Xia: Bronze vessels

The archaeological record goes back beyond 5000 years of history. For example, this particular jade, being a square imposed on a circle, with the perspective carved along the edge taking up two faces. While the masks have certain features (eyes, mouth) the rest are typically indecipherable.

Around 2000 BC the bronze age begins in China. Chinese bronzes uniformly have a preference for tripods with hollowed legs and pouring spouts. These bronzes are also not made from hammered metal, but rather cast, with no examples of hammered bronze working to be found. These come from the “Xia” by date but they don’t contain inherent marking that date them to a Xia dynasty.

Shang: Oracle bone inscriptions

Mass grave with beheaded corpses of captured war prisoners is an indication of a sophisticated social hierarchy. Additionally, rulers were buried in large underground tombs with their retinue and a number of animal or human sacrifices. The sheer scale of violence in the Shang stands in striking contrast to what later historical sources say about the Shang. The later texts do not describe them as violent and war-loving people.

Oracle bone divination hollows a turtle shell and applies a hot poker to produce symmetric cracks on both sides on the bone which are interpreted against a true/false statement. If the cracks are interpreted as auspicious by the king, an appropriate diagnostic is written to record the fortune onto the shell. Writing down these predictions are a Shang invention.

Divination

Why write it down? Either these were put on display with a fancy inking, or else they were kept for archiving to “fix” the future or to record that the fortune actually happened, but only in the positive case. If the King were wrong, the records were obviously not made.

Zhou Yi (Yijing, I Ching) and hexagrams

The book of changes is granted great philosophical weight in the Chinese culture. However, in its earliest form (11th to 8th century BC) it was simply a divination manual, performed by manipulating long reeds to from 6 lines of a possible 64 combinations. This is directly related to the same mechanism for reading the cracks on heated bones. However, the book of changes provides a list of all 64 hexagrams analyzed line by line to provide a “response” to the statement or question you put to it.

By late Zhou (4th century BC), commentaries are added to the explanations of these hexagrams. However, the original lines may directly correspond to astronomical constellations called the dragon made up of three western constellations (scorpio). In march, 800 BC, the dragon’s horns begin to poke above the horizon–the dragon in the fields. Before that, in the winter, it’s the submerged dragon, a reference to a belief in a watery underworld. In the middle of summer, you arrive at the flying dragon in the skies. As the constellation processes to autumn, the head of the dragon disappears and only the neck, body, and tail are visible.

So, the first hexagram is a description of the stars mapped to the changing of the seasons, a valuable indicator for an agrarian society and the arrival of the new year. For this reason, the dragon is important in Chinese culture and associated with the eastern direction.