Oracle Bones (42 page)

Despite the ban, the Institute of Archaeology printed its own version of the book, using the notes that Chen had brought back with him. The editing was sloppy; mistakes were made; many of the photographs had been stranded at Harvard. For good measure, the Chinese edition included an introduction criticizing Chen Mengjia. His name didn’t appear below the title, which was unlike anything else ever produced by Rockefeller money:

Our Country’s Shang and Zhou Bronzes
Looted by American Imperialists

NOWADAYS, THERE ARE
only approximately thirty oracle bone scholars worldwide. In the United States, the most respected expert is David N. Keightley, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. Keightley never met Chen Mengjia, and he knows little of his personal story. But the American has researched in the tracks of the Chinese scholar, and he still uses the Chen book that survived—the volume on oracle bones and the Shang world. “That book was supremely important,” Keightley tells me during one of our conversations at his home in the Berkeley Hills. “It’s a wonderful book. He lays everything out there—the rituals, the sacrifices, the time frame. It’s very old, but it’s still a very good place to start.”

Like Chen Mengjia, Keightley has spent his academic career piecing together fragments. He compares the bone inscriptions to notes on a score—a type of code that, in the right hands, becomes music. There are snatches of
song, pieces of tunes. Melodies: certain themes recur so often that they create harmony. Keightley has perused some thirteen hundred divinations about rainfall, all from the period of the Shang king Wu Ding, who ruled from roughly 1200 to 1189
B.C
.

This month there will be a great rain.

Today the king will hunt; the whole day it will not rain.

That we are not rained on means that for this settlement Shang some Power is making disasters.

The bones make music, and they also tell stories. The Shang are obsessed with the dead—in their world, departed ancestors have power. If neglected, they punish the living through sickness, misfortune, and natural disasters. When a ruler becomes sick, or if there is some problem with the weather, the royal court performs divinations, trying to discover which unhappy ancestor demands a sacrificial offering. Sometimes the Shang negotiate with the dead: on one excavated fragment, an inscription proposes sacrificing three human prisoners to an ancestor. But there must have been an unsatisfactory crack, because another inscription follows: five human prisoners. After that, the divinations end. The ancestor must have been satisfied with five deaths.

“Another nice example is the toothache divination,” Keightley says, opening his own book on the oracle bones,
Sources of Shang History
. He turns to a black-and-white rubbing of an oracle bone that also dates to the reign of Wu Ding. The rubbing shows the reverse side of a cracked turtle plastron, whose oval shape is marked by drilled pits and inscribed characters. Some of the original Shang words are hard to make out, and Keightley’s book reproduces the plastron with clearer, modern characters:

After opening the page, Keightley sets the scene. “The king is going on a campaign, and he has a sick tooth,” he explains. “He’s trying to figure out what to do about the tooth, and he needs to know which ancestor is responsible.”

Four names have been carved into the object: Father Jia, Father Geng, Father Xin, Father Yi. All are of a single generation—the king’s father and three uncles—and all are already dead at the time of the divination.

“It is Father Jia, it is not Father Jia,” Keightley reads aloud, in Chinese, running a finger across the characters. “It is Father Geng, it is not Father Geng. It is Father Xin, it is not Father Xin. It is Father Yi, it is not Father Yi.”

For each ancestor, multiple divinations have been performed—cracks across the plastron. The object is like a three-thousand-year-old detective’s notebook, eliminating possibilities one by one.

“And then we have another inscription: ‘Offer a dog to Father Geng and split open a sheep,’” Keightley says. “That’s why I think it’s Father Geng who was causing the illness.”

Keightley pauses and looks up from the page. At sixty-nine years old, he is a tall, thin man with sharp gray-blue eyes. “Those are the notes,” he says. “We have to supply the music ourselves.”

IN ANCIENT CHINA,
it seems that somebody was always lining up the notes. Order, regularity, organization—these characteristics impress archaeologists and historians. Even three thousand years before the Shang, in Neolithic times, there is a striking regularity to the burial pits of the central plains. Those early cultures followed a practice that is described as “secondary burial.” The dead were buried, and then, after a period of time, the bones were exhumed, cleaned, and arranged into patterns. Sometimes, bones were piled neatly, with the skull lying on top. In other tombs, skeletons were carefully laid out, their heads all pointing in the same direction. Order, regularity, organization.

When Keightley looks at such tomb diagrams, he sees art and writing. In his opinion, everything is connected: the same instinct is at work, the desire to regulate the world.

“If you look for the origins of the Chinese writing system, I think it’s a mistake to look for naturalistic pictures,” he says. “What you have to look for are diagrams—structures where they are abstracting, codifying. The same impulse that is working in the religious sphere is also working in the cultural sphere. If you want to see more evidence of impersonalization, look at the
taotie
.

“These are not naturalistic pictures; they are highly structured, dictatorial designs. Pattern and order are fundamental. They seem to be imposing a code. There is a shared cultural sense of what to do, how to think. My impression is that this is fairly unique to China. When do you see the first portrait of a king in China? I don’t even know the answer to that. In Egypt you have early portraits of kings, of high officials. In China, you get nothing like that. Clearly they take pleasure in depicting important powers, forces, presences in an abstract way.”

The Sanxingdui bronzes are different—even though they are stylized, they still depict the human form. When Keightley refers to “China,” he means the central plains, where the Shang developed and where the modern Chinese have typically sought their roots. This region gave birth to Chinese ancestor worship, which is one of the culture’s defining characteristics. And ancestor worship, in Keightley’s opinion, naturally contributed to bureaucratic organization and the conservative thought of Confucianism.

“When you look at the Shang ancestors, you find that they have their jurisdictions,” he says. “The more recently dead deal with the small things; the ones who have been dead for longer deal with the bigger things. They get more power as generations pass. My point is that this is a way to organize the world. People are in charge of different things. I describe this as generationalism, the sense that power accrues with age.”

In classical Chinese literature, the hero is essentially a bureaucrat. He organizes and regulates; in battle, he is better known for making plans than he is for fighting. The early Chinese classics don’t linger on descriptions of warfare—the gore of death, the muck of the battlefield. “You don’t get that attention to dirty detail that you have in the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
,” Keightley says. “It’s all about what the person does, what his talents are. It’s very pragmatic, very existential.”

Keightley has published a paper on this topic: “Clean Hands and Shining Helmets: Heroic Action in Early Chinese and Greek Culture.” He compares the Greek classics to the closest Chinese equivalent—the texts of the Zhou dynasty, which followed the Shang. The Zhou are credited with establishing many of the philosophical foundations of Chinese culture, including some of the most important early works of literature: the
Book of Songs
, the
Book of Documents
, and the
Zuozhuan
. The composition of these texts ranged from around 1000 to 400
B
.
C
. Confucius, who was born around 551
B
.
C
., two centuries after the fall of the last Zhou ruler, idealized the dynasty as a model of appropriate culture and customs.

In contrast to the literature of ancient Greece, the moral world of the Chinese classics is remarkably orderly. In ancient China, the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. Gods do not come down to earth and behave badly. There is no tragedy in ancient Chinese literature. The dead function in essentially the same way as the living, except with greater power. Order, regularity, organization.

“The trouble with the dead in Homer is that they don’t know beans,” Keightley says. “They are described as ‘the stupid dead.’ They have no power; they can do nothing. In the
Odyssey
, Odysseus visits the underworld and talks with Achilles, who doesn’t know what’s going on back in Greece, or even if his son and father are alive. It’s quite unlike the Chinese dead, who assume power as they become older. The Greeks don’t do this. What the Greeks do is develop a hero cult, which is opposed to the ancestor cult. The Greeks are trying to build a city-state, as opposed to the lineage state, where you have a polity that is run by and for a group of powerful families. The Greeks did not encourage that.”

Keightley’s conversations are timeless. During our meetings, he shifts constantly: sometimes he touches on the Shang period, then the Zhou, and then modern China. Once, he remarks that the Chinese seem to produce bureaucracy as instinctively as the West creates heroes. But he emphasizes that this is not a value judgment; in fact, the need for Western-style heroism—decision, action—might naturally produce war. Historians have long theorized that Europeans educated in the Greek classics were particularly willing to rush headlong into the First World War. In one of his papers, Keightley quotes William Blake:
“The Classics, it is the Classics! That Desolate Europe with wars….”

Back again, to prehistory. When I ask how ancient China and the West developed such different worldviews, Keightley points to the landscape. In the central plains of ancient China, climate patterns were more regular than in the Mediterranean and the Near East. And China’s two main river systems—the Yellow, the Yangtze—both flow from west to east. Each river is modular: there isn’t much change in latitude, which means that crop patterns are similar upriver and downriver. There was little incentive for trade; ancient civilization was naturally agrarian. People who travel less are less likely to exchange ideas and technologies.

“Essentially I’m playing the role of the geographical determinist,” he says. “I believe the climate of ancient China was very benevolent, and this encouraged the kind of optimism that we see in the culture. There is a flood myth, but the ancestor Yu solves the problem. Again, we have an ancestor who is competent; he does things. And in ancient China there is no evil act. There’s no sense of original sin. There’s no interest in theodicy, in explaining evil in the world.

“You look at the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Sumeria, where you have these sandstorms, these disasters—it’s a very different world. Read the
Gilgamesh
; it’s remarkable. The guy is going to die, and he’s angry about it. He wants an explanation about death. There’s nothing like that in China. You die and you become an ancestor. You have the same relationship: once a king, always a king; once a serf, always a serf. I believe that cultures that engage in ancestor worship are going to be conservative cultures. You’re not going to find new things attractive, because that will be a challenge to the ancestors. There’s no room in this culture for a skeptic.”

I ask Keightley why this optimistic view is so different from what we know of China from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—famines, floods, disasters, wars. And now, the migration of more than one hundred million people.

“It’s the high-level equilibrium trap,” he says, referring to a phrase used by the historian Mark Elvin in his classic,
The Pattern of the Chinese Past
. In Elvin’s study of China’s cultural continuity, early success, and subsequent
decline, he notes that relative geographic isolation was an important factor. Surrounded by deserts, mountains, and ocean, China was relatively protected from external threats, but that also limited contact with foreign innovation. Meanwhile, political stability combined with early advances in agricultural technology to allow the population to grow to dangerous levels.