Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

by Ian Morris

Chang saw a link between Lü’s story that the sage kings took the roundness of heaven and squareness of earth as their model and the cong, a type of jade vessel that appeared in rich graves in the Yangzi Delta region around 2500 BCE then spread to Taosi and other sites.

A cong is a square block of jade with a cylindrical opening drilled through it, the circle and square expressing the union of heaven and earth. The circle-square remained a potent emblem of royal power until the fall of China’s last dynasty in 1912 CE.

Chang called the years 2500–2000 BCE “the Age of Jade Cong, the period when shamanism and politics joined forces and when an elite class based on its shamanistic monopoly came into being.”

If Chang was right, religious specialists turned themselves into a ruling elite between 2500 and 2000 BCE, much as they had done in Mesopotamia a thousand-plus years earlier, with jade, music, and temples on beaten-earth platforms as amplifiers for their messages to the gods.

By 2300 BCE Taosi looked like an Uruk in the making, complete with palaces, platforms, and chiefs on their way to becoming godlike. And then, suddenly, it didn’t. The elite compound was destroyed, which is why the only trace of a palace is the fragment of a painted wall found in a garbage pit that I mentioned earlier. Forty

By 2000 BCE the biggest sites in Shandong had also been abandoned and population was falling across northern China—at just the same time, of course, that drought, famine, and political collapse were racking Egypt and Mesopotamia. Could climate change have brought on an Old World–wide crisis?

Some scholars go on to argue that there really was a King Yu, who ended the age of ten thousand guo and imposed the rule of a Xia dynasty on them.

The literary sources even provide a climatic cause, though instead of a Mesopotamian-style dust bowl they speak of torrential rain in nine out of ten years, which was why Yu needed to drain the Yellow River valley.

Maybe the story of Yu is based on a real catastrophe around 2000 BCE. Or maybe it is just a folktale. We simply don’t know.

the advantages of backwardness—so important in Western history—now kicked in, and even more impressive monuments began filling a former backwater, the Yiluo Valley.

We do not have enough evidence to know why, but the Yiluoans did not simply copy Taosi. Instead they created a whole new architectural style, replacing the big buildings that were easy to see and approach from every angle, which had been customary for a thousand years in northern China, with closed-in palaces, their courtyards surrounded by roofed corridors with only a few points of entry.

That community was Erlitou, which exploded into a true city with 25,000 residents between 1900 and 1700 BCE.

Many Chinese archaeologists believe Erlitou was the capital of the Xia dynasty said to have been established by the sage king Yu. Non-Chinese scholars on the whole disagree, pointing out that the literary references to the Xia only begin a thousand years after Erlitou was abandoned.

Copper had been known since 3000 BCE, but long remained a novelty item, used mostly for trinkets. When Erlitou was established around 1900 BCE, bronze weapons were still rare, and stone, bone, and shell remained normal for agricultural tools well into the first millennium BCE

The Erlitou foundry thus represented a quantum leap over earlier craft activity.

The shapes invented at Erlitou (jia tripods, ding cauldrons, jue pouring cups, he pitchers for heating wine) became the East’s ultimate amplifiers for religious messages, displacing jade cong and dominating rituals for the next thousand years.

The archaeologists may just have dug in the wrong places, but they have been looking there a long time; most likely copper was mined and refined at Dongxiafeng then sent back to Erlitou—the East’s first colonial regime.

Backwardness may have advantages, but it has disadvantages too, not least that as soon as a periphery forces its way into an older core it finds itself confronting new peripheries similarly intent on forcing their way in.

Erlitou was the most dazzling city in the East by 1650 BCE, its temples gleaming with bronze cauldrons and echoing with chimes and bells, but a mere day’s walk beyond the Yellow River would have taken an adventurous urbanite into a violent world of fortresses and feuding chiefs.

Relations between Erlitou and this wild frontier may have been rather like those between Mesopotamia’s Akkadian Empire and the Amorites, with trading and raiding profitable to both parties—until something upset the balance.

The upset in the East shows up in the form of a fortress called Yanshi, built around 1600 BCE just five miles from Erlitou.

Later literary sources say that around this time a new group, the Shang, ove...

and most Chinese archaeologists (and this time many non-Chinese too) think the Shang crossed the Yellow River around 1600 BCE, defeated Erlitou, and built Yanshi to dominate their humbled but more sophisticated foes.

Yanshi bloomed into a great city as Erlitou declined, until around 1500 BCE the Shang kings, perhaps deciding that they did not need to watch their former enemies quite so closely, moved fifty miles east to a new city at Zhengzhou.

Anything Erlitou could do, it seems, Zhengzhou could do better,...

Zhengzhou’s ritual vessels continued Erlitou traditions but, naturally, were grander. One bronze cauldron buried in a hurry around 1300 BCE (perhaps during an attack) was three feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds.

Wang’s sick relative was an educated man, and when he saw a row of symbols scratched on the shell his servant brought home he guessed that they were an ancient version of Chinese. He sent the shell to Wang for a second opinion, and Wang guessed that the inscription dated back to the Shang dynasty.

Wang’s inscribed bones came into the hands of an old friend. Within a decade he, too, was dead, after disgrace and exile to China’s desolate west, but in 1903 he managed to publish the inscriptions as a book.

The good news, though, was extraordinary. Not only had Wang been right that these burned shells and bones were China’s oldest texts; but they also turned out to name kings who matched exactly those listed by the first-century-BCE historian Sima Qian as the last rulers of the Shang dynasty.

Antiquities dealers tried to keep the source of the bones secret, but soon everyone knew they came from the village of Anyang, and in 1928 the Chinese government launched its first official archaeological excavation there. Unfortunately,

The biggest-ever find of inscriptions, a pit containing seventeen thousand bones, was made just an hour before the 1936 excavation season was due to end.

The excavations showed that Anyang was the final Shang capital, established around 1300 BCE. Its walled settlement, located only in 1997, covered nearly three square miles, but like Zhengzhou it was dwarfed by its suburbs.

The excavated inscriptions begin in the long reign of King Wuding (1250–1192 BCE), and from the information they contain we can piece together the rituals that produced them. The king would put questions to his ancestors, summoning their spirits from their great tombs on the other side of the river that ran through Anyang. Pressing a heated stick against a shell or bone, he would interpret the cracks it produced, and specialists would inscribe the results on the “oracle bone.”

The idea that the silent turtle could make the ancestors’ voices heard perhaps went back six thousand years to sites like Jiahu, discussed in Chapter 2, but the Shang kings of course made it bigger and better.

Archaeologists have found more than 200,000 oracle bones at Anyang, and David Keightley, the leading Western scholar of the inscriptions, calculates some 2 million to 4 million were originally made, consuming a hundred thousand turtles and oxen.

Shang kings tried to get on the right side of the spirits with spectacular funerals to mark their predecessors’ transition to ancestorhood.

Eight royal tombs have been found, one for each king from 1300 through 1076 BCE, with an unfinished ninth for Di Xin, still on the throne when the dynasty fell in 1046.

All were looted, but the cemeteries are still overwhelming—not so much for the few thousand tons of earth moved for each tomb, which were paltry by Egyptian standards, but ...

Ancient Chinese literature speaks of people “following in death” at elite funerals, but nothing prepared the Anyang excavators for what they found. Tomb 1001, probably Wuding’s r...

The numbers are staggering. The oracle bones mention 13,052 ritual killings, and if Keightley is right that we have found only 5–10 percent of the inscriptions, in all a quarter of a million people may have perished.

Nearly three thousand years later, Aztec kings in Mexico waged wars specifically to take prisoners to feed their bloodthirsty god Quetzalcoatl; the Shang may have done the same for their ancestors, particularly against people they called the Qiang, more than seven thousand of whom are listed as victims in the oracle bones.

By Western standards Shang armies were small. The largest mentioned in the oracle bones is ten thousand men, just a third the size of Ramses’ army at Kadesh.

Sima Qian, the first-century-BCE historian who listed the Shang kings, made early Chinese history sound simple.

After the sage kings, culminating in Yu the ditch digger, came the Xia, then the Shang, and then the Zhou (the three dynasties of the Three Dynasties Chronology Project). From them China developed, and nothing else was worth mentioning.

Like the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Xia and Shang had to deal with dozens of neighboring states.

In the East, though, Sima Qian’s story line that Chineseness began with the Xia and radiated outward makes it all too tempting to imagine these early states, which nowadays lie within a single modern nation, as “always” being Chinese.

In reality, ancient East and West probably had rather similar networks of jostling states, sharing some beliefs, practices, and cultural forms while differing in others. They traded, fought, competed, and expanded.

Even if the collapse of Egypt and Mesopotamia after 2200 BCE had taken the aliens by surprise, as I suggested earlier, they would have felt nothing but satisfaction had they brought their flying saucer back to orbit the world of Wuding and Ramses II around 1250 BCE. This time their work really did seem to be done.

social development had reached twenty-four points on the index, nearly three times where it stood in 5000 BCE.

The average Egyptian or Mesopotamian harnessed probably 20,000 kilocalories per day, as compared to 8,000 around 5000 BCE, and the biggest cities, such as Thebes in Egypt or Babylon, had maybe eighty thousand residents. There...