6.3 Shang
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?