Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [175]
During the past thirty years, along with this vanguard of a new “cultural revolution,” a generation of archaeologists and scholars has also been allowed to peek over the “Great Wall” that surrounds China’s ancient history. As they do, they have begun to reveal the rich, imaginative, and colorful myths born in “the empire without wants.”
MYTHIC VOICES
Thunder comes resounding out of the earth:
The image of Enthusiasm.
Thus the ancient kings made music
In order to honor merit,
And offered it with splendor
To the Supreme Deity,
Inviting their ancestors to be present.
—from I Ching,
Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Banes, translators
What are oracle bones?
Near the end of the nineteenth century, a large number of so-called “dragon bones” began showing up in apothecary shops throughout China. Ground into powders to be used in folk medicines and aphrodisiacs, these bones were thought to possess magical powers, because they had strange markings on them. Scholars became aware of the “dragon bones” in the early twentieth century, and by the 1920s, when extensive excavations were made near some of the oldest human settlements along China’s Yellow River, more than 100,000 of these bones had been unearthed in what proved to be an archaeological gold mine.*
Made from the bones of deer and oxen, and tortoise shells, these artifacts were later identified as “oracle bones” used by royal priests—and even by early Chinese kings themselves—in making prophecies, communicated through dead ancestors. Representing the earliest form of Chinese religion, the bones were marked with Chinese characters from one of the earliest known forms of written Chinese. In ancient divining sessions, the bones were marked with a shallow cut—which evolved into written “questions”—and then heated until the bone or shell cracked. The resulting fissures were then “read” by a priest, who made predictions based on the configuration of the cracks. Usually a simple “fortune-telling” question about the weather, the success of a hunt or battle, or the sex of an expected child would be asked. Interestingly, a “reading” of “yes” meant boy, while “no” meant girl—an indication of a very old Chinese preference for male children, still a concern in China today, where modern sex-screening methods are used to abort female fetuses.
Although they probably represent traditions that go back much further in Chinese history, many of the oracle bones are dated to 1300 BCE, during the Shang Dynasty (1523–1027 BCE), one of the first kingdoms in Chinese history for which there is significant archaeological evidence. Based in the Huang He Valley, the Shang was organized as a city-state with a king who probably served as high priest, similar to the organization in ancient Mesopotamia. Other finds from the Shang Dynasty include sophisticated bronze drinking vessels that show a high degree of metalworking skill. On the grimmer side of the archaeological ledger are Shang tombs in which kings and nobles were buried with treasures that included war chariots—often complete with horses and charioteers. Clearly, human sacrifices were made during the Shang period, and the remains of sacrificial victims, ceremonially beheaded in groups of ten, have been found in these tombs. Patricia Ebrey, a scholar of Chinese family and kinship, writes that one tomb of a Shang king, who ruled around 1200 BCE, “yielded the remains of ninety followers who accompanied him in death, seventy-four human sacrifices, twelve horses, and eleven dogs…. Some followers were provided with coffins and bronze ritual vessels or weapons of their own, some (generally female) with no coffins but with personal ornaments; others were provided with no furnishings and were beheaded, cut in two, or put to death in other mutilating ways.” (Human sacrifice was apparently abolished during the next dynastic period, that of the Zhou Dynasty, 1027–221 BCE.)
During this very early period in Chinese history under the Shang, “religion” was largely based on the idea that each