So familiar to most people are the ancient Near Eastern civilizations— Egypt and Mesopotamia—that we instinctively use them as a standard against which to measure all others. Still, it’s not appropriate to do so, for as Bruce Trigger (2003) stresses, it’s essential to understand both the differences and the similarities between all early civilizations if we are to explain how and why such entities developed. This section is a selective glimpse into the development of the earliest Old World cities, states, and civilizations in several geographical regions: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley in South Asia, and northern China . Later, we will take a similar look at the rise of several of the earliest New World civilizations. Each civilization devised ways of grappling with the challenges presented by entirely new social, political, and economic circumstances. Their legacies have survived for millennia, and we can often recognize them within the framework of modern societies.
Mesopotamia
During the centuries after 8,000 ya, pioneering farmers settled Mesopotamia, the vast alluvial plains bordering the lower Tigris-Euphrates river system (see Fig. 15-2). These agriculturists shared the heritage of such early Neolithic communities as Jarmo, in the Zagros foothills to the east, and Çayönü, at the edge of the Anatolian plateau (Nissen, 1988). In fact, they were probably direct descendants of Samarran farmers, who had practiced small-scale irrigation agriculture along the edges of the central Tigris Valley and obtained painted pottery and obsidian through trade with upland communities. Now expanding onto the southern plains, these Ubaid farmers encountered great flood-prone streams bound only by immense mudflats and marshes. The annual floods in this region began soon after the spring planting season, when young crops were particularly vulnerable. These seasonal overflows deposited rich layers of alluvium, and when the floodwaters receded, a long, dry summer followed. At first, farmers cultivated only the well-drained slopes above the river. Generations later, their descendants began the hard task of redirecting the river’s flow, even cutting through its banks to channel floodwater onto low-lying fields. Irrigation unlocked the fertility of the deep, stonefree alluvium that had accumulated on the floodplain for millennia. Barley was the Ubaidians’ primary grain, but wheat and millet grew well, too, along with the date palm and vegetable crops. Common domesticated animals included pigs, sheep, donkeys, and oxen. The abundant harvests, supplemented by fish and game, more than kept pace with the rapidly growing floodplain communities. By around 6,500 ya, Ubaid villagers were beginning to prosper in the southernmost Tigris-Euphrates Valley (Lamberg-Karlovsky and Sabloff, 1995). Each of their more populous towns, such as Nippur, Eridu, and Uruk in the southern valley , centered on a platform-based temple; even the smaller communities had central shrines. Perhaps to obtain the resources lacking in their new homeland, Ubaidians stayed in touch with distant peoples through trade in decorated pottery, obsidian, ornamental stones, copper, and possibly grain. Important changes ushered in the late Ubaid period, around 5,500 ya. The population of certain communities rapidly swelled into the thousands as rural villagers migrated to the growing towns. Expanding irrigation systems in the lower Tigris-Euphrates Valley produced more food for the concentrated populace. Altering the riverine environment on this scale by digging drainage and irrigation channels was a challenging enterprise, one that the people could accomplish only with organized communal effort, including a great deal of cooperation and direction. The activity transformed not only the landscape but also the nature of the agricultural societies themselves. What might these concentrated populations mean to us? No less than the birth of the Near East’s first true cities. But what stimulated their development? It’s possible that intensified economic or military rivalries in the region forced populations to come together for protection (Adams, 1981). Alternatively, increased agricultural productivity and efficiency may have fostered cultural changes (social stratification, craft specialization, commerce, and so on) that in turn promoted the development of urban communities. Whatever the reason, these trends happened at settlements along the lower Tigris-Euphrates Valley as people flocked to the developing cities. These cities became the social environments within which the earliest Mesopotamian states emerged (Yoffee, 2005).
Sumerians
Over several centuries, Uruk grew to be a city with a population of as many as 20,000 people. Today, the ruins of Uruk’s mud-brick buildings cover nearly 1 square mile in southern Mesopotamia, 150 miles southeast of modern Baghdad (Nissen, 2001). The most ancient parts of Uruk reveal some features of the earliest city. Two massive temple complexes, built in stages and dedicated to the sun and to the goddess of love, probably served as focal points of political, religious, economic, and cultural activities. Inscribed clay tablets associated with these structures record that the temples distributed food to the populace and controlled nearby croplands. Growing social and religious complexity, including the rise of powerful kings and priests, kept pace with the city’s physical growth. The developments associated with Uruk and other urban centers were an immediate prelude and stimulus to a new order in southern Mesopotamia around 5,000 ya. The inscribed tablets, teeming populations, and large-scale religious structures indicate that the essential elements of a Mesopotamian civilization had come together. Uruk marked the beginning of the Sumerians, the first complex urban civilization. The region known as Sumer encompassed about a dozen largely autonomous political units, called city-states, in the southernmost Tigris-Euphrates Valley. About the same number of Akkadian city-states hugged the river to the north, near present-day Baghdad. The Sumerians and their neighbors shared the world’s first modern society between 4,900 and 4,350 ya. Each Sumerian city-state incorporated a major population center—Ur, Lagash, Umma, Nippur, Eridu, and Uruk are examples— as well as some smaller satellite communities and, of course, a great deal of irrigated cropland. These city-states were controlled by hereditary kings, who often fought for dominance with their counterparts in neighboring cities. The Sumerians had a technologically accomplished urban culture, economically dependent on large-scale irrigation agriculture and specialized craft production (Kramer, 1963; Roaf, 1996). The influence of Sumerian cities reached beyond Mesopotamia through exchange and possibly even colonization. Excavations in northern Iraq, Turkey, and the Nile Valley of Egypt have revealed connections with Uruk through trade in prestige goods such as pottery, carved ivory, and lapis (Roaf, 1996). These valued products furnished the tombs of Sumerian elites in a society where social differentiation was becoming more pronounced. Among the prerogatives of elite members of society was the right to burial in a lavish tomb. Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations of the 4,500-year-old “royal” tombs at Ur in the 1920s revealed that King Abargi and Queen Puabi were each accompanied in death by rich offerings— ceremonial vessels, tools, musical instruments, and even chariots complete with their animals and, apparently, also their human attendants— arranged within the burial pits (Woolley, 1929). Woolley interpreted other human remains found in association with these elite individuals as the men and women of their court, who were bedecked with precious jewelry, drugged, and then sealed into the tombs. Mesopotamian citizens constructed brick walls around their city perimeters for security. The heart of each urban center was its sacred district, dominated by a grand temple and flanked by noble houses. In addition to a patron deity associated with each city, citizens worshipped many other gods. Chief among them was Enlil, the air god. Like most Mesopotamian gods, Enlil exhibited human characteristics, taking a fatherly concern for mortals and their daily affairs but also meting out punishment and misfortune. Some cities, like Ur, regularly augmented their shrines and eventually created an impressive artificial mountain called a ziggurat . Rising from an elevated platform roughly the size of a football field, these stepped temples were solidly built of millions of baked mud bricks. Outside the ceremonial district, narrow unpaved alleyways twisted through crowded residential precincts. Much like city dwellers everywhere, Sumerians endured social problems and pollution in their urban environment. The size and location of individual homes correlated with family wealth and position. The houses of all but the nobility were generally one story, with several rooms opening onto a central courtyard. Wall and floor coverings brightened the interiors, which were furnished with wooden tables, chairs, and beds and an assortment of household equipment for cooking and storage. From our perspective, their writing system was perhaps the Sumerians’ most significant invention, enabling us to discover more about them than their other artifacts and monuments could ever reveal. Literacy was a hard-won accomplishment. By about 5,000 ya, the original pictographic form of Sumerian writing was evolving into a more flexible writing system using hundreds of standardized signs. Highly trained scribes formed the characteristic wedgeshaped, or cuneiform, script by pressing a reed stylus onto damp clay tablets, which were then baked to preserve them . Ninety percent of early Sumerian writing concerned the kind of economic, legal, and administrative matters that are typical of complex bureaucratic societies. Later scribes recorded more historical and literary works, including several epic accounts featuring the adventures of Gilgamesh, an early Uruk king and culture hero reputed to have performed many amazing deeds in the face of overwhelming odds. The loose conglomeration of Mesopotamian city-states faced hard times after around 4,500 ya. At least part of the problem may have been their long dependence on irrigation agriculture, which was slowly destroying the fertility of their fields because the irrigation water deposited soluble mineral salts in the soil and groundwater (Nentwig, 2007, but see Powell, 1985). Another part of the problem was that this early civilization spent much of its energy in fruitless internal competition. Clustered together in an area about the size of Vermont, the city-states of Sumer and neighboring Akkad, to the north, vied with one another for supremacy in commerce, prestige, and religion. Finally, around 2334 b.c., a minor Akkadian official assumed the name Sargon of Agade and led armies from the north to victory in the Sumerian lands and united what had been a collection of city-states into a territorial state. Military expansion led to economic, political, and linguistic dominance over a broad area. Under Sargon, his sons, and grandsons, the Akkadian state endured only a century before dissolving. But once it began, the unification process continued on and off for many centuries in Mesopotamia—next under the kings of Ur and later (about 3,800 ya) under Hammurabi of Babylon, famed for his “eye for an eye” code of law, among other accomplishments.
Egypt
The pyramids of Egypt are unrivaled as the ancient world’s most imposing monuments. They have adorned the banks of the Nile for so long that they seem timeless. Egyptian culture was rooted in the Nile Valley long before the pyramids. By 6,000 ya, Neolithic villages lined the great river’s banks, where early farmers grew wheat and barley, among other crops, and raised pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle (Wenke, 2009). Even then, settlements in the section of the valley known as Upper Egypt—just north of Aswan, the “First Cataract” of ancient times— contrasted somewhat with those in the delta region, called Lower Egypt, close to the river’s mouth. Archaeologists recognize a Mesopotamian influence at work among the Upper Egypt villagers, possibly introduced through direct contact or by way of Palestinian traders (Hoffman, 1991). Mineral resources, especially gold, apparently drew outsiders to the region. Around 5,300 ya, increasing political and social cohesion brought some of these Upper Egypt settlements together as local chiefdoms. Walls protected the towns of Naqada and Hierakonpolis, and well-stocked stone and brick tombs marked the social status enjoyed by important individuals (Wenke, 2009). Pottery making and trading became specialized economic enterprises . Continuing contact with Mesopotamian cultures may have stimulated these developments, although researchers do not yet have evidence of comparable Egyptian influence in the other direction. Over the next few centuries, this part of the Nile Valley developed into a strong territorial state. Historical tradition and written evidence record that one of Upper Egypt’s early chiefs took the name Narmer and seized control of both Upper and Lower Egypt . Narmer’s unification of Nile Valley under one king around 5,000 ya (3000 b.c.) marks the traditional beginning of the First Dynasty of Egyptian civilization. After the first unification period, a 425-year span known as Old Kingdom times (4,575–4,150 ya) represented the first full flowering of civilization in the Nile Valley. Most of the estimated population of 1 to 3 million people lived in the far south (Trigger, 2003). The ruler, or pharaoh, was the supreme power of the society. Under his direction, Egypt became a wonder of the ancient world. Egyptians soon adopted a complex pictographic script called hieroglyphics, a writing system that is Egyptian in form but possibly Mesopotamian in inspiration. The earliest inscriptions are associated exclusively with the Egyptian royal court, as are other high-status products, such as cylinder seals, certain types of pottery, and specific artistic motifs and architectural techniques that also seem to be derived from beyond the Nile Valley. Advanced methods of copper working came into use as well, including ore refining and alloying, casting, and hammering techniques. Some of these processes likewise were invented elsewhere. An important by-product of copper metallurgy was faience, an Egyptian innovation produced by fusing powdered quartz, soda ash, and copper ore in a kiln. The blue-green glassy substance, molded into beads or statuettes, became a popular trade item throughout the region (Friedman, 1998). Early pharaohs were godlike kings who ruled with divine authority through a bureaucracy of priests and public officials assigned to provinces throughout the kingdom. The pharaoh’s power depended to a large degree on his assumed control over the annual Nile flood (Butzer, 1984), and throughout the course of Egypt’s long history, pharaonic fortunes tended to fluctuate with the river’s flow. Most Old Kingdom pharaohs maintained their royal courts at Memphis, about 15 miles south of present-day Cairo . In contrast to Mesopotamia, few urban centers emerged in the ancient Nile Valley, and even the capital was of modest size. Egypt remained almost entirely an agrarian and rural culture, the vast majority of its citizenry comprising farmers and a few traders engaged in their timeless routines (Aldred, 1998). Only in the immediate vicinity of Memphis and the sacred mortuary complexes along the Nile’s west bank was Egypt’s grandeur clearly evident. The familiar Old Kingdom pyramids on the Nile’s west bank at Giza evolved out of a tradition of royal tomb building that began at Hierakonpolis. In that early community, brick-lined burial pits were dug with adjoining chambers to stock the offerings for a deceased king’s afterlife, and these rooms were then capped with a low, rectangular brick tomb (Lehner, 1997). The scale of these structures increased as successive rulers outdid their predecessors . Contrary to popular view, they weren’t built by slaves, but by thousands of Egyptian farmers, put to work during the several months each year when the Nile floodwaters covered their fields. The ruins of nearby towns associated with the construction and administration of several of these royal mortuary sites have been found filled with closely packed mud-brick houses aligned along regular street grids (Bard, 2008). In all, some 25 pyramids honored the Old Kingdom’s elite (Lehner, 1997). The first stepped pyramids of stone were built after 2630 b.c. (4,630 ya), and little more than a century later, the imposing tombs of Khufu and Khafra, Fourth Dynasty rulers, were among the last built in true pyramid form. Khufu’s Great Pyramid is 765 feet square at its base and 479 feet in height, with 2.3 million massive limestone blocks required in its construction. Although Khafra’s tomb is about 20 percent smaller, he compensated by having a nearby rock outcrop carved with the likeness of his face on the body of a lion, today called the Great Sphinx (Hawass and Lehner, 1994). Pyramid building ceased soon after, during a time of political decentralization and greater local control over such practical programs as state irrigation works. The Old Kingdom pyramids represented a remarkable engineering triumph and an enormous cultural achievement that inspired the civilizations that followed. Bear in mind that the stark structures we see along the Nile today were adjoined by extensive complexes of connecting causeways, shrines, altars, and storerooms filled with statuary and furnishings and ornamented with colorful friezes and carved stonework. The mortuary cult of the pharaohs also absorbed a large share of the work and wealth of Egyptian society. Later kings contented themselves with being buried in smaller but still lavishly furnished tombs in the Valley of the Kings, a cramped desert valley below a natural pyramid-shaped mountain near Thebes. Discovered in the 1920s, the treasure-choked burial chamber of the young pharaoh Tutankhamen, who died more than 3,300 ya (about 1323 b.c.) during New Kingdom times, is convincing evidence that dead royalty were not neglected even after the era of pyramids had passed (Carter and Mace, 1923). Much of what we know of ancient Egypt’s religion and rulers comes not from the contents of royal tombs, but from the translation of countless hieroglyphic inscriptions . In 1799 at Rosetta, a small Nile delta town, French soldiers discovered a 2½-by-2½-foot stone bearing an identical decree engraved in three scripts, including Greek and hieroglyphics. Twenty years later, Jean- Francois Champollion finally succeeded in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphic writing by using the Rosetta stone as a guide (Wenke, 2009, pp. 87–90). Egyptian hieroglyphics are a combination of signs that represent ideas with others indicating sounds. Because hieroglyphics were used primarily in formal contexts by members of the elite classes and bureaucrats (much like Latin in more recent times), their translation tells us much about pharaohs and their concerns, revealing less about the commonplace events and people of the era. In fact, archaeologists can read disappointingly little about daily life in Egypt’s Old Kingdom period outside the major administrative and mortuary centers, where tomb scenes occasionally portray peasants at work in their fields or winnowing or grinding grain. Happily, later periods of Egyptian society are more fully documented (Montet, 1981; Casson, 2001). Although nothing surpassed the original glory of the Old Kingdom period, Egypt proved remarkably resilient through the centuries, surviving foreign invaders such as the Hyksos and Hittites of southwest Asia, as well as frequent episodes of internal misrule and rebellion. Its pharaohs enjoyed periods of resurgence and revival until, in a state of decline and defeated by the Persians (about 2,500 ya), Egypt fell into the Greek sphere under Alexander the Great and eventually came under the rule of Rome.
Indus
As the first great pyramids rose beside the Nile, a collection of urban settlements that dotted a broad floodplain far to the east was forming into the Indus civilization . For seven centuries, between about 4,600 and 3,900 ya, the banks of the Indus River and its tributaries in what is now Pakistan and India supported at least five urban centers, each with a population numbering in the tens of thousands (Kenoyer, 1998, 2008; Possehl, 2002). Many hundreds of smaller farming villages were socially and economically, if not politically, linked to these central places. The people of the Indus were relative newcomers to the Indus Valley. As we saw in Chapter 14, their ancestors cultivated the higher valley margins to the west at sites like Mehrgarh by 8,000 ya. Farming and herding, along with regional trade, sustained village life in these uplands from an early period (Jarrige and Meadow, 1980). Around 5,300 ya, farmers began to populate the Indus floodplain itself, possibly seeking more productive cropland or better access to potential trade routes for valued copper, shell, and colorful stones. Occupying slight natural rises on the flat landscape at places like Kot Diji , they laid out fields for their vegetables, cereals, and cotton on the deep alluvium. As the new settlements grew, farmers diverted part of the river’s flow into canals to irrigate their fields. They also constructed massive retaining walls or elevated platforms to protect their homes from the devastating effects of seasonal floods. Some of these settlements prospered and grew. By 4,600 ya, several large urban centers hugged the river. Why had people accustomed to living in small farming communities congregated in these cities? Possibly an increased threat of flooding along the river— brought on by extensive deforestation and other poor farming practices—simply forced people to come together in building and maintaining more levees and irrigation canals. An alternative hypothesis proposes that trade was the “integrative force” behind Indus urbanization (Possehl, 1990). A few entrepreneurs may have fostered exchange between the valley settlements and the uplands, promoting resource development, craft specialization, and product distribution to stimulate and reap the economic benefits. As commerce began to pay off, other changes, including urbanism and social stratification, attracted craftspeople, shopkeepers, and foreign traders, all of whom transformed Indus society even more. Indus Valley cities prospered as busy centers of craft production and trade. Workshops in different neighborhoods turned out large quantities of wheelthrown pottery, millions of burnt bricks, cut and polished stone beads and stamp seals, molded figurines, and work in copper, tin, silver, gold, and other metals. Boats plied the Indus River as a commercial highway and also moved goods along the coast as far as Mesopotamia and Oman (Ray 2003). Carts, too, carried the colorfully dyed cotton cloth, pottery, shell, and precious metal goods overland to Mesopotamia. For a while, a distant Harappan trade outpost was even established near Sumerian Ur. So far, archaeologists have carried out extensive excavations at several of the major cities and a few of the smaller contemporary agricultural and pastoral villages . The largest Indus sites excavated so far are Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, which flourished between about 4,600 and 3,900 ya in present-day Pakistan. Raised on massive brick terraces above the river’s flow, these cities were carefully planned, using grids of approximately 1,300 by 650 feet for the residential blocks. Although these large sites certainly reveal social complexity and a certain degree of central control, the Indus civilization lacks grand picturesque ruins of the type found in Egypt and Sumer. Some large building complexes interpreted as palaces have been excavated at Mohenjo-Daro, but generally speaking, evidence of sumptuous palaces and monumental religious structures is rare (Vidale, 2010). Their absence may suggest a basic feature of Indus society, whose people were less focused on glorifying their individual rulers. Richard H. Meadow, who has been excavating at Harappa since 1987, describes this civilization as “an elaborate middle-class society” (Edwards, 2000, p. 116). Gregory L. Possehl (2002), another archaeologist with decades of Indus civilization research experience, describes it as a socioculturally complex civilization that lacks evidence of the state form of political organization. Possehl (2002, pp. 5–6, 56–57) argues that the criteria by which the state is archaeologically identified—a hierarchy of social classes, kingship, state bureaucracies and the monopolization of power, state religions, and so forth— aren’t readily identifiable in the archaeological remains of the Indus civilization. This difference—that of a highly successful, complex society based on a form of political organization other than the state—sets the Indus civilization apart and makes it clear that we still have a lot to learn about this extraordinary development in South Asian prehistory. Both Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa encompassed a public district and several residential areas. Homes range from modest brick-walled dwellings that bordered unpaved streets and alleys to spacious multistoried houses with interior courtyards. What has been proclaimed as the world’s first efficient sewer system carried waste away from these densely packed dwellings, many of them equipped with indoor toilets and baths. What might this culture have to say for itself? Unfortunately, the writing system, consisting of brief pictographic notations commonly found on seal stones and pottery, remains undeciphered (Parpola, 1994; Possehl, 1996). After little more than half a millennium, the Indus civilization’s major sites declined, but hundreds of smaller towns and villages outlasted them (Lawler, 2008). Without written records or any archaeological evidence of invasion or revolution, we can only guess what caused its demise. Did competing trade routes bypass the Indus? Did the irrigation system fail, or did the river shift in its channel, either flooding the fields or leaving them parched? Could shifts in the Indian summer monsoon toward greater climatic variability and increased aridity have contributed to the Indus civilization’s decline, as recently suggested by McDonald (2011)? All we know for sure is that in the end, the river that spawned the principal urban centers gradually reclaimed the surrounding fields and eventually the city sites themselves.
Northern China
The deep roots of China’s early civilizations were nurtured in the loess uplands and alluvial plains bordering its great rivers. Specialized production and exchange of valued ritual goods came to characterize the prosperous farming societies along the central and lower Yellow River valley and brought about increased contact and conflict among them. This phase of regional development and interaction continued during the Longshan period (about 4,600–4,000 ya) and culminated in the formation of a distinctive Chinese culture that emphasized social ranking and ritualism accompanied by persistent warfare (Liu, 2009). During the Longshan period, the circulation of luxury products contributed to the concentration of wealth and the emergence of social hierarchies. Elite consumers supported craft specialties, including fine wheel-thrown pottery, jade carving, and a developing metal industry based on copper and (later) bronze production. Status differences are reflected in the range of burial treatments found in the large Longshan cemeteries—from unusually lavish to mostly austere. Walled towns, some of which were up to 1 mile in circumference, dominated the region’s villages and hamlets (Yan, 1999). Town walls were made of stamped earth, compacted to the hardness of cement, more than 20 feet high and 30 feet thick. These enormous constructions obviously required a large supervised labor force. Numerous arrowheads testify to the prevalence of warfare, but no clear explanations for these developments are yet possible. Perhaps because of the differential access by some individuals and groups to the means of communication within Chinese society (as Chang suggests; see pp. 379–380), their success in organizing and controlling communal agricultural efforts, or more directly through violence and coercion, local leaders who emerged in northern China over the next few centuries commanded the allegiance of ever-larger regions. The rising nobility played an increasingly prominent role in the next era of Chinese civilization. Many Chinese archaeologists believe that Erlitou , in Henan Province, confirms the existence of the legendary Xia dynasty, proclaimed in myth as the dawn of Chinese civilization (Chang, 1986). Other researchers question this association and argue that the Xia dynasty has yet to be demonstrated to be more than legend (Liu and Xu, 2007; Lawler, 2009). Regardless of its relationship with the Xia dynasty, this important site, which covered more than 1 square mile, displayed evidence of increased social complexity between 3,900 and 3,600 ya. It’s here, for the first time, that walled palaces set onto stamped-earth foundations literally raised members of the royal household above all others. Valuable stone carvings and bronze and ceramic vessels figured in elaborate court ceremonies and rituals. Royal burials contrasted sharply with those of commoners, who were sometimes disposed of in rubbish pits. The economy rested on multicropping of rice, millet, wheat, barley, and possibly soybeans and on extensive trade in utilitarian and ritual goods; salt production and transport may also have figured prominently in the development of this community (Liu, 2009). The earliest evidence of wheeled vehicles in China also comes from Erlitou, where archaeologists have found ruts made by wheeled carts or wagons in a road near the palace complex (Liu and Xu, 2007).
Shang
The following Shang dynasty, beginning in the eighteenth century b.c., attained a level of sophistication in material culture, architecture, art styles, and writing that only a highly structured society could achieve. Enduring for some six centuries, Shang is generally acknowledged as China’s first civilization, but its relationship to older polities, such as that which built Erlitou, is still far from clear. While peasant farmers lived and labored as they always had, an elite and powerful ruling class, supported by slaves, craft specialists, scribes, and other functionaries, topped the rigid Shang social hierarchy. Unlike the Indus civilization, the Shang territorial state included multiple cities and covered roughly 8,900 square miles. The power and actions of Shang rulers were sometimes directed through the rite of divination, or prophecy. This practice is of immense importance because it also provides the most extensive evidence of early Chinese writing. Divination was performed by first inscribing a question on a specially prepared bone, such as the shoulder blade of an ox or deer or on turtle shells. Applying heat to the thin bones made them crack, and then the answer to the question could be “read” from the patterns formed by the cracks. Divination was a vital activity to the Shang, and thousands of the marked bones survive as a unique historical archive offering insights into early Chinese politics and society (Fitzgerald, 1978). These bones also demonstrate that Chinese writing is older than Shang times. Its roots may lie in the developing social complexity of late Longshan period towns (Dematte, 2010). Shang cities were significantly larger than older Chinese settlements. By 3,500 ya, the city of Erligang, in Henan Province, covered about 8 square miles (von Falkenhausen, 2008). Its inner enclosure alone, filled with palaces and temples, was comparable in size to the entire community of Erlitou. The city of Shixianggou, also in Henan Province, was enclosed by an outer ditch and stamped-earth city walls that were 50 to 55 feet thick (von Falkenhausen, 2008). Excavations inside Shixianggou’s city walls have exposed elite compounds, some of which were also walled. While most ordinary people appear to have lived outside the city walls, Shixianggou also contained the homes of lesser retainers and servants, as well as workshops and specialized production areas, including several bronze foundries, pottery kilns, and bone workshops. Shang artisans created remarkable bronze work, particularly elaborate cauldrons cast in sectional molds . Decorated with stylized animal motifs and worshipful inscriptions, the massive metal vessels were designed to hold ritual offerings of wine and food dedicated to ancestors and deities. They also served as prominent funerary items in the royal tombs, about a dozen of which were in the vicinity of the later Shang capital at Anyang (Chang, 1986). In addition to bronzes, lavish offerings of carved jade, horse-drawn chariots, and scores of human sacrificial victims accompanied the rulers in death. In much later times, as in the tomb of emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (died 2,200 ya) at Xian, life-size clay sculptures of warriors and horses sometimes substituted for their living counterparts. It seems that the Shang kingdom was only one of several contentious feudal states in northern China. Despite their political competition, all shared a common culture, one that served as a foundation for most future developments in China. After the eclipse of the Shang state, successive Zhou rulers (1122–221 b.c.) adopted and extended the social and cultural innovations introduced by their Shang predecessors. Much of China remained apportioned among competitive warlords until the Qin and Han dynasties (221 b.c.–a.d. 220), when this huge region was at last politically unified into a cohesive Chinese empire. Consolidated by Shi Huangdi and protected from the outer world behind his 3,000-mile Great Wall , China in later times maintained many of the cultural traditions linking it to an ancient past.