to have disappeared as a genre soon after the fall of the Shang, (9) but a different kind of inscription, cast in ritual bronze vessels, became no less important. There are late Shang bronze inscriptions, but they tend to be short and uninformative; inscriptions on Zhou bronzes, by contrast, can be relatively long--much longer than oracle-bone inscriptions--and were produced in unprecedented numbers. Some scholars suggest that inscriptions were intended not for human audiences, but for the ancestral spirits invoked during the sacrificial rituals in which the bronzes would have been used. (10) According to this argument, the main purpose of the inscriptions was to inform the spirits of their living descendants' achievements on earth, even if we know that such reports were sometimes embellished, if not baldly falsified. (11) The typical placement of an inscription on the inside of a bronze vessel likewise suggests that its message was supposed to be transmitted to the spirit world together with the food or liquor being offered. There can be little doubt that bronze inscriptions were also intended to be read and cherished by future generations, but this is not incompatible with the idea that communication with spirits is secured by means of writing. Even today, it is not uncommon to find a Daoist priest or other medium writing a message from the spirit world in spontaneous spirit writing, which is subsequently deciphered for the benefit of the uninitiated. (12)

2. THE STATUS OF CHINESE AS THE SOLE WRITTEN LANGUAGE

   For a patently multi-lingual society like premodern China, (13) the first written non-Sinitic languages appeared remarkably late. The oldest examples may be the so-called "Ba-Shu scripts" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (sometimes called "Ba-Shu pictographs" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., of which there were at least three different kinds, but they remain undeciphered and might not even represent true writing. (14) The next candidates thereafter--probably Prakrit documents from the Kingdom of Shanshan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], written in the Kharosthi script (15)--do not appear for many centuries. These facts do not by any means permit the inference that Chinese was the sole spoken language; rather, they encourage the historically fascinating inference that Chinese was chosen to be the universal written one.

   For the Shang, the exclusive use of Chinese can be partially explained with reference to the ancestral cult. If the Shang kings spoke (an archaic form of) Chinese, then their ancestors presumably spoke Chinese as well, and thus one would have to communicate with them in written Chinese. But oracle-bone inscriptions attest to sacrifices to numerous spirits such as the winds (feng [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), (16) the spirit of the Yellow River...