The cultural homogeneity of ancient China as revealed by the archaeological record contrasts remarkably with the multiplicity and diversity of peoples, states, and cultures in the ancient Middle East. Beginning about 3000 BC, Egyptians, Sumerians, Semites, Akkadians, Amorites (ruled by Hammurabi of Babylon), Assyrians, Phoenicians, Hittites, Medes, Persians, and others jostle one another in a bewildering flux of Middle Eastern warfare and politics. The record is one of pluralism with a vengeance. Irrigation helped agriculture in several centers - the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Indus valleys. Trade flourished along with seafaring. Languages, writing systems, and religions proliferated. The contrast with ancient China could not have been greater.
Second, Middle Eastern technology predates Chinese in several respects. Painted pottery, the use of bronze, and the horse chariot appear earlier in the Middle East than in China, as does the subsequent use of iron, and this priority naturally suggest that these cultural elements were transmitted to China. But the precise connections between ancient China and the Middle East are still obscure and in dispute. We do know that some things failed to be transmitted from the Middle East. For example, despite precedents in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, the Yellow River did not at first lend itself to irrigation networks on the North China plain. The Chinese of Xia and Shang did not use metal agricultural tools nor draft animals and plows. The horse chariot functioned in the late Shang as an aristocratic vehicle as well as the main war machine, but its use in the Shang is not this far accompanied by evidence of a barbarian horse-chariot invasion from the northwest and the steppe, as Western historians posited until recently from the example of early horse-chariot invasions in the Middle East.
Obscurity also clouds the influences coming into China from the south. For example, bronze metallurgy seems to have begun in Thailand before 3000 BC. Its relation to bronze in China is uncertain. On the whole, the Middle Eastern evidence of early and extensive communication between separate prehistoric cultures has made "diffusion" or the lack of it a dying issue. Each major culture was a local achievement, but cultures were hardly isolated. We can conclude that important influences from West Asia reached China as though "by osmosis," to be sure, but never in proportions so cataclysmic as to shatter China's cultural homogeneity.
This conclusion counters the early suggestion of pioneer archaeologist, mainly Western, that ancient China was given an absolutely essential impetus toward civilization by Middle Eastern contact filtered across Central Asia. The new evidence also militates agains a more recent concept that ancient Chinese civilization grew from a single nuclear area in North China and that the Xia-Shang development was unique - "the cradle of the East," in P. T. Ho's phrase. To be sure, the combination of Zhou era chronicles about Xia, Shang and Zhou and post-1920 excavations gives the Three Dynasties center stage in China's ancient history. But excavation in East Asia as a whole, though just beginning, has already revealed separate though related pottery cultures south of the Yangzi, on China's southeast coast, and in northern Vietnam.
One source of Xia-Shang strength was the social order imposed by kinship and the ranking of lineages through their hierarchical segmentation, that is, branch lineages remaining subordinate to their parent lineages. Every individual had a status in his family group, and lineges had relationships of superiority and inferiority among themselves, all the way up to the dynastic power-holders. The ruler's top position rested also on his final authority both in the shamanistic religion of ancestor reverence that used bronze ritual vessels and the warfare that featured chariots and bronze weapons. Royal burials involved human sacrifice in a society already highly stratified.
On the other hand, in the absence of significant seafaring, trade and technological innovation seem to have been quite secondary in the growth of central political authority. This finding of the archaeologist is not easy for Western historians to grasp, so deeply engrained in Western, especially Mediterranean, history is the evidence that early cities emerged on trade routes and empires grew by their command of commerce, especially on the sea. Ancient China's lack of sea trade left the merchants less important and disesteemed ideologically, and this made it easier for the Qin and Han rulers when they came to power to assert control over the merchants who had arisen in their societies.
Finally, the ruler's primacy rested on his monopoly of leadership not only in ritual and warfare but also in oracle-bone writing and the historical learning it recorded. The Shang writing system already evinced subject-verb-object syntax and methods of character formation by simple pictograph, abstract descriptive pictographs, and phono-pictographs that would remain basic in Chinese thereafter.
Discussion of some samples of Chinese character formations and meanings, but in Chinese. Note especially the 214 classifiers or "radicals." Need to get a book on just the language and practice writing the language out elsewhere.
Shang writing was already using "radicals" like wood, mouth, heart, hand, that indicated categories of meaning. From the start the governmental power of the Chinese writing system was at the ruler's disposal. Writing seems to have emerged more in the service of lineage organization and government than in the service of trade.
When we group together the shaman-priests, warriors, scribes, heads of lineages, and superintendents over artisans, we can see the rudiments of the ruling elite that developed. The emerging art of government made use of ritual and art, warfare, writing, and family connections, all of which contributed to the concept of culture. A next step was the assertion of central cultural superiority over the surrounding peoples by designating as "barbarians" ... ...those peoples who did not yet acknowledge the central government's supremacy. Such peoples were given generic names in the classics and histories: Yi, barbarians on the east, Man on the south, Rong on the west, and Di on the north. (When Westerners arrived by sea, they were officially designated until the late nineteenth century as Yi.) This custom of sharply distinguishing "inside" (net) and "outside" (wai) went along with calling China the "Central Country" (zhongguo), which began by ruling the "Central Plain" (zhongyuan) in North China. So strong is this nomenclature in the classics that were composed under the Zhou Dynasty that historians East and West have generally depicted ancient China of the Three Dynasties as a "culture island" surrounded by a sea of "barbarians" lacking in the civilized qualities of Chinese culture.
The new archaeological record suggests that things were not so simple. The Western Zhou, having intermingled with non-Chinese-speaking peoples on China's north and west peripheries, were adept at tolerating cultural differences while asserting the civilizing superiority of the culture of the Central Plain. Rather than outright military conquest, the process was often one of steady assimilation based on the efficacy of the Chinese way of life and government. The politcal unit was defined culturally more than territorially.
When we read that "barbarians" have been ever-present on the fringes of China's long history, we can realize that they were a basic category in the political system from the very beginning. We must not overlook the ancient Chinese assumption of a symbiosis between culture (wenhua) and temporal power. Subservience to the dynastic state required acceptance of its rituals and cosmology that gave it Heaven's mandate to rule over mankind. Nonacceptance of this politicized culture left one outside of Zhongguo. Yet if one's language was Chinese, acceptance was already partway assured by the very terms imbedded in the classics and in the spoken tongue itself. An identifiably similar way of life was widespread throughout late Neolithic China. The task of state-building during the Three Dynasties of the Bronze Age was to gain ever wider submission to or acceptance of the central dynastic ruling house. It functioned as the capstone of the social structure, the high priesthood of the ancestor cult, the arbiter of punishments, and the leader in public works, war, and literature. Among these onmicompetent functions K. C. Chang stresses the ruler's "exclusive access to heaven and heavenly spirits." The result was that the ruler engineered a unity of culture that was the basis for political unity in a single universal state. China of course was not alone in idealizing this kind of unity, which was sought in many of the ancient empires. But China's geographic isolation made the ideal originally more fesible, and as time went on it became more readily supportable in the state and society.
Overstated though these considerations may be, they represent a great fact emerging from Chinese archaeology - that by the beginning of the era of written history, the Chinese people had already achieved a degree of cultural homogeneity and isolated continuity hard to match elsewhere in the world. They had begun to create a society dominated by state power. To it all other activities - agricultural, technological, commercial, military, literary, religious, artistic - would make their contributions as subordinate parts of the whole. Yet it would be an error for us today, so long accustomed to the modern sentiment of nationalism, to imagine ancient China as an embryonic nation-state. We would do better to apply the idea of culturalism and see ancient China as a complete civilization comparable to Western Christendom, within which nation-states like France and England became political subunits that shared their common European culture. Again, because we are so aware of the all-encompassing power of the totalitarian states of the twentieth century, we would do well to avoid an anachronistic leap to judgment that the Shang and Zhou kings' prerogatives led inevitably to sort of totalitarianism. We might better follow Etienne Balazs (1964), who called it a government by "officialism." As summarized by Stuart Schram (1987), "The state was the central power in Chinese society from the start, and exemplary behavior, rites, morality and indoctrinations have always been considred in China as means of government." We need only add that in addition to these liturgical functions the ruler monopolized the use of military violence.
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