Written by Any consideration of the ecological circumstances of early man’s life in East Asia shows the material factors to be inextricably bound up with other elements of the civilization Chinese man produced there.
In addition to those material foundations, there are also the spiritual foundations, that is, the nonmaterial components of Chinese life, to consider. These took form, on the one hand, as the concepts, the attitudes, the values, and the cumulative knowledge which the Chinese people, having generated some and borrowed others, put to use in that setting. On the other hand, the nonmaterial foundations of the civilization also include the social and institutional forms, products of the long interaction of human and material resources and of guiding ideas.
The history of how all these constituent elements of Chinese civilization developed is a very long one, extending back into a time for which we have only shreds of documentation, that is, into East Asian prehistory. It may even extend back to stages of human or proto human development in East Asia that we have no particular reason to call “Chinese.” The riddle here involves not merely that usual question about when the accepted name for a high civilization should begin to apply to its early antecedents.
One of the most intriguing riddles of all human history is where the earliest stage of China’s high civilization came from—the stage at which Chinese writing and Chinese bronze technology first appeared, either as inventions or as borrowings. Many authorities stress the continuity of Chinese civilization, and its relative isolation from other equally advanced civilizations, as the elements that account most significantly for China’s special character. What does historical “Chineseness” then consist of? Can we identify the point in history at which “China” begins?
The high Chinese civilization is characterized for us perhaps most pertinently by its possession of the Chinese written language. That first literate stage of Chinese civilization emerged into verifiable history between 2000 and 1500 B.C.—a period from which we have archeologically recovered material remains in great profusion, including literary material.
Yet that civilization’s immediate antecedents are simply unclear. Archeologists working throughout the last forty years have found many material remains of early Chinese man’s divination practices, which utilized the shoulder-blade bones of animals and the shells of tortoises. These relatively durable ” oracle bone” materials, inscribed with divination texts, have been turned up by the thousands in sites dating from the Shang-Yin period (ca. 1500-1100 B.C.).
They bear inscribed upon them a form of the Chinese script that is already a well-developed writing system, one we might perhaps estimate as having a thousand or more years of previous development. And this script is found in conjunction with a bronze technology that is astonishingly advanced, in point of both the casting techniques and the artistic conception Material evidence for the earlier stages of the script and the bronze revealing where and when they were invented has not been identified among the masses of recent archeological finds. This and other reasoning has led some to the conclusion that this particular invention of writing, apparently one of the two or three independent inventions of full scripts in human history, and this bronze art £.re not “Chinese,” but were diffused from some other part of the world. The best, or at least most widely accepted, opinion at present, however, is that we have no reason to question an independent East Asian invention of these things. Certainly, we should not overlook the fact of the distinctiveness of the entire cultural complex of which they are part. Although the stages furnishing the evidence for the earlier development of the script, for example, are not directly known to us yet, there are many cultural links between that civilization in which we first find writing and the still earlier, nonliterate neolithic cultures of the same region, cultures also well known to archeology. Some
of the foundations of traditional China had already begun to take shape in those early prehistoric phases too.
But history proper, in China as elsewhere, is considered to begin with written materials.
The Chinese calls that earliest of the archeologically attested periods of their literate history the Yin period, or the Shang-Yin. Yin is the name of the capital city founded about 1450 B.C., and Shang is the longer dynastic period (ca. 1760-1111 B.C.) of which the Yin forms the last phase.
Old Chinese historical accounts in documents dating from about 1000 B.C.
—to the considerable surprise of skeptical historians
—have been remarkably well confirmed by the past half-century of archeological research. This now leads many historians to anticipate that the whole tradition concerning still earlier epochs, particularly those detailing the succession of kings of the Hsiadynasty (for which the legendary dates are ca. 2200-1700 B.C.) and the pre-Yin phases of the Shang dynasty (roughly 1760 to 1 500) may well also some day be verified by archeology. In fact, some of the extensive archeology conducted in mainland China in the past fifteen years bears importantly on Shang culture, but oracle bones with inscriptions or other forms of writing making the identification explicit seem not to have turned up yet. Until that happens or until other kinds of material evidence become
more complete, the precise story of Chinese origins must remain a fascinating but tantalizing puzzle, providing cultural historians with enticing opportunities to indulge in speculation and hypothesis.
Let us. However, except the last Shang civilization dating from about 1500 B.C. as a starting point.
Since it is well anchored in material evidence supplemented by much further historical and legendary written material, we can speak with considerable certainty about that earliest substantiated phase of Chinese history. These earliest foundations of the civilization are already “Chinese” in significant ways.
The Shang state was at that time already aware of itself as a “central Kingdom” of high culture, a nuclear area conscious of peripheral peoples showing lesser cultural attainment, but peoples susceptible to Shang’s civilizing influences. It occupied a small area (only the size of modern France) in the central and lower Yellow River drainage traditionally regarded as the heartland of ancient China. Shang’s economy was based on intensive village agriculture of a kind made possible by the environmental circumstances of Nortl China, circumstances, especially of water and soil and climate and terrain that have remained largely the same throughout history.
Shang’s civilization displayed specialization in the manufacture of its craft products. It had achieved
what archeologists call “mature urbanism.” It engaged in a wide trade facilitated by the use of cowrie shell currency. Its bronze technology has scarcely been equaled in subsequent ages in any part of the World. Its use of silk, jade, and other luxury materials showed considerable sophistication. An elaborate ceremonial based on lineage and on concepts of ancestor worship marked its stratified social organization and its complex political life. The archeologist Kwang-
chih Chang concludes that the Yin-Shang civilization was indeed a new phenomenon, the outcome of vast and thorough change, so that with it the Neolithic Age ended, and Chinese history truly begins.
Moreover, he asserts that the Shang civilization developed from elements already present on Chinese soil. It is now demonstrated that bronze technology, writing, and chariot warfare, the three elements which, because of analogies to Western Asian cultural features, are most susceptible to the interpretation that they were not indigenous to China, could have been of East Asian origin. Most scholars now assume them to have been purely indigenous developments, even though very recently there has emerged archeological evidence pointing to several locations in East and Southeast Asia as possible sites of the important late-Neolithic advances in civilization. But also very recently the historian P. T. Ho published (in Chinese) a monumental study of the origins of Chinese agriculture, demonstrating through its highly distinctive features how unlikely it is that early Chinese civilization could have represented a diffusion of culture from India, the Fertile Crescent, or other early centers of civilization.
