920
Lectures Watched
Since January 1, 2014
Since January 1, 2014
- A History of the World since 1300 (67)
- History of Rock, 1970-Present (50)
- A Brief History of Humankind (48)
- The Modern World: Global History since 1760 (35)
- Chinese Thought: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science (33)
- The Bible's Prehistory, Purpose, and Political Future (28)
- Introduction aux éthiques philosophiques (27)
- Roman Architecture (25)
- Jesus in Scripture and Tradition (25)
- Sexing the Canvas: Art and Gender (23)
- Descubriendo la pintura europea de 1400 a 1800 (22)
- Introduction aux droits de l'homme (19)
- Buddhism and Modern Psychology (18)
- Calvin: Histoire et réception d'une Réforme (17)
- The Ancient Greeks (16)
- The French Revolution (15)
- À la découverte du théâtre classique français (15)
- Christianisme et philosophie dans l'Antiquité (14)
- Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases (14)
- Letters of the Apostle Paul (14)
- Egiptología (12)
- Western Music History through Performance (10)
- Phenomenology and the Conscious Mind (9)
- Human Evolution: Past and Future (9)
- Greek and Roman Mythology (9)
- Alexander the Great (9)
- The Great War and Modern Philosophy (9)
- The Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact On Pop Culture (9)
- Villes africaines: la planification urbaine (8)
- Masterpieces of World Literature (8)
- Programming Mobile Applications for Android (7)
- Introduction to Psychology (7)
- Fundamentos de la escritura en español (7)
- MongoDB for Node.js Developers (7)
- Pensamiento Científico (7)
- Greeks at War: Homer at Troy (7)
- Lingua e cultura italiana: avanzata (6)
- A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior (6)
- The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (6)
- Reason and Persuasion Through Plato's Dialogues (6)
- Fake News, Facts, and Alternative Facts (6)
- Karl der Große - Pater Europae (6)
- The Rooseveltian Century (6)
- Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas (5)
- Dinosaur Paleobiology (5)
- Understanding Einstein: The Special Theory of Relativity (5)
- L'avenir de la décision : connaître et agir en complexité (5)
- Designing Cities (4)
- Problèmes métaphysiques à l'épreuve de la politique, 1943-1968 (4)
- The Kennedy Half Century (4)
- Introduction to Public Speaking (4)
- Emergence of Life (4)
- War for the Greater Middle East (4)
- Postwar Abstract Painting (3)
- Découvrir l'anthropologie (3)
- Analyzing the Universe (3)
- The Music of the Beatles (3)
- La visione del mondo della Relatività e della Meccanica Quantistica (3)
- Initiation à la programmation en Java (3)
- Formation of the Universe, Solar System, Earth and Life (3)
- History of Rock and Roll, Part One (3)
- La Commedia di Dante (3)
- Devenir entrepreneur du changement (3)
- Moons of Our Solar System (3)
- Orientierung Geschichte (3)
- Paleontology: Early Vertebrate Evolution (3)
- Western Civilization: Ancient and Medieval Europe (3)
- Russian History: from Lenin to Putin (2)
- L'art des structures 1 : Câbles et arcs (2)
- Art History for Artists, Animators and Gamers (2)
- Introduction to Classical Music (2)
- Galaxies and Cosmology (2)
- The Science of Gastronomy (2)
- The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem (2)
- Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity (2)
- Philosophy and the Sciences (2)
- Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communication (2)
- The European Discovery of China (2)
- Our Earth: Its Climate, History, and Processes (2)
- Découvrir la science politique (2)
- Introduction à la programmation en C++ (2)
- Introduction à la philosophie de Friedrich Nietzsche (2)
- Géopolitique de l'Europe (2)
- Gestion des aires protégées en Afrique (2)
- Lingua e letteratura in italiano (2)
- The Changing Landscape of Ancient Rome (2)
- Materials Science: 10 Things Every Engineer Should Know (2)
- Highlights of Modern Astronomy (2)
- La Philanthropie : Comprendre et Agir (2)
- The Science of Religion (2)
- Advertising and Society (1)
- America Through Foreign Eyes (1)
- Superpowers of the Ancient World: the Near East (1)
- The Art of Poetry (1)
- Bemerkenswerte Menschen (1)
- Big History: From the Big Bang until Today (1)
- Controversies of British Imperialism (1)
- Age of Cathedrals (1)
- Christianity: From Persecuted Faith to Global Religion (200-1650) (1)
- Narratives of Nonviolence in the American Civil Rights Movement (1)
- Constitutional Law - The Structure of Government (1)
- Contagious: How Things Catch On (1)
- Care of Elders with Alzheimer's Disease (1)
- The American South: Its Stories, Music, and Art (1)
- Programming Mobile Services for Android Handheld Systems (1)
- Animal Behaviour (1)
- From the Big Bang to Dark Energy (1)
- Configuring the World (1)
- Introduction to Data Science (1)
- Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society (1)
- The Law of the European Union (1)
- 21st Century American Foreign Policy (1)
- Éléments de Géomatique (1)
- History and Future of Higher Education (1)
- The Age of Jefferson (1)
- The Magna Carta and its Legacy (1)
- A New History for a New China, 1700-2000 (1)
- The New Nordic Diet (1)
- A la recherche du Grand Paris (1)
- What Managers Can Learn from Great Philosophers (1)
- Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1)
- Exercise Physiology: Understanding the Athlete Within (1)
- Physique générale - mécanique (1)
- Subsistence Marketplaces (1)
- Practicing Tolerance in a Religious Society (1)
- Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life (1)
- Andy Warhol (1)
- Web Intelligence and Big Data (1)
- Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics (1)
- Learning How to Learn (1)
- Imagining Other Earths (1)
- Vital Signs: Understanding What the Body Is Telling Us (1)
- Développement durable (1)
- Dinosaur Ecosystems (1)
- The Civil War and Reconstruction (1)
- Shakespeare: On the Page and in Performance (1)
- Introducción a la genética y la evolución (1)
- Poetry in America: Whitman (1)
- Anthropology of Current World Issues (1)
- Escribir para Convencer (1)
- Découvrir le marketing (1)
- Créer et développer une startup technologique (1)
- Frontières en tous genres (1)
- Une introduction à la géographicité (1)
- Gestion et Politique de l'eau (1)
- Theater and Globalization (1)
- Handel’s Messiah and Baroque Oratorio (1)
- Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1)
- From Goddard to Apollo: The History of Rockets (1)
- Miracles of Human Language (1)
- Human Origins (1)
- The Computing Technology Inside Your Smartphone (1)
- Intellectual Humility (1)
- Introduction to Italian Opera (1)
- Magic in the Middle Ages (1)
- Making Sense of News (1)
- Introduction to Mathematical Thinking (1)
- Mobilité et urbanisme (1)
- Moral Foundations of Politics (1)
- Mountains 101 (1)
- The Biology of Music (1)
- Oriental Beliefs: Between Reason and Traditions (1)
- In the Night Sky: Orion (1)
- Visualizing Postwar Tokyo (1)
- The Renaissance and Baroque City (1)
- The Rise of China (1)
- Russian History: from Lenin to Putin (1)
- Социокультурные аспекты социальной робототехники (1)
- Science of Exercise (1)
- El Mediterráneo del Renacimiento a la Ilustración (1)
- Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1)
- The World of the String Quartet (1)
- Switzerland in Europe (1)
- The Talmud: A Methodological Introduction (1)
- William Wordsworth: Poetry, People and Place (1)
- Wine Tasting: Sensory Techniques for Wine Analysis (1)
- The World of Wine (1)
Hundreds of free, self-paced university courses available:
my recommendations here
my recommendations here
Peruse my collection of 275
influential people of the past.
influential people of the past.
View My Class Notes via:




Receive My Class Notes via E-Mail:
Contact Me via E-Mail:
edward [at] tanguay.info
Notes on video lecture:
The Shang Dynasty (1554-1045 BC)
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on November 20, 2014 (go to class or lectures)


Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
abstract, symbol, Europeans, Yin, sky, China, Pantheon, gross, vary, child, historical, bronze, crack, shamanic, East, Di, drink, oracle, animals, ridiculous, dialects, future, pattern, Latin, human, Xia, tomb, pharmacies, breakfast, archeologically, writing, holistically, mountains, unified, spiritual, offer, eccentric, humans, turtle, married, contentious, written, entombing, phonetic
Shang Dynasty (1554-1045 BC)
first clearly attested dynasty
with Shang Dynasty the record matching up with the archeological evidence
alternate name is the Dynasty
the first source of significant written records
bones
inscriptions in vessels
once you have , you can match it up with the historical record in a rigorous way
the nature of Chinese writing
symbol of looks like a sun coming up behind a tree
the issue that Chinese symbol writing looks like pictures is a issue in Chinese scholarship
one argument is that Western alphabets are based on logocentrisms while Chinese alphabets are based on pictures
the argument goes: this is why tend to be more logical and analytical
Chinese have pictures and so tend to think more
taken to an extreme, this is a argument
some Chinese characters clearly have picture origins
very quickly, though, this just becomes an concept that means East
people don't see the anymore of the sun rising in the east
similar to the English word " " which comes from the idea of "breaking one's nightly fast"
but when I say, "Let's go have breakfast", you don't think of breaking your fast anymore
the same in Chinese: once you are a literate person, you are just reading words as people do who read European languages
so we don't want to get to about how different and Chinese writing system is, it's a writing system like any other writing system
one important feature, though, is it is not directly
there are many theories about why Chinese became at a very early date in history and remained unified
"I personally think it has to do with the writing system"
so you have people's who speak completely different , but when they read the language, they can read it in their own dialect
in this way different peoples are connected to the system in a way that is different than, let's say, if you are reading and you are a German speaker, if you are a German you can't read a Latin document from the Pope in German
however, people living in the outback areas of receiving an official notice from the central government can each read it in their own dialect
Shang chronology
King Tang - 1554 BC
defeated the evil king of the and founded the Shang dynasty
Wu Ding (1250-1192 BC)
Di Xin (1105-1046 BC)
23rd generation
dissolute, evil, mean to people, lost in
was defeated by his own army
oracle bones
makes up much of the information we have from Shang
shells
shoulder blades of oxen
discovered in 1898, "dragon bones" used in traditional medicine
they were being dug up by farmers and sold to
we now have hundreds of thousands of them
they were divination records
records of attempts to communicate with the ancestors
tend to be about things that are not under control
harvest
war
weather
dreams
sickness
bearing
there were attempts by Shang kings to get some insight into what will happen in the
so we have these records at least of what the Shang royal line was concerned about
Shang
Shang
"Lord on High"
the supreme god in the Shang pantheon
non-ancestral
seems to be an independent god
originally a god
referring to a region around the north pole in the sky
important because all the other stars go around it
ancestors
the past Shang ancestors
the further back, the more revered
nature deities
rivers
Shamanism
king is the political ruler and a kind of god
spirits communicate through patterns in bone
take a hot poker, stick it on the bone and it cracks
the pattern from the cracks reveals what the answer from the spirits is
the king is the only one who can interpret that
Shang bronze vessels
evocative imagery
animalistic spirits
shamanistic figures transforming or being embraced by
sacrifice
food and drink
animals and
large numbers of war captives were sacrifices in exchange for
favors
avoiding bad luck
announcements
if an important person is getting
you don't communicate with the ancestors without making some sort of to them
need keep them happy
the dead
elite tombs were very large
prepared physical body
there was a process which they went through to turn a dead person into a spirit
tombs wildly in elaborateness
showed a very stratified culture
would put human sacrifices in the
luxury items, food and tools
a good part of the national product went into the ground with dead people
dynasties:
Shang Dynasty (1554-1045 BC)
ruled in the Yellow River valley, the first source of significant written records
earliest known body of Chinese writing, mostly divinations inscribed on oracle bones
People:
![]() |
######################### (1675-1646 BC) The first king of the Shang dynasty in Chinese history, overthrew Jie, the last ruler of the Xia dynasty
|
Spelling Corrections:
wholistically ⇒ holistically
disolute ⇒ dissolute
ancesteral ⇒ ancestral
Ideas and Concepts:
On how a lack of unified phonetics in the Chinese writing system helped China unify early and stay unified, via this tonight's Ancient Chinese Thought course:
"The issue that Chinese symbol writing looks like pictures is contentious in Chinese scholarship. One argument is that Western alphabets are based on logocentrisms while Chinese alphabets are based on pictures. This is why, the argument goes, that Europeans tend to be more logical and analytical while the Chinese tend to think more holistically. Taken to an extreme, this is a ridiculous argument, since while some Chinese characters clearly have picture origins, for people learning to read, symbols very quickly come to represent abstract concepts, e.g. even though the character for "east" resembles a sun behind a tree, literate people simply read the symbol as the concept "east". A similar example is the English word "breakfast" which comes from the idea of "breaking one's nightly fast", yet if I use the word breakfast in a sentence, you don't think of breaking your nightly fast, but just think of the concept of a morning meal. So we don't want to get too eccentric about how different the Chinese writing system is, it's a writing system like any other writing system.
However, one important difference in Chinese writing is that is does not have a unified phonetic system. There are many theories about why China became unified at a very early date in history and remained unified, and it could have something to do with this peculiarity of their writing system since it enabled people who spoke completely different dialects to use the same written language. This was very different in Europe where a member of a Germanic or Gallic province could not read a Latin document written by the Pope in their native German or French dialects. However, people living in the outback areas of China receiving an official notice from the central government could each read the written document aloud to members who could understand their own dialect."
"The issue that Chinese symbol writing looks like pictures is contentious in Chinese scholarship. One argument is that Western alphabets are based on logocentrisms while Chinese alphabets are based on pictures. This is why, the argument goes, that Europeans tend to be more logical and analytical while the Chinese tend to think more holistically. Taken to an extreme, this is a ridiculous argument, since while some Chinese characters clearly have picture origins, for people learning to read, symbols very quickly come to represent abstract concepts, e.g. even though the character for "east" resembles a sun behind a tree, literate people simply read the symbol as the concept "east". A similar example is the English word "breakfast" which comes from the idea of "breaking one's nightly fast", yet if I use the word breakfast in a sentence, you don't think of breaking your nightly fast, but just think of the concept of a morning meal. So we don't want to get too eccentric about how different the Chinese writing system is, it's a writing system like any other writing system.
However, one important difference in Chinese writing is that is does not have a unified phonetic system. There are many theories about why China became unified at a very early date in history and remained unified, and it could have something to do with this peculiarity of their writing system since it enabled people who spoke completely different dialects to use the same written language. This was very different in Europe where a member of a Germanic or Gallic province could not read a Latin document written by the Pope in their native German or French dialects. However, people living in the outback areas of China receiving an official notice from the central government could each read the written document aloud to members who could understand their own dialect."