Hello
friends, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor: The Show
Where I Say Things. Today we’ll be delving into something a little
more sinister: the dark side of the Shang dynasty...and how!
Most
of what we know about the Shang dynasty today comes from their
capital at modern Anyang, in east-central China’s Henan province.
Given the richness of documentary and material evidence recovered
from the Anyang site, it appears that the 13th century BC
represented the apogee of Shang power. This was a civilization that,
finally, had all of the trappings of a historical Chinese dynasty:
ritual, stratification, urbanization, and now the written word.
All
this talk about the cool stuff from the Shang dynasty might lead one
to think it was a pretty cool time to be around. It wasn’t.
Although the Shang got off to a good start, life under the dynasty’s
later kings wasn’t exactly Woodstock.
Of
course things were pretty good if you happened to be the king or one
of his buddies, but for the other 99% of the population life seems to
have been pretty rough. For one thing, the Shang upper crust seems
to have been pretty keen on human sacrifice, often using highly
creative methods(1—don’t read if you’re eating). Sacrificed
and decapitated skeletons in the hundreds have been excavated from
Shang royal tombs:
It
appears that life was cheap to the Shang aristocracy, and commoners
were seen as little more than livestock, fuel for the twin engines of
food productions and ritual.
In
part five I showed you a picture of an extremely disturbing
Shang-dynasty axehead. Just in case you haven’t had any good
nightmares lately, here it is again:
(2)
Good
gravy. It looks like something from a DnD campaign run by Tim
Burton. Whoever made this thing needs therapy.
Imagine
the cruel grin on the axe gleaming red in the firelight as it rises
and falls from one helpless victim to the next. Blood drips from its
greedy maw as it drinks the life of a new sacrifice. The
executioner—Fu Hao, we talked about her last time—is a beautiful
woman, swaying back and forth in her trance. Her hands purple with
gore, she kneels before a fire, scratching arcane sigils onto a bone.
Three thousand years later, that very bone is again held in human
hands, and the mysterious carvings thereon are read once more. The
blood is gone, but the innocent bones filling the Shang tombs remain.
And they cry out to us over the chasm of history at the cruelty of
their fate; and though in this life their suffering went unrewarded,
we can hope that in the hereafter they have found rest.
So
we have human sacrifice, axes with monster faces, a beautiful but
deadly war-queen, and to top it all off they write on bones.
This sounds like something out a fantasy novel, but it’s history!
From the 13th century BC on, the Shang dynasty gradually
waned in power and waxed in decadence and cruelty. If the later
records are any indication, what was already a dark and brutal
society got darker and brutal-er:
The
Shang dynasty, or at least the late portion of it, became something
less in line with “splendorous ancient civilization” and more
“Dark Eldar from Warhammer 40k”. So, to my friends with time
machines, if you’re planning a trip I would rethink that.
But,
the eventual fate of all tyrannical regimes is to fall, sooner or
later, and the Shang were no exception. Next time we’ll be talking
about the collapse of the Shang, so I hope you’ll look forward to
it. See you then!
Sources:
1.
http://international.uiowa.edu/files/international.uiowa.edu/files/file_uploads/
wangpingMethodsofHumanSacrificeinShangNEWEDITION.doc
2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty#/media/File:CMOC_Treasures_of_Ancient_China_
exhibit_-_bronze_battle_axe.jpg
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