these first ‘cities’ were not where the wider population lived; they were enclosures of royal power and ritual, containing palaces, storerooms and workshops where craftsmen produced ritual vessels and weapons of war. A fundamental discovery from this and other digs in the plain is that the Bronze Age transformation in China, the emergence of civilisation, was not, as in Iraq and the Near East, due to sudden technological advances or great social change. The development of centralised power was political and based on a deep-rooted cosmology which would last until the twentieth century.
