Chapter 9 (Part 3): The Ritual Warfare of Shang Dynasty China
Army conscripts were recruited and mobilised along lineage lines for military campaigns but especially to secure captives for human sacrifices
If you are new here, we are reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Catch up and join us Thursdays in 2024. My first slow read here on Substack is David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything. These two books showcase his thesis on the development of humanity by looking at how debt evolved and how people organised themselves and their world. Unique among his peers, Graeber still asks the big questions in anthropology.
Dear Reader,
Graeber is going to make it hard for us this section. He barely mentions what happens in China. I understand. Ancient Chinese history is quite complex and covers such a large period and size accompanied by numerous artefacts. It is simply mindboggling. We are attempting to find, given the short time frame that we have, on how Chinese armies, numbering in the thousands, could be paid.
Stay dry,
Melanie
Why I will avoid using state
If we are looking for clues when the professional soldiers in China emerged, we’ll have to understand the chaotic past filled with conflict in Chinese history. Unlike what we have seen in the Indus Valley and the Ganges-Yamuna sites, the Chinese sites have a multitude of evidence found in what scholars label as early states along the main river systems. This is the Bronze Period in China (2000 - 500 BC) focused along the Yellow River in the North of China.
The term ‘state’ is what scholars describe the three prominent Bronze Age large-scale settlements of Erlitou in Yanshi, Henan Province (1800-1600 BC), Erligang Zhengzhou, Henan Province (1600 - 1400) and Anyang, Anyang county Henan Province (1250 - 1050 BC). The first two are contemporaneous but distinct communities and the latter is an important settlement, said to be the capital of the first historic Shang Dynasty.
I am avoiding the labels traditionally assigned to this period, such as the legendary Xia Dynasty to refer to Erlitou and Erligang for instance. Chinese archaeological analyses has been dominated by the search for continuity from the past to its contemporary present. This explains why the question on the origin of the state links the timeline, interpretation of excavations, and historical records. The labels remain useful for period references. I will approach the archaeological evidence on its own merits.
This problem is similar when we use the term (nation)state. We have to be careful when we use a modern concept derived from the French Revolution. I do understand what scholars mean and it includes some of these features:
numerous craft specialisation (also linked to standards)
standardisation system - it could be styles, weights and measurements
central authority - a clear single ruler(s) that wields complete power or can mobilise power to move people and resources
clear social and economic hierarchy resulting in unequal and differentiated habitation, burial, and health outcomes
taxation or extraction of surplus from people that covers labour, land, goods
monopoly on violence - the power to deploy an army or armed force on another group or even in its own territory
a demarcated territory - this may be linked to a clear identity built on shared values or religious beliefs
a shared culture, identity and values that may or may not be demarcated by a clear and stable territory
agriculture - this usually refers to intensive food cultivation rather than relying on foraging or hunting as the main sources of food
population size - the number of people supported in a given territory is larger compared to villages, it approaches the number of early urban cities (in the thousands at least)
large public works or monumental architecture
organised religion
We do know that China rapidly and independently developed into what many assign as states based on some or all of these features.1 For my purpose, I will try to be more specific and use specifc features that we can verify with archaeological evidence. More appropriately, these independent polities are run by kings in a monarchial system of rule.
The political experiment
The period of the Neolithic and Late Neolithic in China (7,000 - 1700 BC) is a soup of both egalitarian and increasing rank hierarchy societies. I have written about four Middle Neolithic sites: Niuheliang (Liaoning Province) and Dawenkou (Shandong Province) along the Yellow River, Shimao (Shaanxi Province) and Taosi (Shanxi Province) a uniquely upland fortification that is closer in governance model to Anatolian highland settlements for Graeber’s later work, The Dawn of Humanity.
My initial conclusion was these settlements still had features of egalitarianism but increasing rank hierarchy. Archaeological evidence points to
possibly kin-based, non-hierarchical large settlements
tiered settlement with large and small houses
common religious beliefs
So it seems like these settlements provided mixed features with early indications of differentiation. It helps not to slot them into fixed categories. Other sites display expansion, contraction, abandonment, or destruction.
What is astonishing is that there seems to be an accelerated push towards greater hierarchy and tension among different groups. By the time the Bronze Age (2,000 - 500 BC) arrives, the large-scale settlements have been described as states that had features of state power.
Settling into a monarchial system and ritual violence
The period we are interested in is the early Bronze Age that straddles three large-scale settlements:
Erlitou in Yanshi, Henan Province (1800-1600 BC),
Erligang in Zhengzhou, Henan Province (1600 - 1400)
Anyang in Anyang county, Henan Province (1250 - 1050 BC).
However, for this discussion, we shall focus on Anyang, a kingdom settlement that is on the cusp of historical records. It is largely recognised as the capital of the Shang Dynasty due to the proto-Chinese written records found on oracle bones. There are about two hundred thousand pieces with three fourths waiting for full analysis.
The oracle bones is used for divination. The way it works is that you ask questions, subject these to heat that cracks the bones, and cracks are then interpreted in the form of answers. The sequence and in some cases the final outcome is recorded on the bone. These are usually performed by the Shang kings.
What binds these three settlements is the level of violence during this period. The soldiers is a necessary role to maintain the religious and the social system of that period.
Ritual economy and priest kings
Warfare is permanent feature in the Anyang and Shang period. It is intimately connected to the king who can be best described as ritual-kings or priest kings. He is the direct representation of the ancestral line on earth. Those who belong closest to the ancestral line wield greater access to spiritual power (or answers).
The structure of authority relies on uniting both spiritual and earthly resources with access delineated according to lineage distance from the king. Much of the divination involved exercising approval of military campaigns by kings to extend or enforce their power to competing villages and mustering their own networks, sub-lineages, and allies.
…it would probably be more accurate to say that for the Shang people, sacrifice and war were the great affairs of the lineage, and operated materially, practically and discursively through its hierarchies of being – incorporating the living and the dead, the straight and the crooked, the pacified and the wild. At the same time, however, as argued in Chapter 5, the Shang polity formed a kind of super-lineage, and the king acted as a kind of lineage leader of the world.
Roderick Campbell
One of the target of these military campaigns is to acquire qiang captives 羌 who are destined to be human sacrifices. Several thousands have been found in sacrificial pits in Anyang decapitated or mangled before burial.
Where is the army?
The Shang system revolves around networks of lineages mobilised by its corporate leader. The king taps his sub-lineages and allies, who in turn, coerced some form of conscription service from their own lineages and networks. Since the king recruited through corporate identity rather than individual recruitment, loyalty diminishes with ancestral distance.
The conscript number anywhere between 3,000 - 5,000 up to 13,000 and these could be mobilised quickly as the king activates his different networks simultaneously (130-131). This means that the lineage system triggers recruitment from its sub-branches and the conscript numbers scale up. Scholar David Keightley describes zhong ren 衆人 or many men as pertaining to the ordinary conscripts ren but also zhong as possibly the lower ranking leader of a group who may hold specialised positions.
It is unclear if the conscripts were temporary or permanent or how they were paid individually. What we do know are the following:
The king bestows gifts to lineage leaders. We know from inscription and in graves that cowries are gifts, some argue as early forms of money, but its exact use or valuation is unknown. Since these are given to lower ranking officials and some are buried with them, then it is likely a ritual item and not for commoners or commodity purchases (p.118).
There might be both permanent soldiers under the king and temporary bodies available when needed
If we follow the lineage based recruitment, every group member surrenders X number of years as service.
So far, no indications of how they are paid but Keightley strongly believes that the specificities of number of troops indicate the probability of meticulous records kept except we have not found or deciphered them yet.
The dearth of records on ordinary people meant that our questions remain regarding:
how conscripted soldiers return to their households, if ever
the relationship between slavery, debt, and serving the army
whether captives are used for agriculture or manufacturing prior to their eventual use in ritual sacrifice
Round-Up
Warfare has characterised the rise of the lineage kingdoms in the Shang Dynasty. What has been a promising egalitarian political set-up has been totally replaced by an inherited monarchial system defined by ritual violence. We know from oracle bones that
armies are recruited from sub-lineages and allies and these can scale up quickly; the downside is that loyalty diminishes the further the ancestral line is from the king
gifts flow from the king, such as cowrie shells, but we do not know the value of these shells or how payments are made to ordinary people
war captives and tributes are important incentives for wealth acquisition for all participants
Since the oracle bones only document elite activities and interests, we may never know more about the credit or debt system. We do know that interest in the Bronze Age is accelerating and more information will be available.
Re-read the previous post
Sources:
To get a quick overview of prehistoric China, I have been enjoying the podcast of
on the Axial Age. There are several episodes tackling the the Pre-history and Bronze Age of China up until the Warring States Period.For Anyang and Shang oracle bones interpretation, I have relied on Roderick Campbell’s Violence, Kinship and the Early Chinese State and Chapter 4 of the Cambridge History of Ancient China, David Keightley’s The Shang China’s First Historical Dynasty
For a discussion on whether state is a good term or not in Chinese political development, see Gideon Shelach, et. al. (2014) The Earliest States in China: A Long-Term Trajectory Approach; see also Chapter 2, Cities, States and Civilizations of Roderick Campbell’s Violence, Kinship, and the Early Chinese State