Chinese civilization must have taken shape in the first
half of the
second millennium B.C. It was a product of the Yellow River valley, not
of the Yangtze; rather as in India, the earliest appearance of
civilization was in the part of China most likely to be in distant
contact with the Near East and most similar to it. Though we are not
well informed about the early centuries of this culture, we do have a
reasonably good picture of what it looked like toward the end of the
millennium, during the last phase of the rule of the Shang, a dynasty
that must have come to power around 1600 B.C.
At this late stage of its history (about 1200-1050
B.C.) Shang culture
combined elements of strikingly diverse origin. As might be expected,
there was substantial continuity with the northern Chinese Neolithic.
The use of stamped earth as a foundation for buildings is one obvious
example, since it is well attested for earlier Neolithic cultures in
the region. Another is the three-legged design of some types of Shang
bronze vessel (like several of those in figure 16); this is already
found in Neolithic pottery.
At least one feature of the culture had its origins
far to the west.
This was the chariot, an instrument of warfare that had proliferated
alarmingly in the early centuries of the second millennium. Shang
chariots were in fact closest in the details of their design to those
of Transcaucasia. We do not know the route by which the chariot reached
China, but this transfer of military technology is quite likely to have
been the work of Indo-European-speaking nomads; speakers of an archaic
Indo- European language were still living to the northwest of China in
the later first millennium A.D., and burials excavated in this region
suggest that their ancestors were already there in the second
millennium B.C.
There were also crucial elements in the late Shang
complex whose
origins are harder to determine. One is bronze. It is quite conceivable
that Chinese bronze working was an indigenous development, since
Neolithic China already possessed the technology for firing pottery at
high temperatures. But it could also be an import from the west. It is
suggestive that the earliest evidence of bronze in China comes from the
northwest, where it dates from about 2000 B.C., a millennium after the
development of bronze in the Near East and half a millennium before its
appearance in the Yellow River valley. Another such element is writing,
which survives on large numbers of inscribed oracle bones and in some
short inscriptions found on bronzes. Did the Chinese script emerge
independently, as was clearly the case with Mesoamerica? Or was it
influenced by the existence of writing elsewhere, as may have been the
case with Egypt and the Indus Valley? In any event, the new technology
was in each instance combined with long-established Neolithic
traditions; for example, oracle bones had been used in divination long
before the Shang began to write on them.
If we look back from the late Shang period, it is frustrating
not to
know when and how these and other features of Shang culture coalesced.
Did the Shang always have chariots and writing, for example, or did
they acquire them only at some secondary stage in their history?