The powerful Shang rulers collect exotic animals …
Years: 1197BCE - 1054BCE
The powerful Shang rulers collect exotic animals for their own amusement, to impress foreign visitors, and to display some of the marvels of nature, creating the first real zoos in the twelfth century BCE.
The late Shang oracle bone writings, along with a few contemporary characters in a different style cast in bronzes, constitute the earliest significant corpus of Chinese writing, which is essential for the study of Chinese etymology, as Shang writing is directly ancestral to the modern Chinese script.
It is also the oldest member and ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts.
Chinese music flourishes in the Shang dynasty after the fourteenth century BCE, although its origins are surely earlier.
Many musical instruments, such as the sheng, are invented in Shang times.
Chinese free reed wind instruments named he and yu are first mentioned in bone oracle writing dating from the fourteenth–twelfth centuries BCE, and will be identified in later texts as types of sheng.
The earliest sheng is a gourd with a protruding mouthpiece and twelve to seventeen slender symmetrical cane pipes inserted vertically in the base.
A few of the pipes are nonspeaking.
Sound is produced by inhalation and exhalation; covering holes in the pipes produce the pitches, from the pentatonic (five-tone) scale.
The sheng plays chords rather than melodies.
In its mature form, the base, a beautifully lacquered wooden bowl, contains thin metal reeds that sound when the finger holes above are closed.
Over time, court rituals to appease spirits have developed under the Shang, and in addition to his secular duties, the king serves as the head of the ancestor worship cult.
Oftentimes, the king even performs oracle bone divinations himself, especially near the end of the dynasty, which declines in the twelfth century through internal unrest.
Evidence from excavations of the royal tombs indicates that royalty were buried with articles of value, presumably for use in the afterlife.
Perhaps for the same reason, hundreds of commoners, who may have been slaves, were buried alive with the royal corpse.
