The World

Wuding, the twenty-first of his lineage, was a warrior king who around 1250 BC expanded Shang influence by conquest and marriage: many of his sixty-four wives were princesses of conquered fiefdoms. A favourite wife, Fu Hao, rose within his household to become a commander and high priestess. Wuding expanded into north-eastern China, fighting the other fiefdoms but also the northern peoples, the Guifang – Border Demons – from whom he had learned the arts of crossbow and chariot. Overseeing an agricultural society that also produced bronze crafts, weaponry and silk, the Shang ruled from Yin (near Anyang, Henan Province), aided by scribes who used the earliest Chinese writing from which today’s language derives. While worshipping a supreme god, Di, who may have been the supreme ancestor of the Shang, along with a lesser pantheon, they revered their ancestors as intermediaries and they daily consulted court diviners who used scapulimancy, the cracks on burned ox bones or turtle shells, to answer all the essential questions of life – from the imminence of natural disasters to health, harvest and family.

The bones and shells were burned and the diviners interpreted the cracks, their comments written on the bones, thousands of which survive. Scapulimancy helped people cope with a dangerous, unpredictable world, but the divinations were frustratingly vague.

War was waged partly in order to capture humans to sacrifice and so ensure a serene afterlife: the Shang – contemporary with Rameses in Egypt^* – were buried in a family necropolis of tombs cut into the loess soil, with bronze artefacts and weapons. ‘Offerings to Da Ding’, reads one inscription. ‘Da Jia and Zu Yi, 100 cups of wine, 100 Qiang prisoners, 300 cattle …’. When Shang potentates died, hundreds were killed and buried with them.

Lady Fu Hao, mentioned in 170 oracle bones, may have started as a court diviner, but became the king’s partner. When the king appointed Lady Hao, he consulted the diviners and they confirmed the appointment. Hao won four successive campaigns, mainly against barbarians, but when she died at the age of thirty-three she was buried with sixteen sacrificed slaves and her favourite pets, six dogs.^* The king missed her bitterly, regularly asking her advice in the afterlife.

In 1045, the Shang were said to have been destroyed by their own perverted corruption: King Zhou and his wife Daji floated on pleasure boats on a lake of booze, cavorting with concubines while devising vicious tortures for their enemies, the worst being the Cannon Burning Torment in which victims were fried alive on red-hot metal. Yet these excesses are likely to be the propaganda of the Zhou, a rising dynasty from the west, who destroyed them. At the battle of Muye, they were defeated by King Wu of Zhou. After the Shang couple had committed suicide in the ruins of their burning palace, Wu hunted down the Shang, family and troops, collecting 177,779 ears, then amid the rituals of chanting, bells and flutes he ‘beheaded and sacrificed their little prince and master of the cauldron [and] the leaders of their forty families’, scalping them. The Zhou family now ruled for several centuries, developing the first bureaucracy, the Grand Secretariat. Wu’s son Cheng was challenged by rebellious nobles but was rescued by that rare phenomenon, a benign uncle, Dan, gong (duke) of Zhou.

Once Cheng came of age, the duke of Zhou surrendered power – and later came to define responsible rule and the idea of the Mandate of Heaven: if a dynasty ruled well, they would ensure order, blessed by heaven, but if they abused power, they would lose the Mandate and be replaced.

Back in Syria, a less virtuous uncle, Hattusili, seized the Hattian throne from his nephew. After occupying Dimasqu (Damascus), he stopped to pray at a shrine to Ishtar, where he met and married the priest’s daughter Puduhepa, one of the first women of power whose voices we can hear. The Egyptian war went on until King Hattusili and Queen Puduhepa negotiated a peace treaty with Rameses – the first surviving treaty – that, like many such carve-ups right up to our own times, split Canaan–Syria – and then arranged a marriage between their children. It was Queen Puduhepa who did much of the negotiating while her husband galloped westwards to scourge a vassal, the Mycenaean kingdom of Ahhiyawa. The two had fallen out over Hattusili’s small ally, Wilusa – also known as Ilios or Troy.