Hey guys, welcome
back to Office Hours with the Brofessor: The Show Where I Say Things.
Tonight we’re going to begin a new series that I’m really
excited about: we’re going to discuss the ancient origins of
Chinese civilization.
In this series
we’re going to go way back in time to the very earliest cultures
that could be considered ancestral to what we call “China”, and
look at some of the cultural elements that continue to be with us
even to this day.
Something my
Chinese friends like to say is “China has five thousand years of
history”. Even the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, recently made an
address to the UK parliament wherein he claimed the figure to be
“over” five thousand. The “5k figure”, as I call it, is
usually used as an assertion of Chinese national pride. To question
the figure is tantamount to belittling the Chinese nation, so in my
experience when someone makes this claim the best thing to do is nod
and go along with it—internal cringing aside.
The 5k figure is
inaccurate. For one thing, “history”, strictly speaking, means
that contemporary written sources are available from this time. They
weren’t. The very oldest undisputed Chinese written documents date
from the 13th century BC, maybe a little older. Sorry,
Xi. Saying “China has over five thousand years of history” isn’t
wrong in the “2+2=5” sense, but it is a gross oversimplification.
I think it would be more accurate to say this:
China has almost
3500 years of written history, four thousand years of civilization,
and at least seven thousand
years of continuous cultural development. That is to say, the Yellow
River basin seven thousand years ago was home to cultures directly
ancestral to the Chinese culture of today.
Wow.
That’s
a period of existence older
than any other society today. Egypt and Mesopotamia became
Arabic-speaking Islamic societies. Byzantium, the continuation of
ancient Greco-Roman culture, fell to the Ottomans. But China is
still here, and arguably has been for seven thousand years.
To
an American—especially one from Colorado, a history-starved pocket
of a history-starved nation—these numbers boggle the mind. It’s
almost unfathomable, but there it is.
So,
let’s get started by going back to five thousand BC in the Yellow
River basin of central China. This is the middle of what’s called
the neolithic, or new stone age. Agriculture is hardly a new thing,
but we’re still thousands of years off from what we would call
civilization, or even the use of metal. Basically we’re looking at
a continuum of culturally related farming villages (1).
The
apparent
continuity between these cultures suggests some degree of language
contact. Even if these communities were not linguistically related,
the people belonging to them were at least bro enough to learn each
other’s languages. There might even have been what linguists call
a sprachbund—that is, languages that influence each other, but are
not necessarily related themselves. A good example is the linguistic
exchange between Sumerian and Akkadian in
ancient Mesopotamia. While
of course we can’t prove whether language contact did in fact
occur, I like to think of the words of the immortal Dr. Seuss:
“If
such a thing could be,
it certainly would be.”
--Dr. Seuss, McElligott’s Pool
--Dr. Seuss, McElligott’s Pool
...or
at least, so I like to think.
Gradually,
between the seventh and fourth millennia BC, a unifying set of ideas
spread throughout the Yellow River basin. Among these were, for
example, a belief in a circular sky and square earth, with totem
items to represent them (2) and the association of dragons with
storms and water (3).
It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that these concepts were
spread by people speaking a language ancestral, or at least related,
to modern Chinese, given that some
of the words for these concepts may
be found in reconstructed Proto-Sino-Tibetan. A good example is PST
/*m-bruk/(4), which referred to a heavenly dragon associated with
storms and weather. This concept was probably held by the PST
speakers of eight thousand years ago, and remains prominent in
Chinese culture today. We even still have the same word in modern
Standard Chinese, written
like this:
靐
That
is, bing4 “sound
of thunder”. It was ideas like these
that spread across the Yellow
River
basin of
seven thousand years ago—perhaps spread, as I say, by a language
ancestral to today’s Chinese.
These
prehistoric farming communities gradually coalesced into what is
known to archaeologists as the Yangshao culture, which flourished
between the seventh and fifth milennia BC and developed out of the
earlier Penligang, Dadiwan and Cishan cultures(4). The Yangshao
people have given us some of the very earliest distinctively
“Chinese” cultural elements. For
example, present in the Yangshao culture was
the ding, or ceremonial cauldron(5),
which really began with the
even earlier Cishan culture (6). To
this day dings are
highly prestigious symbols in
China.
Here’s a look at a Cishan
and Yangshao ding:
Cishan
ding (8-7kya)(5)
Yangshao
ding (7-5kya)(6)
To
the north of the Yangshao was
the culturally similar Hongshan culture. From
the Hongshan people, too, we find some of the first recognizable
elements of what we would call Chinese culture. For instance, the
Hongshan people used shapes and figures at ceremonial sites that
imply, incredibly, the earliest example of what we know today as Feng
Shui(7). Another great
Hongshan find is this beautiful jade dragon:
Hongshan Jade Dragon (7-5 kya)(8)
I
love to look at the dings and
the dragon, and think about how I am now living in what could be
called a direct continuation of these seven thousand year old
cultures. Pretty amazing, and that’s why I love China.
So that’s part I of our series on the origins of Chinese
civilization. Up next: Origins of Chinese Civilization, Part II: Big
Men and Kings. See you next time!
Part I:
5.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CMOC_Treasures_of_Ancient_China_exhibit_-_pottery_ding.jpg
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