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Short version: The Zhou state started as a tributary and later replaced the Shang as hegemonic power of Northern China. They made a big deal of how they did this because the Shang were bad and decadent and had lost divine right to rule. Plenty of debate over how much they actually changed vs how much they were a development of the Shang state, especially whether they were more recognizably "Chinese" than the Shang. Their kings eventually devolved a bit too much power to the fiefs and were broken in 771 BC by a combination of barbarians and rebellious nobles. The capital was moved eastward (this is why they are sometimes divided into "Western Zhou" and "Eastern Zhou" periods) and the kings became rulers in name only, while the feudal lords fought it out. Eventually the lords stopped even pretending to respect the Zhou rulers and after a LOT of fighting and an age of intellectual ferment in which most of the known Chinese philosophical traditions had their origins, the state of Qin conquered the other feudal lords and re-established a strong central government. They didn't last too long because they were assholes and that's when the Han dynasty takes over. It's very debatable how much continuity any of these state entities had with any other of them, a lot of them had a vested interest in portraying themselves as completely the opposite of the old boss.
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Sep 21, 2017 20:02
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After the Qin dynasty fell to a coalition of forces. The strongest of these, the Chu, tried to re implement a Zhou-style loose feudal system with one hegemonic lord. This failed almost immediately and the revived feudal states started to eat each other until the state of Han brought back the empire. From the Han dynasty on, a lot of the native Chinese dynasties take their names from whatever Zhou state that geographically aligns with where the dynasty originated, and the early Zhou era was sometimes mythologized as an idealized state by Confucian philosophers. Even as late as the 19th century you have the Taiping taking the titles of Zhou era nobility to play on this perception. Chinese court histories certainly tried to portray a continuance of society and culture, so the intelligentsia at least bought into the idea. On the other hand, depending on how you count it, China has spent more of its history divided than united. It took centuries for a stable empire to emerge from the wreckage of the Han dynasty, for instance. If you wanted, you could call in to question the continuity between any of the empires. Think of how many empires in the west have tried to claim the heritage of Rome - how would our perception of them change if they actually succeeded in uniting Europe?
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Sep 21, 2017 21:47
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Mantis42 posted:On the other hand, depending on how you count it, China has spent more of its history divided than united. It took centuries for a stable empire to emerge from the wreckage of the Han dynasty, for instance. If you wanted, you could call in to question the continuity between any of the empires. Think of how many empires in the west have tried to claim the heritage of Rome - how would our perception of them change if they actually succeeded in uniting Europe? I don't know why the Western Jin aren't considered one the of official dynasties. I admit the Jin never got most of Bingzhou to submit, but they had pretty much every other Han province under their thumb a little over a century after the official end of the Han. Is it because of their silly War of Eight Princes?
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Sep 21, 2017 23:18
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golden bubble posted:I don't know why the Western Jin aren't considered one the of official dynasties. I admit the Jin never got most of Bingzhou to submit, but they had pretty much every other Han province under their thumb a little over a century after the official end of the Han. Is it because of their silly War of Eight Princes? Because someone didn't write them in as such in the Approved History works.
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Sep 21, 2017 23:26
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Mantis42 posted:The Xia stuff vaguely maps onto actual archaeology It's worth noting that since the discovery of the Erlitou, Xia stopped being considered mythical by Chinese historians, even the more respectable ones. You'll hear about the Xia Dynasty written without qualification even in lots of stuff written for western audiences and with western co-authors. They're (at least not most of them) not pretending everything written about the Xia in antiquity is fact; normally you see it treated as a separate but contemporaneous state to the Shang, rather than claiming it covered all of China or whatever. But they treat Erlitou and Xia as synonymous which could lead to some confusion. The whole dynastic order of history for China falls especially flat in the Bronze Age though. Whether or not "Xia" existed, there was certainly civilization in China at the time, but as a discrete dynasty it makes no sense; it's thought that the Shang, Xia, and pre-dynastic Zhou were all contemporaneous with each other at one point, and that's in addition to yet more civilizations in the southeast, southwest, and northeast. There was never any one "Chinese" state that should claim the title of dynasty in this period. Koramei fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Sep 22, 2017 |
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Sep 22, 2017 00:34
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cheetah7071 posted:I saw the first episode of a documentary on Chinese history last night and am looking for help picking apart the scholarship from the sensationalism. Am I right in assuming the Xia are fairy tales and the Shang, while real, are no more China than Athens was Greece--just the most important pre-unification state? There is no evidence of a Xia dynasty. All records about them are made up. There were certainly people living in China at the time and there is material culture from settled societies but it's like excavating a cave somewhere, finding a pot, and saying England has a 5,000 year history. It was not "China", whatever one means by that, except that it takes place physically in the area currently occupied by a country named China. The historiography of China is so hosed and politicized it's best to entirely ignore the dynasties narrative and treat each period as its own thing, IMO. To stretch and be fair to the mythology: the Shang were also considered fake until the discovery of the Oracle Bones and the records written on them. It is not impossible there is something waiting to be found from the Xia, but I find it unlikely. The stories about them are all so obviously mythological with god-kings ruling for like 200 years and teaching humanity about fire and poo poo. The fact that the PRC officially considers figures like the Yellow Emperor to be 100% historically real is hilarious and pathetic.
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Sep 22, 2017 02:22
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It's worth mentioning that the Zhou also have a ridiculously mythical origin story; the alleged ancestor of the dynasty is a euhemeristic portrait of a supernaturally conceived demigod who represents millet. I don't think it is meaningfully different from Clovis's great-great-granddad being a sea monster, or like every royal in Europe at one point being descended from Trojans. If you don't have some kind of fancy pants ancestor, who even gives a gently caress? However calling the Erlitou culture evidence of the existence of the Xia is indeed CCP-line bullshit. It's like Schliemann naming a neat mask he found THE MASK OF AGAMEMNON, it's one part self promotion, one part wishful thinking, with a healthy bit of grievous misunderstanding of how archaeology and ancient literature relate to each other.
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Sep 22, 2017 03:03
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xthetenth posted:Gotta make copies of those sweet sweet primary sources to ensure their survival. I may personally chisel one into loving steel.
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Sep 22, 2017 03:17
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There's one totally fake Egyptian dynasty that everyone recognizes as non-existent but just totally ignores.
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Sep 22, 2017 04:00
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Yea, and then there's the Carolingians.
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Sep 22, 2017 04:04
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I mean there's a dynasty, the seventh, that almost definitely didn't exist, and everyone acknowledges that it almost definitely didn't exist, but no one is ready to take the extra step and start calling the 23rd Dynasty the 22nd Dynasty, so all Egyptologists are just kind of promulgating and propagating this one lie from one historian from +2000 years ago because it's too much work not to do it. And everybody's fine with that, because not being fine with it is just too much work. And so it goes.
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Sep 22, 2017 04:11
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I can't find a better quality version of this but ship scan  https://twitter.com/sotonarch/status/910824542238658560
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Sep 22, 2017 06:08
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Grand Fromage posted:I can't find a better quality version of this but ship scan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlcZYOENgcQ
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Sep 22, 2017 06:20
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Grand Fromage posted:I can't find a better quality version of this but ship scan This is chicken soup for my ancient mariner soul. I really, really want there to be some absurd polyreme in there, but I'm guessing merchant ships outnumber warships by a whole lot.
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Sep 22, 2017 06:47
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Grand Fromage posted:To stretch and be fair to the mythology: the Shang were also considered fake until the discovery of the Oracle Bones and the records written on them. It is not impossible there is something waiting to be found from the Xia, but I find it unlikely. The stories about them are all so obviously mythological with god-kings ruling for like 200 years and teaching humanity about fire and poo poo. The fact that the PRC officially considers figures like the Yellow Emperor to be 100% historically real is hilarious and pathetic. The god-kings who invented fire and so forth you're thinking of are the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. They supposedly reigned before the Xia Dynasty.
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Sep 22, 2017 07:01
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Silver2195 posted:The god-kings who invented fire and so forth you're thinking of are the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. They supposedly reigned before the Xia Dynasty. You're right. The PRC's official dating of historical China includes the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors as actually existing, I just mash all the mythology together in my head. In any case, even if the Xia existed they are not part of history because there is no evidence of writing prior to the Shang. The Oracle Bone script is developed enough that there's clearly some sort of more primitive predecessor out there, but it hasn't been found beyond the occasional fragmentary scratch into something that sorta, kinda, resembles a later character.
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Sep 22, 2017 07:17
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Are fully-formed writing systems seemingly appearing out of nowhere common in the archaeological record? I know Sumerian writing has a well-attested record
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Sep 22, 2017 07:21
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I don't know enough about the history of writing to be confident, but discounting intentionally-constructed systems like Cyrillic there's usually some kind of predecessor. I don't know of anything predating mature Mayan script, and we don't understand quipus enough to say about them. Hieroglyphs seem to appear fully formed, they're believed to be derived from Sumerian but I can't find any sort of intermediate forms. Phoenician is believed to be some sort of simplified heiroglyphic script, and all other natural alphabets/abjads/syllbaries/whatever derive from it, except Hangeul and Japanese kana since those are derived from simplifications of Hanzi characters. My guess is that a partial writing system isn't all that useful so they have to be functional before they become widespread, and if they aren't widespread it's unlikely for us to find any surviving examples. The idea of writing took a while but people seem to have adapted it quickly once they encountered the concept.
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Sep 22, 2017 07:33
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For some reason I had thought that writing appeared in China before India (which would suggest China invented it independently since it'd be hard for the idea to jump straight from the middle east without landing in the intermediate areas) but a quick google says that there was totally writing in India that predates the Shang bone inscriptions. Taken together with the sudden appearance in the archaeological record I wouldn't be surprised if Chinese writing was just invented by some dude more or less fully formed after he observed foreign merchants using it to keep records.
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Sep 22, 2017 07:46
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Yeah we don't know where Chinese writing comes from. Every other writing system in the Old World can be traced back to Sumer. If Chinese also can, then it would appear that writing was invented only twice, once in Sumer and once in presumably Mesoamerica. Though then we have the question of the quipus again, since if those are a full writing system they're likely an independent invention. They're just so different than any other form of writing it's hard to see how you'd encounter the idea of carved characters and think "hm, cool idea, let's knot some strings". It's a tough area to get answers in since for some reason nobody thought to write down how they invented writing. 
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Sep 22, 2017 08:03
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah we don't know where Chinese writing comes from. Every other writing system in the Old World can be traced back to Sumer. If Chinese also can, then it would appear that writing was invented only twice, once in Sumer and once in presumably Mesoamerica. Though then we have the question of the quipus again, since if those are a full writing system they're likely an independent invention. They're just so different than any other form of writing it's hard to see how you'd encounter the idea of carved characters and think "hm, cool idea, let's knot some strings". weird because personally that'd be the first thing I wrote down
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Sep 22, 2017 08:09
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:weird because personally that'd be the first thing I wrote down Yeah you're a nerd. Real Sumerians write down receipts and fart jokes.
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Sep 22, 2017 08:11
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah you're a nerd. Real Sumerians write down receipts and fart jokes. Also societal notes-to-self like "if your bartender is pouring your drinks short, throw them in the river" and "hookers can't own bars" E: yes I know the term hooker has modern connotations that make it poorly applicable to the role of temple prostitute (or simply a nun) but it's funnier to say the sumerians made it illegal for hookers to own or even visit bars.
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Sep 22, 2017 08:15
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I'm personally in the camp of quipus being a symbolic representation system that doesn't map 1:1 with spoken language the way writing does but I'd love to be wrong because it'd be super cool if south america invented a totally different form of linguistic representation than what the rest of the world uses
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Sep 22, 2017 08:15
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I wonder if they had something like the really kooky kabbala numerology going on but because they had a base-13 counting system they had to index it to knots on string like an abacus but whatever "start here" system to determine the direction of reading these macrameic scriptures is long gone on any uncovered examples.
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Sep 22, 2017 08:20
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cheetah7071 posted:I'm personally in the camp of quipus being a symbolic representation system that doesn't map 1:1 with spoken language the way writing does but I'd love to be wrong because it'd be super cool if south america invented a totally different form of linguistic representation than what the rest of the world uses This is why I want it to be proven to be straight up writing, it would be the only truly unique one. All other writing is fundamentally the same idea, scratch lines into a flat surface to represent sounds and/or ideas. A 3D, possibly binary system you read by running your fingers through it is fuckin' cool as hell.
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Sep 22, 2017 08:21
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What about that whistling turkish dialect?
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Sep 22, 2017 08:24
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Whistle languages are cool but they're not writing.
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Sep 22, 2017 08:27
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I just had a thought about those wrecks: what about bodies of crewmembers or passengers who went down with the ships? Could those be preserved too? Or their clothes, personal items, tools, what have you?
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Sep 22, 2017 09:09
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah we don't know where Chinese writing comes from. Every other writing system in the Old World can be traced back to Sumer. If Chinese also can, then it would appear that writing was invented only twice, once in Sumer and once in presumably Mesoamerica. Though then we have the question of the quipus again, since if those are a full writing system they're likely an independent invention. They're just so different than any other form of writing it's hard to see how you'd encounter the idea of carved characters and think "hm, cool idea, let's knot some strings". Yes they did. The Sumerians were taught writing by Inanna so they could better insult their neighbors. sullat fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Sep 22, 2017 |
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Sep 22, 2017 09:16
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the ability to record your sick burns for future generations to study is probably the biggest advance in insult technology in human history Thanks Inanna
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Sep 22, 2017 09:18
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Kassad posted:I just had a thought about those wrecks: what about bodies of crewmembers or passengers who went down with the ships? Could those be preserved too? Or their clothes, personal items, tools, what have you? Good question, I'm not sure how the environment down there works with bodies. Their clothes and stuff should be possible, it's kind of like a peat bog and biological stuff doesn't degrade. But the human body is full of bacteria that will consume it from the inside, I think the only way to stop that is desiccation.
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Sep 22, 2017 10:32
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Grand Fromage posted:I can't find a better quality version of this but ship scan What do you think the big spar on deck is? A lateen yard?
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Sep 22, 2017 13:11
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Arglebargle III posted:What do you think the big spar on deck is? A lateen yard? That's probably what it is. If we're lucky they'll get more detailed imagery and it'll still have something left of the rigging too.
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Sep 22, 2017 13:18
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Arglebargle III posted:What do you think the big spar on deck is? A lateen yard? Maybe if that's one of the things to hold the sail for gofast I looked it up. There's actually a debate if the lateen was invented by Arabs or Romans, so if it is a lateen yard that seems to prove the Romans invented it.
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Sep 22, 2017 13:46
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Sailings going to be a really useful skill when there is no more fuel and the only source of protein on Earth is jellyfish and your fellow scavengers.
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Sep 22, 2017 14:05
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Arglebargle III posted:Sailings going to be a really useful skill when there is no more fuel and the only source of protein on Earth is jellyfish and your fellow scavengers. There is a company making weird computer controlled kite things to let cargo ships catch the wind and economize on fuel bit I think interest died down when oil got cheap again.
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Sep 22, 2017 14:40
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National Geographic published an article yesterday about digging up a medieval porpoise that was buried in a grave. They have a couple theories about it, but I just imagine some drunken sailor pulling a porpoise out of the water to mess with it like that Florida man did, it died, and they buried it out of drunken sadness.
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Sep 22, 2017 18:09
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Whoa, lets not jump to any conclusions out of our modern prejudice here. That porpoise could have been a mighty Viking warrior.
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Sep 22, 2017 18:26
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skasion posted:Whoa, lets not jump to any conclusions out of our modern prejudice here. That porpoise could have been a mighty Viking
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