The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200-1045 BC) (review)

The Shang dynastic proto-kingdom was founded somewhere in the lower-middle reaches of the Yellow River drainage basin around 1500 BCE. The first two-thirds of the dynasty's history is very imperfectly known, because the sites of its several successive royal towns have not been securely identified, and almost no written records survive from that period. Around 1200 BCE, however, the dynasty established a temple and palace complex (whether this can be called a "capital," properly speaking, is a matter of debate among specialists) at what is now the village of Xiaotun, near Anyang, in northern Henan Province. The move to Anyang ushered in a period known as the Late Shang, and from the soil of Anyang have emerged the first written records of an East Asian civilization.

For a century and a half, from the reign of Wu Ding (the twenty-first king) through the reign of Di Xin (the twenty-ninth and last), the Shang kings held sway at the city they called Great Shang. Assisted by kinsmen, nobles, and an array of functionaries and artisans, they hunted, made war, asserted territorial control, collected and expended wealth, and, above all, carried out elaborate, recurring rituals designed to secure the favor of their deceased ancestors and various gods and powers. The actions of the Shang kings were accompanied by incessant, and indeed almost obsessive, measures to consult the ancestors and deities in order to learn how to deal with them. This was done, as is well known, by applying heat to specially prepared bovine scapulae and turtle plastrons so as to produce a distinctive kind of crack, some aspect of which (the shape? the sound?—no one is sure) was taken to indicate a positive or negative answer to the question (the "charge") posed by the diviner. In many cases, an engraver was ordered subsequently to inscribe the charge on the bone or shell; sometimes also the answer was indicated, and sometimes also the actual outcome of the event about which the divination had been performed.

Some forty-six thousand oracle bones are known to scholarship, most of them having been excavated from storage pits in which they were carefully archived. That is not far short of one for every day of the entire Late Shang period; moreover, many of the bones and shells were used multiple times, and often contain several written divination records. Although the inscriptions are silent on a great many things that we would like to know about the Shang, they are nevertheless in aggregate a historical resource of immense importance, and one from which a very impressive amount of information can be gained—some of it overtly obvious, some of it needing to be teased out by skillful scholarly work.

David Keightley has made a brilliant career of interpreting this evidence. It is hard to remember a time when he was not the West's foremost scholar of oracle bones, and its most persuasive interpreter of the era that produced them. In dozens of articles, and in such influential books as Sources of Shang History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, 1985) and the edited volume The Origins of Chinese Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), he has painted a remarkably full and rich picture of Shang civilization. His work has led him into a great many disciplines, from paleoclimatology and historical topography, plant genetics, and metallurgy to the interpretation of archaeologically recovered objects. But always at the center of his scholarship, the foundation on which all of his work is built, has been the corpus of oracle-bone inscriptions.

The Ancestral Landscape is an admirable addition to Keightley's bibliography. The subject here is, as the book's subtitle has it, "Time, Space and Community in Late Shang China"—in other words, Shang...