16 Comments

"It is possible to trace a thread from the Shang and Zhou dynasties back to the Peiligang culture, although this line of reasoning would repel most Western archaeologists."

Could you elaborare on that? Why would it "repel most Western archaeologists"?

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Late reply - my apologies

The Chinese historiographical approach has been to approach archaeology as a source of evidence for events found in historical texts, eg the Xia Dynasty is documented by later chroniclers ergo it must exist so we must find it archaeologically. That approach goes against western style archaeology, where you don't want to bias your findings by trying to make them fit a preconceived idea.

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Can you recommend any book-length reviews of what you are relating here? This is extremely interesting material. Thanks.

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I was planning to include a reading list for the next one, but I'll list a few here:

Excavating the Afterlife - The Archaeology of Early Chinese Religion, Guolong Lai

The Making of the Chinese Civilization by Jianye Han

The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States by Li Liu

The Archaeology of China: From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age by Li Liu & Xingcan Chen (probably the most comprehensive overview)

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Thank you very much for those. I was able to successfully find all of them online, and in English. The last does appear to be the most encompassing.

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Yes, the last book is extremely thorough, esp if you're interested in late Palaeolithic and early Neolithic China. Typically people are interested in the early Bronze Age, understandably, but it's good to see detailed much older work.

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I'm more interested in the 'before and after' changes that took place as agriculture kicked in, so I'll start with the last book. Me, I think we're still in the Bronze Age.

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Peter Lamborn Wilson talks about early Chinese shamanism in his masterpiece "The Shamanic Trace"... which I reposted some months back: https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/what-is-the-shamanic-trace-my-mind

Interesting reading!

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Do you have any ideas on why ancestor worship is such a long run tradition in Chinese (and other peasant societies?) culture? Does it promote fertility and so gets selected for or something along those lines?

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Its a universal feature of agricultural societies, likely in part due to the difficulties of agricultural land inheritance between children and the need to retain land within a family or clan. China seems particularly keen on it, hard to say why exactly but hopefully I'll have some more answers by the end of the next essay

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The forefathers are the easier Schelling's Point for an extended family: imho the Chineses simply never needed an euhemerization so stronge to move past ancestor worship.

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Semi-related, but what exactly is an "altar"? Is it just a term we use for superficially similar things that exist in many unrelated cultures, or are there strong commonalities? How do you differentiate an altar from a pedestal, a table or a shelf? I imagine that we can trace the Roman, Greek, Hindu etc. altars back to a PIE altar: I assume that the Jewish altar is a completely separate tradition (shared with e.g. Phoenicians?)? I assume that the Chinese altar is another tradition?

There's Wikipedia but it doesn't give me much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altar Does anyone know of good writing on the altar?

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I believe originally an altar was where sacrifices were performed. This is slightly complicated by the way many post-Axial Age religions have partially or completely abandoned sacrifice while keeping a semi-symbolic altar.

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But there are sacrificial bogs, trees, stones etc. An altar must be man-made? It seems like they always turn out like free-standing rectangular slabs of stone (or shelves before shrines), is that just my limited exposure or is there some deeper psychology that makes that the "best" shape? Has anyone ever used e.g. spherical altars: wouldn't that work equally well?

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Well, it's kind of hard to manipulate the things to be sacrificed on a sphere.

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> and their lives seem unmarked by neither warfare nor social hierarchy.

Awkward double negative here. Perhaps you meant "marked by neither" or "unmarked by either... or"?

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