So the Shang capitals were all over the place in a
So the Shang capitals were all over the place in a triangle of area. That was their, if you will, base, their homeland. One of the ones I want to just quickly talk about is Aodu, which is in Zhengzhou. Here, you see the outline of the original city. This is the modern city just gone haywire. And so very little of it is left, because it's under a modern metropolis. But we can see, in fact, how it still has some residual orientation still to the modern town in some of its aspects of it. Now, Zhengzhou is designed as a type of center of the dynasty. And it was connected to these. These orangey things are basically copper. And the white things are tin. And you can see the copper and tin mines that are being developed. And the Shang were trying to capture as much of the copper and tin industry, if you will, into one regime and then place their capital at the center of that. In particular, these were copper and tin areas. You need the copper and tin for bronze. Copper is pretty much easy to find. It is tin that is a hard metal to find. It is much more rare. So you can see that actually, they're closer. They have a lot of copper everywhere. But it's really the tin that they wanted to go. And, in fact, I took out the slide. But if you go to Zhengzhou today and go a little bit in the mountains, you still have important tin mining activity there. Now, the Shang dynasty were coming out of, if you will, a first society world of shamans, oracles, and a culture of ancestor worship. This is still strong in the Chinese world today. And they were the first to make ancestor worship into the worship of the dynastic empire. So not all ancestors are the same. The emperor's ancestors are much better or at the top of the heap. And then come the next and so forth and so on down to the bottom, where each of us might have our ancestors. But if I'm a little peasant in the Shang dynasty, my ancestor might be at the back of my house. And that's about the end of it. But when I go outside, I'm going to be worshipping the ancestors of the rulers. Now, this became, in the modern world, diffused into a religion that's called Daoism. So Daoism basically took the idea of ancestors and worshipping the certain elements. And it's how it continued into the modern world. And it transformed to what's called
the spirit of the perfect warrior, or Zhen Wu, who is the protector of the state. And if you want to go to visit China, you should go to Wudang Shan, which is Mount Wudang in China. And there's Zhengzhou in the mountains to the south. And a series of temples were built there on the top of the mountains. So these were mountainside, animistic cultures. The temples that were built later than the Shang, but basically preserved, if you will, a type of ethos, which started with the Shang, which has traditions and connections thousands and thousands of years into a prehistory. So here we are after a snowstorm on the site. Absolutely gorgeous. So how do you get in touch with ancestors? This is what the first society people always are very much worried about. So having the ancestors connect to the proper-- having the dead connect to the proper ancestors, that's an important part of the culture. So to do that, you had this particular set of rites. And what the Shang did was organize these rites into very prescribed set of activities. So there's meat. There's food. Food is sometimes raw, sometimes cooked. There's wine. There's water. The whole meal is laid out. And we've seen meal and food offerings, of course, in Egypt and, of course, in Greece. And so food offerings, in relationship to architecture, is just a hugely fascinating topic. And almost, we could talk about the beginning of architecture, in the same breath, we could talk about architecture and food. Because food is, in some sense, whether it's a sacrifice or whether it's the butter in the fire or the cow or the activities in front of the Egyptian statue-- So here we see the food again. And the bronze that was produced was not made for weapons, as it might have been in Mesopotamia, but made to produce the vessels in which this activity takes place. These rituals are called li. So li is the name for the whole spectrum of types of rituals that will be imposed. And then they are written down in very precise books. So in this sense, the Shang culture of hierarchy, of highly ritualized activities that have a lot to do with food and with the natural elements have very strong and uncanny parallel with the Vedic world simultaneously, contemporaneously taking place in India. So in order to perform these rituals, you need different types of vessels.
And you need place to do it. So you do it on an altar, basically. It just a flat, elevated terrace. Stairs going up and, perhaps, demarcated by a wall, sort of a sacred enclosure, and a terrace. So there's, in this case, no big fires, no big fire ceremonies. So basically, an altar in which you will bring, if you will, the food and the food items. The food is brought in these ritual vessels. So the bronze that has been made, that was-The reason needed these bronze workshops is not to make cult statues. You're not making ceremonial daggers, as you would in Mesopotamia or Sumeria or in Greece. You're making vessels to hold these ritual food items. So this is for wine. This is a gui, which is-- I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly-- for a cooking grain. And they come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. This is a ding, which is for cooking food so that you could sit it in the fire. And you could put your food and make a stew in it. So you have your platform. You will bring your vessels. The vessels will have the wine and the food and the little, maybe like hibachis, if you will, cooking the stew. And basically, different categories of people will bring different numbers of these vessels. So if you're a very high, important person, you will bring x number of dings, x number of guis, x number of this and that and lay them out for these activities. And it's just all highly prescribed. These would take place, then, in the first temples, as we call them. But I'm awkwardly nervous about using that word temple, because I talked about the Etruscan templum. And this has nothing to do with the templum, but they're called temple, generally. Basically, it'd be better to call them ritual halls, because, basically, this is where these ceremonial food items are presented to the ancestors and, thus, to the deities in this room at the back. Here, it has a roof over it. So it's no longer open in the open, but now has an enclosed roof over it. But we see the front hall. And then there's some rooms in the back. These are for a preparation, we're assuming. We're not exactly sure how the whole thing was used. But these ritual halls were enclosed. And certain walls, which were blessed for protection, as they were, in some sense, to demarcate the sacred space. And then at the back, you have these so-called temple or the ritual hall, where the food would be laid out. The architecture consisted of a wooden architecture, which nothing at all has survived into the modern world,
except through traditions, on a tamped earth base. So the tamped earth is called hangtu and, we see here, are being made out of bricks. Or you can make the tamped earth, you take a type of scaffolding wood. And then you put the earth in it. And then you tamp it down with a stone or heavy rock. And if it's done well, these things last really, really very well. Where the students of architecture made a tamped earth wall just in N51, just up this road on Vassar Street about 10 years ago. And it's still there doing just fine. So it's like an early form of a concrete. Huge architectures were made throughout the Chinese World using this system. These are the ruins from part of the Great Wall. And over time, of course, if you don't preserve it, it just erodes away because it is earth. But the very fact that these things have survived over thousands of years is remarkable. So the Shang dynasty basically produced, if you will, a cultural profile that emphasized the cities, that emphasized the bronze, the bronze rituals, and the hierachization of Chinese society. The Zhou come in. And they try to change this. And they introduce a whole new concept, called Tiananmen, which is the mandate from heaven.
the spirit of the perfect warrior, or Zhen Wu, who is the protector of the state. And if you want to go to visit China, you should go to Wudang Shan, which is Mount Wudang in China. And there's Zhengzhou in the mountains to the south. And a series of temples were built there on the top of the mountains. So these were mountainside, animistic cultures. The temples that were built later than the Shang, but basically preserved, if you will, a type of ethos, which started with the Shang, which has traditions and connections thousands and thousands of years into a prehistory. So here we are after a snowstorm on the site. Absolutely gorgeous. So how do you get in touch with ancestors? This is what the first society people always are very much worried about. So having the ancestors connect to the proper-- having the dead connect to the proper ancestors, that's an important part of the culture. So to do that, you had this particular set of rites. And what the Shang did was organize these rites into very prescribed set of activities. So there's meat. There's food. Food is sometimes raw, sometimes cooked. There's wine. There's water. The whole meal is laid out. And we've seen meal and food offerings, of course, in Egypt and, of course, in Greece. And so food offerings, in relationship to architecture, is just a hugely fascinating topic. And almost, we could talk about the beginning of architecture, in the same breath, we could talk about architecture and food. Because food is, in some sense, whether it's a sacrifice or whether it's the butter in the fire or the cow or the activities in front of the Egyptian statue-- So here we see the food again. And the bronze that was produced was not made for weapons, as it might have been in Mesopotamia, but made to produce the vessels in which this activity takes place. These rituals are called li. So li is the name for the whole spectrum of types of rituals that will be imposed. And then they are written down in very precise books. So in this sense, the Shang culture of hierarchy, of highly ritualized activities that have a lot to do with food and with the natural elements have very strong and uncanny parallel with the Vedic world simultaneously, contemporaneously taking place in India. So in order to perform these rituals, you need different types of vessels.
And you need place to do it. So you do it on an altar, basically. It just a flat, elevated terrace. Stairs going up and, perhaps, demarcated by a wall, sort of a sacred enclosure, and a terrace. So there's, in this case, no big fires, no big fire ceremonies. So basically, an altar in which you will bring, if you will, the food and the food items. The food is brought in these ritual vessels. So the bronze that has been made, that was-The reason needed these bronze workshops is not to make cult statues. You're not making ceremonial daggers, as you would in Mesopotamia or Sumeria or in Greece. You're making vessels to hold these ritual food items. So this is for wine. This is a gui, which is-- I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly-- for a cooking grain. And they come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. This is a ding, which is for cooking food so that you could sit it in the fire. And you could put your food and make a stew in it. So you have your platform. You will bring your vessels. The vessels will have the wine and the food and the little, maybe like hibachis, if you will, cooking the stew. And basically, different categories of people will bring different numbers of these vessels. So if you're a very high, important person, you will bring x number of dings, x number of guis, x number of this and that and lay them out for these activities. And it's just all highly prescribed. These would take place, then, in the first temples, as we call them. But I'm awkwardly nervous about using that word temple, because I talked about the Etruscan templum. And this has nothing to do with the templum, but they're called temple, generally. Basically, it'd be better to call them ritual halls, because, basically, this is where these ceremonial food items are presented to the ancestors and, thus, to the deities in this room at the back. Here, it has a roof over it. So it's no longer open in the open, but now has an enclosed roof over it. But we see the front hall. And then there's some rooms in the back. These are for a preparation, we're assuming. We're not exactly sure how the whole thing was used. But these ritual halls were enclosed. And certain walls, which were blessed for protection, as they were, in some sense, to demarcate the sacred space. And then at the back, you have these so-called temple or the ritual hall, where the food would be laid out. The architecture consisted of a wooden architecture, which nothing at all has survived into the modern world,
except through traditions, on a tamped earth base. So the tamped earth is called hangtu and, we see here, are being made out of bricks. Or you can make the tamped earth, you take a type of scaffolding wood. And then you put the earth in it. And then you tamp it down with a stone or heavy rock. And if it's done well, these things last really, really very well. Where the students of architecture made a tamped earth wall just in N51, just up this road on Vassar Street about 10 years ago. And it's still there doing just fine. So it's like an early form of a concrete. Huge architectures were made throughout the Chinese World using this system. These are the ruins from part of the Great Wall. And over time, of course, if you don't preserve it, it just erodes away because it is earth. But the very fact that these things have survived over thousands of years is remarkable. So the Shang dynasty basically produced, if you will, a cultural profile that emphasized the cities, that emphasized the bronze, the bronze rituals, and the hierachization of Chinese society. The Zhou come in. And they try to change this. And they introduce a whole new concept, called Tiananmen, which is the mandate from heaven.
