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Routledge Handbook of Early Chinese History the Bronze Age This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 27 Sep 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK Routledge Handbook of Early Chinese History Paul R. Goldin The Bronze Age before the Zhou Dynasty Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315773605-4 Robert Bagley Published online on: 17 May 2018 How to cite :- Robert Bagley. 17 May 2018, The Bronze Age before the Zhou Dynasty from: Routledge Handbook of Early Chinese History Routledge Accessed on: 27 Sep 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315773605-4 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. 3 THE BRONZE AGE BEFORE THE ZHOU DYNASTYROBERT BAGLEYTHE BRONZE AGE BEFORE THE ZHOU DYNASTY Robert Bagley Preliminaries: scope, aims, and sources In East Asia the earliest state-level societies that we know much about are those of the Yellow and Yangtze river valleys in the second millennium bc. In calling them states, we are diagnosing social organization from material remains: we take city walls, imposing building foundations, large-scale metal production, elite burials, and widely distributed artifact types to be material residues of highly stratified societies. Some of these features, city walls for example, have an ear- lier history, and a case for earlier states could be made. The third millennium Liangzhu culture of the Yangtze delta region is an obvious candidate. Toward the middle of the second millennium, however, the rise of a distinctive metal industry, and with it the characteristic artifacts of the Chinese Bronze Age, cast bronze bells and ritual vessels, was a new and consequential develop- ment. Writing may have been invented at about the same time, though we have no trace of first stages. The civilized societies to which metallurgy and writing direct our attention arose in the middle Yellow River valley, but by 1200 bc they had flourishing offspring throughout the Yang- tze valley as well. These societies, whose achievements were inherited by the first millennium Zhou civilization, are our subject. The period of concern to us, roughly 1800–1000 bc, will for convenience be called the Early Bronze Age (EBA). For the earlier part of the period the dating of archaeological sites depends on radiocarbon measurements, which give absolute dates – calendar dates – but have uncertainties on the order of one or two centuries. Toward the end of the period we begin to rely on informa- tion taken from later texts. We try to fix the date of the Zhou conquest of Shang, an event that figures prominently in the texts, and then count generations backward from it. The conquest date endorsed by the state-sponsored Xia Shang Zhou Chronology Project is 1046 bc.1 “Ca. eleventh century bc” might be more realistic, but whichever we prefer, a date for the Zhou conquest is, in the material record, a date for an event at one city. It is a date for the supposedly punctual end of the Anyang settlement and hence for the end of the pottery sequence that archaeologists have constructed there. Other sites can be connected with the conquest date and the pottery sequence it terminates only by correlating their material culture with the material culture of Anyang. For an important tomb discovered a few decades ago at Xingan in Jiangxi, for example, neither radiocarbon nor written evidence is available. A date for the Xingan tomb can only be estimated by comparing its contents with the contents of Anyang tombs. As the best-dated and 61 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 04:28 27 Sep 2021; For: 9781315773605, chapter3, 10.4324/9781315773605-4 Robert Bagley best-explored EBA site, Anyang is our reference point: we judge other sites and artifacts to be earlier than, later than, or similar to Anyang and its artifacts.2 Absolute dates are indispensable for some purposes. They enable us to compare unrelated or widely separated cultures. We depend on them, for example, to say that chariots in the Caucasus pre-date chariots at Anyang. But they do not have the resolution to sort out developments within the EBA. They cannot put the tombs of a royal cemetery in order or align a newly discovered site with a level in the Anyang stratigraphic record. All of archaeology’s detailed reasoning rests either on artifact comparisons or, within a single physically continuous site, on stratigraphy. These give relative dates. The time of concern to us is the end of prehistory. At present the Chinese written record begins with the first Anyang oracle inscriptions, for which a date around 1200bc has been shakily inferred from mentions of lunar eclipses in some of them. Because the oracle inscription corpus is small3 and restricted in provenance and content – one city mainly, and matters that its king divined about – we might suppose that the study of EBA states would not differ signifi- cantly from prehistoric archaeology. But this is far from being the case. Because the inscriptions mention kings’ names known from transmitted texts, the archaeology of the second millennium was from the start motivated and guided by late first millennium texts, and it has at times aspired to narrative history of a kind beyond the reach of the prehistorian. If this is now beginning to change, the reason is that the archaeological record has proved absorbing in itself. Our mental picture of the EBA is increasingly dominated by material culture, and scholars are increasingly preoccupied with matters that can be investigated through it – the process of state formation and the history of technology, to mention only two. The sources relevant to our subject are both material and written. All have biases of several kinds. The material record has both a preservation bias (the soft parts of history, we might say, do not fossilize) and a sample bias (accidents of discovery, agendas of archaeological exploration, the practicalities of salvage archaeology). Whether contemporary or later, the written sources too have a preservation bias: the bulk of what was written has not survived, and what does survive does so partly by accident, partly (in the case of transmitted texts known only in Han recensions) by the active intervention of editors and scribes. The written record also has innate biases: authors have reasons for writing; editors interpret. Any inscription or text is shaped by its author’s purposes, knowledge, and perspective.4 Our inferences should be informed by aware- ness of all these biases. The written sources for our period are second millennium inscriptions on oracle bones and bronzes and first millennium bronze inscriptions and transmitted texts. The oracle inscriptions, almost the only documents that survive from the EBA, have a very narrow bias. They see the world through the Anyang king’s eyes, and only that part of it that he divined about. Though they touch on many other matters, interactions with enemies and trading partners for instance, their principal concern is sacrifices to the king’s ancestors. Because the names of the people and places they mention can seldom be connected with archaeological finds and sites, they give us only a vague idea of the king’s view of the world and no idea at all of how his neighbors saw him. They do not answer our most basic questions about China in the last two centuries of the second millennium or even about everyday life at Anyang. What territory did the Anyang king rule? What other polities, large or small, near or distant, existed in his time? Did those neighbors view him as having special authority or standing, or was it later writers who for their own pur- poses represented him as a divinely sanctioned universal ruler? The Anyang king called himself “I, the one man.” How many of his contemporaries called him that? How many instead called themselves “the one man”? The answers scholars have given to questions like these have always owed less to second millennium evidence than to preconceptions absorbed from transmitted texts. 62 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 04:28 27 Sep 2021; For: 9781315773605, chapter3, 10.4324/9781315773605-4 The Bronze Age before the Zhou dynasty When we study a period for which both material and written evidence are available, we need a reasoned way of combining bodies of evidence that are sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, sometimes incommensurable. Ever since the birth of scientific archaeology in the nineteenth century, students of the biblical and Homeric worlds have wrestled with this problem without ever arriving at a clear set of rules.5 Archaeology can contradict texts, for instance by showing that at the time Joshua is supposed to have destroyed Jericho’s walls, ancient Jericho had no walls. But its ability to verify narratives of human action is limited. Proving that an event described in a text could have happened is not the same as proving that it did happen. If ruined walls of suitable date were discovered at Jericho, could archaeologists confirm that they were destroyed by Joshua? Most ancient walls are now in ruins.
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