Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (86 page)

41.
The current consensus is challenged by Barbieri-Low (2000: 8–9 et seq.), who claims “no society could accept and adapt such a sophisticated package of machinery as the horse-drawn chariot so smoothly without extensive previous experience with wheeled vehicles.” However, no earlier wheeled vehicles of any kind have ever been found in China proper. “In fact, no actual remains of vehicles other than chariots have been excavated at Anyang” (Barbieri-Low 2000: 48). Moreover, the modern history of the automobile and airplane indicates that, in order to introduce an advanced technology in a society without any related precursors, it is only necessary for an intrusive people to bring the technology in, use it, and allow the local people to learn how to use it. This is without question the way in which chariot technology and culture was transmitted in the second millennium
BC
in every location where chariots have been found or remarked outside Central Eurasia, including China. The dubious nature of the archaeological and other evidence he cites (Barbieri-Low 2000: 14–17) only further weakens this theory. Barbieri-Low (2000: 37) himself agrees that the fully formed chariot was introduced into China from outside rather suddenly in the Shang period, “around the reign of Wu Ding of the Shang Dynasty, that is around 1200 B.C.” Elsewhere he suggests the more likely date of about a century earlier to account for the already localized technical and artistic treatment of chariot parts (Barbieri-Low 2000: 19 n. 40) and the fact that the Shang were fighting foreign people who had chariots. One Early Old Chinese inscription records the capture of “two chariots from an enemy group along with other weapons and prisoners” (Barbieri-Low 2000: 47). Piggott (1992: 65) says, “Chinese chariotry was a Chinese ‘package’ created on the Yellow River from the basic horse-and-chariot technological prerequisite, acquired incidentally without any linguistic affiliations, Semitic or Indo-European.” This remarkable declaration ignores the impossibility noted by everyone, even Piggott (1992: 45–48) himself, of doing any such thing without extensive, long-term training by people who necessarily spoke one or another language—in this case certainly a Western one. As Piggott (1992: 45–47) also says, acquiring chariots “involved the acquisition of a techno-complex, a package-deal … involving not only things but people.”

42.
Among the weapons, notably including numerous bronze-tipped arrows (thus belying the usual argument that the chariots were somehow used with spears or halberds, a virtual impossibility), is a type of “semilunar-shaped knife which is topped by a ring or a fully-sculpted animal figure. In comparison to the motifs of mainstream Shang bronze-vessel decoration, these knives look very foreign. Their animal-style art is very common, however, in the Northern Zone which stretches to the north and west of Anyang. Pointing to the issue of technology,the shape and texture of some of these knives suggest that they were cast using a lost-wax casting method. Shang vessels were usually cast using the piece-mold casting method. Thus, these knives also seem to be part of an assemblage of items used by the Shang charioteer which trace their origin to the steppe zones and not to the Central Plain [i.e., ancient China proper—
CIB
]” (Barbieri-Low 2000: 42–43). In fact, the knives were ubiquitous and typical throughout the steppe zone north of China and farther west and have been much noted and discussed as a well-known intrusive northern element in China (Bagley 1999: 222–226; cf. Di Cosmo 1999a: 893–894).

43.
It is remarkable that the characters of the Oracle Bone Inscriptions, the earliest form of Chinese writing, are structured exactly like the most typical forms of writing in the ancient Near East at that time—they consist mostly of derived pictographic (or “zodiographic”) forms, rebuses, combinations of phonetic and semantic elements, and so on, rather than simple pictographs. For more precise terminology and analysis, see Boltz (1994). One might imagine that a totally unrelated writing system would be totally unrelated in structure, but this is not the case with the Oracle Bone writing system, as shown by Boltz, who however argues that the Chinese themselves invented this writing system de novo without any outside influence: “There is no tangible evidence known at present to suggest that … Chinese writing is the result of any kind of stimulus-diffusion, however indirect, from points outside China” (Boltz 1994: 34). Yet the Chinese writing system appears, fully formed, only in the thirteenth century
BC
, some two millennia after writing had been invented in the West, and it appears at the same time as the fully formed chariot, which was also invented long beforehand in the West. Humans are typically imitative more than inventive. The Chinese did not have wheeled vehicles before this period. They adopted the chariot from the foreigners who brought the fully formed artifact with them from the northwest. It is thus much more likely that the idea behind the Chinese writing system—though perhaps not the system itself—ultimately comes from the same direction. Boltz (1994: 35 et seq.) himself essentially debunks the theory that various marks found on Neolithic pottery are precursors of the Chinese writing system.

44.
In Shang and early Chou practice, words referring to women often were written with the addition of the character for ‘woman’, sometimes instead of, or in addition to, the character for ‘man, human’. For a good example and discussion, see the paper by Elizabeth Childs-Johnson (2003) on Fu Tzu
or
(whose name is usually read ‘Fu Hao’). In the present case, the word Chiang
(NMan
jiâng)
has the ‘woman’ significant instead of the ‘man’ significant in Ch’iang
(NMan
qiâng).
In this case it is probable that Chiang
is simply a taboo form. That is, the actual clan name, Ch’iang
could not be written during the Chou Dynasty itself because the maternal line of the Chou was from this clan. Because the anomaly appears to exist solely for the Chou Dynasty period, the actual identity of the two ethnonyms (Chiang
and Ch’iang
seems clear. The words are sometimes thought to be Chinese, meaning ‘shepherd (man ~ woman)’; however, this does not seem likely, because they are never used in the sense ‘shepherd’, but only as ethnonyms. For a possible Indo-European etymology of the name, see
appendix B
.

45.
There are two attested Old Chinese dialect forms of the word
‘horse’ Old Chinese *mraγ from earlier *mraga, ancestor of New Mandarin
m
ǎ, and Old Chinese *mraη from earlier *mraηa, ancestor of the loanforms in Old Burmese
mra
η
,
Old Tibetan
rma
η from *mraη, and Proto-Japanese-Ryukyuan *
^m
maη from *mraη (Beckwith 2007a: 145–146). The latter dialect pronunciation is evidently also attested within Chinese via the phonetic of the character
NMan
píng
‘tread on, rely on’, from Middle Chinese *biη (Pul. 240) from Old Chinese dial. *
^m
brәη (Sta. 589: *brәη), from *mraη. Both dialect forms derive regularly from earlier *mraga, from Early Old Chinese or Proto-Chinese *marka, as shown in Beckwith (2002a). Note that the final vowel is unknown, but it could not have been a high vowel; it was probably *a. On the dialectal shift of nasal onsets to prenasalized oral onsets in Old Chinese and Middle Chinese, see Beckwith (2002a: 121–127; 2006c: 186–188).