Shang Dynasty

The Shang Dynasty is the first Chinese dynasty for which archaeology and contemporary writing agree, though the Chinese historiographical tradition, recorded centuries later in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, places a Xia Dynasty before it that has left no confirmed written trace. Shang rule is conventionally dated from around 1600 BCE, when Tang is said to have overthrown the last Xia king, to 1046 BCE, when King Wu of Zhou defeated the last Shang king, Di Xin, at the Battle of Muye. The dynasty moved its capital several times before settling at Yin, near modern Anyang in Henan province, from around 1300 BCE onward, which is why the period is often called the Yin Dynasty in later sources.

What is known of Shang religion and governance rests overwhelmingly on the oracle bones excavated at Anyang from 1899 onward, tortoise plastrons and cattle scapulae inscribed with questions put to royal ancestors and to Shangdi, then heated until they cracked and read as answers. These inscriptions record royal sacrifices, military campaigns, harvests and the king's own health, and they name a genealogy of Shang kings that later texts largely confirm. Bronze casting reached a very high technical level in this period, producing ritual vessels used to present food and wine offerings to ancestral spirits at state sacrifices, and Shang tombs, including the undisturbed tomb of the consort Fu Hao, held large quantities of bronze and jade and, in royal burials, human sacrifice. David Keightley's study of the oracle bone corpus remains the standard scholarly account of how this evidence reconstructs Shang belief and practice.

Shang religion centered on Shangdi, the Lord on High, a remote high god who governed weather, harvest and war but who was approached only indirectly, through the spirits of the royal ancestors. The king functioned as chief diviner and priest, and the oracle bone inscriptions are overwhelmingly royal divinations addressed first to dead kings and queens, asking whether a sacrifice would please them, whether a campaign would succeed or whether the king's toothache had been sent by an aggrieved ancestor. Ancestors were ranked in a fixed ritual calendar and offered wine, grain and meat in bronze vessels cast in animal and abstract patterns, chiefly the taotie mask, whose meaning is still debated among scholars.

Divination itself was a technical and repeatable procedure: a diviner applied heat to a prepared bone or shell, interpreted the resulting crack, and a scribe recorded the question, sometimes the answer and occasionally whether the prediction had come true, giving the corpus an unusually verifiable structure for a Bronze Age religious archive. Human sacrifice, generally of war captives, accompanied major royal burials and some ancestral rites, a practice the Zhou conquerors later cited to justify their overthrow of the dynasty as morally corrupt. The Shang ancestor cult and the concept of a supreme but distant high god, later merged with the Zhou's idea of Tian, or Heaven, both passed into later Chinese religion and remained points of reference for the ritual reforms of the Zhou and the ethical reinterpretations of Confucius centuries afterward.