The Shang Dynasty ruled China during the second millennium BCE. The Shang kings ruled through a complex government hierarchy and were responsible for maintaining proper relations with spirits and ancestors. Shang society was highly stratified, with a large gap between the royal/noble class and common farmers. The economy supported this social structure through agriculture. The Shang made advances in science, developing a calendar system and recording celestial phenomena. They excelled in bronze-working, pottery, jade carving, and other crafts. The Shang also developed a mature system of Chinese characters that formed one of the world's earliest writing systems.

1. The Shang Dynasty
Shang Government
Society and Economy
Science, Arts and Crafts
Pictographic Script

2. Shang Government
 The Shang oracle bones were used for
divination, the art of telling future events
through consulting the supernatural, a
practice found worldwide that was also
used by the Neolithic peoples of china.
 The Shang king’s diviner would inscribe a
question on the prepared bone or shell, dig
a small pit part way through the piece, and
then apply a heated metal rod to the pit,
which would cause the shell or bone to
crack and the nature of crack indicated the
answer.

3.  It was believed that the spirits of royal
ancestors could influence events, Shang
monarchs regularly offered elaborate
sacrifices to propitiate those spirits.
 Oracle bone inscriptions also contained
information about Shang government,
state, society, and economy as well as
insights into the king’s private lives and
relationship with their ancestor, the
inscriptions have also corroborated much
of the information about the Shang
recorded in the later historic texts.

4.  Shang State and Society were based on
tribal alliances or a form of feudalism.
 The king ruled through a complex and
highly stratified government network.
 The kings were responsible for correct
relations with the wider spirit would as
well.

5. Society and Economy
 A great gap existed between the rulers
and ruled in shang Society. At the top of
society were the royal and aristocratic
families, who were organized according
to patrilineal clans and kept careful
genealogies.
 Since the royalty and nobility practiced
polygyny.

6.  Economy could not have supported an
ever increasing leisure-class.
 It is reasonable to assume that some
offspring of the nobility must have been
regularly demoted to commoner status.
 Nobles were rewarded with strings of
cowries shells acquired from south china
and southeast Asia, which were
probably used for major transactions.

7.  The vast majority of people, however ,
were not the slaves, they were farmers,
who probably had the status of serfs,
meaning that they were tied to the land
and had to give part of their crops to the
lord.

8. Science, Art, and Crafts
 Chinese tradition says that the yellow
Emperor first establised the sixty- year
cycle as the basis of calculating time
and that the Hsia dynasty fixed the lunar
calendar of 366days a year.
 Many oracle bones of the Shang
recorded solar and lunar eclipses and
noted predictions of their occurrences.

9.  The most remarkable products of the
Shang dynasty are bronze ritual vessels
that art historians consider unequalled in
technical excellence and beauty.
 The art of bronze casting developed
around 2000BC, in the late Neolithic
Age.

10.  In early west Asia, India, and Europe,
bronze was made by the lost wax
method, whereby a wax model of the
object is encasted in a clay mold: as
molten metal is poured in, the wax melts
( is lost ) and is replaced by the metal.
 By contrast, the Chinese cast their
vessels in ceramic piece molds.

11.  This method of bronze casting came
naturally to the chinese, who were
already skilled in pottery making,
indeed, the Shang potter made a high-
fired, glazed pottery close to stoneware.
 They invented lacquer by extracting sap
from a lacquer tree and applying the
liquid to a surface such as wood to form
a glossy, waterproof coating. They also
worked gold and silver.

12. A Pictographic Script
 Although signs and symbols are found on
pottery as early as 5000BC.
 The script exhibited a maturity of stylization
that presupposes a centuries-long
evolution.
 Chinese writing is unrelated to other
writing.
 It is no alphabetic script consisting of
symbols and graphs.


13.  A good modern dictionary will list over 40,000
graphs, most of which have evolved since Shang
times.
 There are three basic kinds of graphs:
 1) Pictographs are conventionalized picture symbols
of an object such as the sun and moon.
 2) Ideographs frequently are formed by combining
two or more pictographs, such bright and brilliant.
 3) Logographs are formed by combining either a
pictographs or an ideograph to indicate meaning and
a symbol to give a key to pronounced.