| Author | : Roderick Campbell |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 363 |
| Release | : 2018-05-03 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1107197619 |
The violence of war and sacrifice were not the antithesis of civilization at Shang Anyang, but rather its foundation.
| Author | : Roderick Campbell |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 364 |
| Release | : 2018-05-03 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 110819558X |
Situated between myth and history, the Shang has been hailed both as China's first historical dynasty and as one of the world's primary civilizations. This book is an up-to-date synthesis of the archaeological, palaeographic and transmitted textual evidence for the Shang polity at Anyang (c.1250–1050 BCE). Roderick Campbell argues that violence was not the antithesis of civilization at Shang Anyang, but rather its foundation in war and sacrifice. He explores the social economy of practices and beliefs that produced the ancestral order of the Shang polity. From the authority of posthumously deified kings, to the animalization of human sacrificial victims, the ancestral ritual complex structured the Shang world through its key institutions of war, sacrifice, and burial. Mediated by hierarchical lineages, participation in these practices was basic to being Shang. This volume, which is based on the most up-to-date evidence, offers comprehensive and cutting-edge insight into the Chinese Bronze Age civilization.
| Author | : Roderick Campbell |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 363 |
| Release | : 2018-05-03 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 110818717X |
Situated between myth and history, the Shang has been hailed both as China's first historical dynasty and as one of the world's primary civilizations. This book is an up-to-date synthesis of the archaeological, palaeographic and transmitted textual evidence for the Shang polity at Anyang (c.1250–1050 BCE). Roderick Campbell argues that violence was not the antithesis of civilization at Shang Anyang, but rather its foundation in war and sacrifice. He explores the social economy of practices and beliefs that produced the ancestral order of the Shang polity. From the authority of posthumously deified kings, to the animalization of human sacrificial victims, the ancestral ritual complex structured the Shang world through its key institutions of war, sacrifice, and burial. Mediated by hierarchical lineages, participation in these practices was basic to being Shang. This volume, which is based on the most up-to-date evidence, offers comprehensive and cutting-edge insight into the Chinese Bronze Age civilization.
| Author | : Roderick B. Campbell |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : |
| Release | : 2018 |
| Genre | : China |
| ISBN | : 9781316647820 |
Being, society and world : towards an inter-ontic approach : Shang civilization, historiography and early China -- Cities, states and civilizations -- Central plains civilization from Erlitou to Anyang -- The great settlement Shang and its polity : networks, boundaries and the social economy -- Kinship, place and social order -- Violence and Shang civilization -- Constructing the ancestors : the social economy of burial -- Technologies of pacification and the world of the great settlement Shang
| Author | : Mark Edward Lewis |
| Publisher | : State University of New York Press |
| Total Pages | : 392 |
| Release | : 1989-08-15 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1438410735 |
This book provides new insight into the creation of the Chinese empire by examining the changing forms of permitted violence—warfare, hunting, sacrifice, punishments, and vengeance. It analyzes the interlinked evolution of these violent practices to reveal changes in the nature of political authority, in the basic units of social organization, and in the fundamental commitments of the ruling elite. The work offers a new interpretation of the changes that underlay the transformation of the Chinese polity from a league of city states dominated by aristocratic lineages to a unified, territorial state controlled by a supreme autocrat and his agents. In addition, it shows how a new pattern of violence was rationalized and how the Chinese of the period incorporated their ideas about violence into the myths and proto-scientific theories that provided historical and natural prototypes for the imperial state.
| Author | : Brian Lander |
| Publisher | : Yale University Press |
| Total Pages | : 317 |
| Release | : 2021-11-30 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0300262728 |
A multidisciplinary environmental history of early China’s political systems, featuring newly available Chinese archaeological data This book is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China’s early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China’s agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. He argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability to exploit the labor and resources of those who harnessed photosynthetic energy from domesticated plants and animals. Focusing on the state of Qin, Lander amalgamates abundant new scientific, archaeological, and excavated documentary sources to argue that the human domination of the central Yellow River region, and the rest of the planet, was made possible by the development of complex political structures that managed and expanded agroecosystems.
| Author | : Yung-ti Li |
| Publisher | : Columbia University Press |
| Total Pages | : 310 |
| Release | : 2022-12-20 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0231549636 |
The site of Anyang, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, dated to around 1200 to 1000 BCE, is one of the most important sources of knowledge about craft production in Bronze Age China. Excavations and research of the settlement over the past ninety years demonstrate both the advanced level of Shang craft workers and the scale and capacity of the craft industries of the time. However, materials unearthed in Anyang by different expeditions have since been stored separately in China and Taiwan, making a thorough study of this important aspect of life in Shang China challenging. Despite efforts to integrate the data based on published material, the physical evidence rarely has been considered as a single group. Through a systematic analysis of the archaeological materials available in both China and Taiwan, Yung-ti Li provides a detailed picture of craft production in Anyang and paves the way for a new understanding of how the Shang capital functioned as a metropolis. Focusing on craft-producing activities, including bronze casting, bone working, shell and marble inlay working, lithic working, and pottery production, Kingly Crafts examines the material remains, the technology, and the production organization of the craft industries. Although the level of Shang craftsmanship can be seen in the finished products, Li demonstrates that it is necessary to study workshop remains and their archaeological context to reconstruct the social and political contexts of craft production. Offering a comprehensive investigation of these remains, Kingly Crafts sheds new light on the relationships between craft industries and political authority in the late Shang period.
| Author | : Mark Edward Lewis |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 116 |
| Release | : 2022-03-31 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1108982980 |
Violence, both physical and nonphysical, is central to any society, but it is a version of the problem that it claims to solve. This Element examines how states in ancient East Asia, from the late Shang through the end of the Han dynasty, wielded violence to create and display authority, and also how their licit violence was entangled in the 'savage' or 'criminal' violence whose suppression justified their power. The East Asian cases are supplemented through citing comparable Western ones. The themes examined include the emergence of the warrior as a human type, the overlap of hunts and combat (and the overlap between treatments of alien species and alien peoples), sacrifice of both alien captives and 'death attendants' from one's own groups, the impact of military specialization and the increased scale of armies, the emergent ideal of self-sacrifice, and the diverse aspects of violence in the regime of law.
| Author | : Garret Pagenstecher Olberding |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 213 |
| Release | : 2021-11-18 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1009084062 |
Ancient Chinese walls, such as the Great Wall of China, were not sovereign border lines. Instead, sovereign space was zonally exerted with monarchical powers expressed gradually over an area, based on possibilities for administrative action. The dynamically shifting, ritualized articulation of early Chinese sovereignty affects the interpretation of the spatial application of state force, including its cartographic representations. In Designing Boundaries in Early China, Garret Pagenstecher Olberding draws on a wide array of source materials concerning the territorialization of space to make a compelling case for how sovereign spaces were defined and regulated in this part of the ancient world. By considering the ways sovereignty extended itself across vast expanses in early China, Olberding informs our understanding of the ancient world and the nature of modern nation-states.
