The Cambridge History of Ancient China:
From the Origins of Civilization to 221BC
© Cambridge University Press 1999, ISBN 9780521470308
Archaeology and Traditional (Chinese) History
by Robert Bagley, Princeton University
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Posting Introduction
In the conflict of archaeology and traditional Chinese history, with its preoccupation with political legitimation of the Zhou, a product of Zhou publicity, the most striking feature is the absence in the traditional Chinese history of the world of civilized communities existing at many places in the Yangzi valley, from Sichuan to the sea, with simpler bronze-using societies occupying the Wei River valley and the vast expanses of the Northern Zone. Chinese are not unique in that, histories of many modern countries start with a vague prehistorical void, be it USA, Russia, or Balkan countries. The Chinese tradition-driven national pride, inclined to overlook or explain away conflicting evidence, whitewashes that the promulgated history is the history that Zhou rewrote. When archaeology someday frees itself from politics to take a more detached view of tradition, the time before Zhou will become an archaeological reality, and the Zhou period itself will take on new interest.
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The posting's notes and explanations, added to the text of the author and not noted specially, are shown in (blue italics) in parentheses and in blue boxes. Footnotes, mostly on the sources, are not posted, with minor exceptions where footnote explanations area partof the narrative. Square brackets replace ommited Chinese transcriptions in the text. This posting highlited in bold some findings and conclusion immediately relevant to the Türkic history
Princeton University
Shang archaeology (in China, 1600 - 1145 BC)
Early Bronze Age
Archaeology and Traditional (Chinese) History
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Archaeology and Traditional (Chinese) History
The archaeological evidence that has been surveyed in this chapter allows us glimpses
of complex societies scattered over a large part of north and central China. All belong
to the latter part of the second millennium, though in the present state of
archaeological knowledge we cannot be sure that all survived as late as the Zhou
conquest. The civilization of the middle Yangzi region clearly did, since its influence
is apparent in the Wei Valley both before and after the conquest.
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On the other hand we do not know whether the city that left sacrificial deposits at Sanxingdui around 1200 BC was still in existence two centuries later. But whatever the fortunes of particular cities, at the time of the conquest civilized communities must have existed at many places in the Yangzi valley, from Sichuan to the sea, while simpler bronze-using societies occupied the Wei River valley and the vast expanses of the Northern Zone. The Anyang kings had dealings with many of these areas, and they had powerful neighbors in Shandong as well. The civilized world on the eve of the Zhou conquest was large, diverse, and intricately interconnected.
In the light of archaeology, therefore, the most striking feature of traditional history is the absence from it of any such world. Transmitted texts present us instead with an ancient China in which the only civilized powers were Zhou and Shang, and with an ancient history in which the principal event was the transfer of rule from one to the other. Ever since the Eastern Zhou period the Zhou conquest has been viewed as an event of towering significance, not because of anything tangible connected with it, such as a building project or a reform of script or a standardization of weights and measures, but because it provided a model for the morally correct transfer or power and for the maintenance of power through dynastic virtue. In that model a unified political order coextensive with civilization was ruled by the Shang until their rule grew oppressive, whereupon the Shang were replaced by the Zhou.
This is a distinctly schematic account of the past, one that left us quite unprepared for archaeology's discovery of a wider civilized world, and if we are to understand its emphases and omissions, we must begin by reminding ourselves that the tradition in which the Zhou figure so centrally is a Zhou creation. The oldest surviving statements about pre-Zhou history, including the first mentions of a dynasty earlier than Shang occur in Western Zhou texts enunciating the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven, in other words in texts concerned with political legitimation 181 Though long accepted at face value, these statements about the past form part of an account of the Zhou conquest that seems more expedient than factual. Depicting a momentous struggle between the Zhou and a single opponent to whom the Zhou attributed what they themselves wished to claim — universal rule, divinely sanctioned — it bears the stamp of symbolic history. Attributing universal rule to the Anyang kings required assigning them a unique status which on the evidence of archaeology they did not possess. Legalizing the transfer of rule was achieved by inventing a precedent, an earlier dynasty whose equally universal rule had been lawfully transferred to Shang.
181 That is, parts of Shang shu 尚書 and Shi jing
詩經/诗经 that are likely to be of Western
Zhou composition, though not necessarily is early as the events they describe.
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The Zhou claim to legitimacy took the form of a claim to preserve an existing political order, and this depended on an account of the past significantly at variance with reality. 182
The question arises, of course, why the Zhou singled out Shang rather than some other contemporary to be the source of their legitimacy. To explain the choice by supposing that the Anyang kings did in fact claim some sort of universal kingship or some sort of divine mandate, and that they alone in second-millennium China made such a claim, is merely to adopt the self-serving explanation offered to us by the Zhou. Did the Zhou perhaps choose to link themselves with a culture which had high prestige in their eyes because they had borrowed its writing system? To answer such questions we need to know more than we do about the second millennium. To discover how the Zhou remade history, we must explore the discrepancy between history as the Zhou reported it and history as recovered by archaeology.
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Posting Note In the context of Türkic history, a divine claim is not exceptional; on the contrary, the divine claim is known to be present in most of the conquests of which history preserved accounts. The destiny was not for external consumption only, it was ingrained in the psyche of the rulers, their army, and their people; only a chosen clan, be it Siyavush, Luyanti, Ashina, Dubo, or Jalair Borjigins, could hold the reign, that was accepted as an absolute truth, to claim the origin from a dynastic tribe was enough to claim a right for a throne. The situation is no different from the claim of divinity for the descendents of the King David in the biblical context. In antiquity, the claim was supported by external evidence, the cranial deformation and the royal braid, which were a substantial part of demonstrating and proving the divine volition. An individual could lose the divine mandate, but the dynastic line remained divine and had to produce a replacement. The Chinese annals documented past and present of the divine dynasties, within the concept of divine mandate the Heaven grants and withholds the mandate, and the Zhou mandate was a continuation of the Shang mandate, under a new management. The advent of Christianity did not change the concept, the divine mandate changed its feathers whole retaining the divinity concept, in a new divinity paradigm the mandate survived well into the 20th century not only in secular, but also in religious spheres. |
For Chinese archaeologists, unfortunately, it has been difficult to admit that any such discrepancy might exist. The always thorny problem of interpreting mute archaeological evidence has been complicated by national pride, which insists that tradition is reliable and that the task of archaeology is to vindicate it. Searching always for correspondence with the written record, inclined to overlook or explain away evidence that conflicts with it, archaeology sadly misses its chance of giving us an independent view of the second millennium. In the process it deprives us also of an independent view of the Zhou, who might seem more interestingly creative if their efforts at rewriting history had not been quite so successful. When archaeology someday frees itself from politics to take a more detached view of tradition, the time before Zhou will become an archaeological reality, and the Zhou period itself will take on new interest.
182 Compare the role played by symbolic history in the ideology of Egyptian kingship (Kemp, Ancient Egypt, pp. 31—53 passim, discussing the story of the first dynast's
unification cf Upper and Lower Egypt;see also Trigger et al.. Ancient Egypt, pp. 44-6).
On the elaborated moralizing accounts of the Zhou conquest that were accepted as history
in the late Eastern Zhou period, see John Knoblock, Xunzi. vol. 1 (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1990), introduction. Typical is the story that 800 states
shifted their allegiance from Shang to assist the first Zhou king, a story less likely to
preserve a memory of eleventh-century events and powers then to be an invention
illustrating the magic charisma of a leader who possessed the Mandate of Heaven.
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Additional sources
Michael Loewe, Edward L. Shaughnessy, “The Cambridge history of ancient China: from the origins of civilization to 221 BC”, 1999, Traditional Accounts “Traditional accounts of the Zhou people prior to their migration under Gu Gong Danfu locate them at a place called Bin [豳 (state of mountain people)] (or [部] meaning “section”) (another phonetical 宾 bīn means guest, visitor, i.e. newcomer; the On phonetizations of 豳 hin/han/hen all dance around “Hun”), before they crossed over the Liang [梁] Mountains to settle at the base of Qishan [岐]. 27 Most geographical works have routinely identified this Bin as the Bin in of present-day Binxian 彬县 in Shaanxi, about 75 km due north of Qishan, between which two places there runs a low mountain range called the Liang Mountains. 28 Thus, the Zhou have been seen as native to present-day Shaanxi province and, consequently, at least in comparison with the Shang and other states of the Central Plain (Zhongyuan 中原), as being of western, and perhaps therefore semibarbaric, origin. 29 29. This view has been incorporated in the major modern
general histories of China; see Guo Moruo, Zhongguo shi gao (Beijing: Renmin 1964) vol.1, pp. 117-18; Fan Wenlan, Zhongguo
tongshi (Beijing: Renmin 1978) vol.1, pp. 65-6; Jian Bosan, Zhongguo shi gao (Beijing: Renmin
1983) vol.1, pp.
31-2. In Western sinology, this view is
perhaps best exemplified in the argument by Wolfram Eberhard that the Zhou were a
proto-Turkic people; A History of China: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), p. 25.” |
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Wolfram Eberhard, “Local culture of South and East China”, Leiden, 1968. Transition from Shang to Zhou “During the time of the Shang dynasty, the Zhou formed a small realm in the west, at first in central Shensi, an area which even in much later times was the home of many non-Chinese tribes. Before the beginning of the eleventh century BC they must have pushed into eastern Shensi, due to pressures of other tribes which may have belonged to the Turkish ethnic group. However, it is also possible that their movement was connected with pressures from Indo-European groups. An analysis of their tribal composition at the time of the conquest seems to indicate that the ruling house of the Zhou was related to the Turkish group, and that the population consisted mainly of Turks and Tibetans (While the concensus of the historians, including Chinese historians, concur with the view of W. Eberhard, a separate local Chinese school advocates an eastern, not specifically Türkic, origin of the Zhou). Their culture was closely related to that of Yang-shao, the previously described painted pottery culture, with, of course, the progress brought by time. They had bronze weapons and, especially, the war-chariot. Their eastward migration, however, brought them within the zone of the Shang culture, by which they were strongly influenced, so that the Zhou culture lost more and more of its original character and increasingly resembled the Shang culture (Considering that the Shang Yin culture had all markers of the Türkic culture, there was not much of a gap to bridge to begin with). The Zhou were also brought into the political sphere of the Shang, as shown by the fact that marriages took place between the ruling houses of Shang and Zhou, until the Zhou state became nominally dependent on the Shang state in the form of a dependency with special prerogatives. Meanwhile the power of the Zhou state steadily grew, while that of the Shang state diminished more and more through the disloyalty of its feudatories and through wars in the East. Finally, about 1028 BC, the Zhou ruler, named Wu Wang (“the martial king“), crossed his eastern frontier and pushed into central Honan. His army was formed by an alliance between various tribes, in the same way as happened again and again in the building up of the armies of the rulers of the steppes. Wu Wang forced a passage across the Yellow River and annihilated the Shang army. He pursued its vestiges as far as the capital, captured the last emperor of the Shang, and killed him. Thus was the Zhou dynasty founded, and with it we begin the actual history of China. The Zhou brought to the Shang culture strong elements of Turkish and also Tibetan culture, which were needed for the release of such forces as could create a new empire and maintain it through thousands of years as a cultural and, generally, also a political unit.“ (One critical note: W.Eberhard treats the Türkic dynastic marriage in Chinese or IE cultural context, which is not applicable to the Türkic context. In the Türkic tradition, dynastic marriage is a tribal marriage, it is a union of two tribes. Since the Shang (Yin) “family system was not a patriarchal system“, and neither could the Türkic Zhou system be corrupted in the beginning, the Shang and Zhou “marriages between the ruling houses“ could only be dynastic unions that confederated two realms. The Zhou and Türkic traditions are identical in naming concubines, in the royal court of Zhou concubines or secondary wives, and sons of concubines, were called by their birth clan name: if you mama was Eskimo, and your name was Pedro, your full name was Pedro Eskimo; transitioning to the Chinese system, it was Eskimo Pedro) |
Xie, Xia, Zhou, Sai/So/Se, Saka, and Türks
That Xie, pronounced Se, represent an ethnic name is little doubt; a great number of the Chinese names are versions of the ethnic names, from different locations, different traditions of writing, and likely from different languages and dialects; the name Xie is controversial in terms of the Chinese history; it was noted that Zhou justified their conquest of the Shang by asserting that the Shang had replaced the Xia, i.e. justifying their conquest by the right of priority, and claiming the descendency of the Zhou from Xia; while Shang was associated with the east, the Xia was associated with the west; many aspects of the Xia were opposite of traits believed to be emblematic of the Shang; on top of that the traditional Chinese chronology is also controversial, there are indications that not only the standard Chinese concept of ethnical continuity projected into illiterate period is false, but the dating is implausibly exaggerated.
With these premises, it was suggested that the Sai/So/Se 塞 (pin. Sai; Old Chinese *Sək; who knows how Saka pronounced their name, and how different neighboring tribes vocalized their name) may be associated with the Chinese Xia and later Yin and Zhou, ascending to the mythological period of the Chinese history; that they not only integrated with the Chinese, but also survived as distinct people is evidenced by the direct records testifying that the Ashina Türks were a branch of the Sai people. There is high confidence that the Chinese Sai refer to the Saka tribes, identified as Eastern Scythians, and comprising on the western end of their territory the tribes of Massagets/Masguts and Alans. Both Sai and Alans (Ch. Lan 阿蘭 = A 阿 + Lan 蘭) were members of the Eastern Hun confederation, and both had a tint of Mongoloidness that predated anthropological finds of the 1st millennium BC.
It is true that these constructs are speculative, and may never be concluded; but at the same time they are not any more speculative then the ethnical constructs within Indo-Europeism that enjoyed wide circulation and are inherently innately contradictory, frequently misleading, and sometimes openly absurdous or delirious.