 The Shang Dynasty, 16th century BC until 1046 BC. This is the first moment when the China comes out of the darkness because the Shang Dynasty is the first one in history that actually is described by the written sources. And we have several different chronicles talking about Shang kings. We are in the central part of China, in the Henan province at the coast of the Yellow Sea. At that time, the Shang Kingdom was one of many. It's not actually a really kingdom in the European sense. It's a statelet. It's a more advanced form of statelet organization. The rest of China, the one you don't really see on this map, is heavily inhabited by myriads of other statelets. So why the history of Bronze Age China starts in Shang Dynasty? Because the Shang are the first one who are actually using written inscriptions. So we can track back the organization of the state to the oracles. In the corner you see the so-called bone oracles. This is very typical artifact found in Chinese archeology of the Bronze Age. The shells of the turtles were basically covered with the first forms of the Chinese characters. These are magical spells. And they've been basically taking all these bone shells. They've been burning them in the fire. And the shaman or the king was supposed to read the god's will from the fumes of the burnt shells. But some of them were preserved in the thousands of examples. And from the text on these bones, we can actually start to see what they're actually doing in that time period. The majority of the spells is pretty trivial. Gives me more wine, gives me more beautiful women. But still, it gives you information. There's the wine consumption. And you can start writing your habilitation about that. So the city state was the city called Guo Ying in the ancient language. But today we call it An Yang. It's a massive ruin. And we know from the chronology that it became the city of the Shang around 1300 BC. In general, in Chinese archeology, there is a massive problem with dating of early Chinese dynasties. The first dynasty, the dynasty zero, as we would call it, is Xiyan. I'm going to come back to that. This is the end of the Neolithic. But there's a lot of written sources. But the dates, according to the written sources, do not really match the radiocarbon dating. So in the Chinese literature, you may have a problem of double dating. Sometimes you can see a certain event happening, the king, and you have four different dates. But they're all referring to the same problem. Because according to the written sources, the foundation of the An Yang was... The end of the Shang dynasty was 100... 1122. But after a correlation with some astronomical events, like supernovas and eclipses, it was correlated that, in fact, it presents 1045 or 4046. This is the battle of Muria, where the Shang dynasty has been beaten. And this is the stable moment when we start to reconstruct who is after whom on that list of kings. Chronological outline just to be clear where we are. Neolithic in China, 8500 until 2000, more or less. In different areas it develops differently. The first dynasty we've heard of is Xixia. There is a still ongoing debate regarding what Xixia really was and what form it functioned. But we know for sure that around 1600, the Shang dynasty appears and we start to have the flow of the written evidence. After that, after the defeat of the Shang in 1046, at the Muya battle, we have the following dynasty, who actually fought the Shang dynasty and they destroyed them completely. But from an archaeological perspective, we have two major archaeological cultures. The first is Erlitu culture, dated to 2000 until 1500. That culture has four sub-periods, so it follows pretty much the same like we in Europe. And Erlitu culture is thought to be associated with that late Neolithic transition to Bronze Age, with Xixia dynasty. So in tombs we have clay, early Bronze Age objects, lacquered coffins, animal bones. And for the first time in Erlitu culture, we have Renxun, a habit of Renxun, which is fairly typical for the Bronze Age China. This is the habit of human sacrifices and mass scale. We are not talking about ten people, we are talking about nobility being buried with the mass graves of 200, 400 slaves. So we are looking at fairly developed slave-based, economy-eslave-based society. The second Erlitu culture is called Erli Shang. And the thing about Erlitu culture is that the Shang dynasty, and we know that from the written sources, they had to change capitals several times. So within that we have sub-periods when the Shang has to move a capital from the first city where the capital was located, was Ao. But later on they moved to Ying and later on they came back to Ying and so on. So there are different sub-faces. And Erli Shang culture is dated 1600 to 1400 more or less. The funny thing about this culture is that in the Erli Shang period we don't have nobility graves. But we do have evidence of the copper and salt trade because the thing about the Bronze Age in China is that they have no limitations like in Europe. They don't have problem with tin. Tin is available in the whole country. So we are going to see alternative vision of the Bronze Age where the tin was never a problem. Shang dynasty in brief, just the headlines. First two old cities built on a very regular pattern. Those cities are large administration centers and ritual centers. Rulership passed only in the main line. And that will become a tradition in China that the ruler can be only male. And there is absolutely no exception even later on in Han dynasty. Imports of domesticated horses and chariots and mass. Shang kings maintained huge armies with the bands of 300 chariots per army. So they go really big. The development of Chinese scripture, the development of Chinese calendar system which was based on 10 days week. But this calendar system was used in a very specific way because Shang needed calendar only to perform their favorite action, divination and fortune telling. And this is the thing about the Bronze Age. The Shang kings are not the kings in our sense. In the Chinese tradition the king in that time is perceived as a holy person, a vessel who is supposed to communicate through the oracles with the ancestors. So what the Shang kings did, they were basically listening to the ancestors and telling people what to do. And that was pretty much the mechanism behind power. Production of bronzes, I'm not going to go into that. The Chinese bronzes are different in that sense that they are all casted. There is no hammering comparing to European bronzes. There is a sense of silk production and wine production. Bronze Age China is drunk. And this is the picture that goes through the history of China through centuries later on. In the Han dynasty the chronicles were depicting the bad kings of Shang dynasty, adulterers, drunk, smoking opium and stuff like this. So this part of the decadency is also involved in that picture. I would like to show you one thing about Shang dynasty. They developed several types of currency. But in order to explain why and how China started to use currency it's actually we need to have some kind of introduction. The first type of currency I'm going to show you is actually related to agriculture. And during the Shang dynasty it's good enough to say that China was growing food for thousands of years. The agriculture was very well developed. And the massive surplus of that production was actually spent on the divination, on the rituals that were taking place pretty much every 10 days. And during those rituals they sacrificed huge amounts of food and grain up to 600 cows to the ancestors. And that was absolutely the regular thing to maintain the order of the power to ask ancestors every week, every time about their opinion about different matters. The most stable grain of Shang dynasty is millet. Later on we have soya. Rice becomes more popular during Han dynasty 800 years ago. And when it comes to land administration the most common problem was locus. Grass poopers flying around. But we have also an evidence that the Shang dynasty started to burn the fields to get rid of that so they're getting more into being more aggressively combating the problem. The first type of money is a boom money because before 1200 BC farming equipment, spades, machete, knives were used as a medium of trade barter exchange and this is how the first form of money arrived. It was so called spade money. In the second segment the Shang kings were pre, after divination, after fortune telling they were preoccupied with hunting and supervision of the pastures because the nobility in China was allowed to have a huge pastures when they kept the whole menagerie of different animals and the higher you were in rank the bigger pastures were so you had the whole army of officials supervising the harvest, supervising the hunting games. And the Shang kings' favorite topic of hunting games was the elephants. In Henan we have evidence that the elephants were present so they could kill up to 10 elephants during one party. They also hunted tigers, white boars and everything was moving around. And by the very late Shang periods the majority of the time the Shang kings spade was pretty much hunting and performing the rituals regarding the cult of ancestors. But there was one segment of bronze age economy in China, fishing. And fishing was very popular among middle class people especially fishing with the corn moran you can see on this picture a guy keeping the birds to do the job for him. And in the Chinese tradition the fish is considered to be a very lucky thing because the sound you is actually very similar to the sound of the character Luck and the fish was considered to be very, very good to have because they breed fast so you can get good stuff fast. So we have another type of currency also during Shang Dynasty we have the fish money, you money ingots in a form of fish. Shang commerce and economy went much further. The Shang kings were the first ones who actually built the road systems but they were also very much interested in the building canals and the watering of the territory because during the bronze age China was much hotter and much wetter than it is today. So we have a massive label works regarding the building of the channels and we can see that they are interested in building waterways to the places where the salt or the copper is available so they want to maintain the metal production but we have also huge cities the city of Aniang 250,000 people the city Ertigang probably 100,000 people a slave class, a middle class, a nobility class so very highly advanced society and in that society a number of different currencies. On this diagram you can see various types of bronze age Chinese money all related to Shang dynasty. On the one hand side we have state money the one I've mentioned that go into that agriculture team we have fish money I mentioned that the fishing was involved we have also bridge money which are coming back from the taxation duties during crossing the bridges that were owned by the king so you had to... this is another form of protocurrency a very interesting form of knife money which goes back to something I didn't talk about it was wool making so basically Chinese farmers they had to shave the goats or the sheep and the wool was very expensive so along the way the knife that you were using to cut off the wool was also used as a replacement in a transaction way and the most common known since the Neolithic was the Crowdies the shells in the Neolithic and Xiyan period we have regular normal shells being exchanged but during the Shang dynasty they are made of metal so this is the replica of money and looking at that mass looking at that transitional period in the history of China what could be the basic conclusion the basic conclusion is that the great variety in protocurrency is unification and economic expansion of the Chinese state so basically when you have too many currencies when you have too many languages then you have a big problem and if they cannot really overlap one system is equally good as the other one you can stay in that state for hundreds of years and that indeed happens in China they start to unify the country during the Han dynasty 800 years later and the Han dynasty does one thing actually two things they introduce one common grain rice which China is famous for today and they introduce one type of currency the currency sometimes you can see in Chinese shops this is the first uniform form of money that is accepted by all stateless and all classes of growing economic giants thank you very much