Human Sacrifice in the Shang

Dynasty
The Shang dynasty is the first Chinese imperial dynasty for which we have
archaeological and documentary evidence. Ruling in a period spanning from 1600 BC
to 1100 BC, according to documentary findings it succeeded the legendary first Xia
dynasty.
The official dates given for the founding of the Shang Dynasty and its fall usually vary
and it is said that it began from about 1760 to 1520 BCE and lasted until 1122-1030
circa. More recent archeological discoveries tell us more precise dates and we can now
believe that it started at about 1600 BCE and ended quite definitely in 1046 BCE.
The geographical area in which Shang dynasty flourished had its center in the North
China Plain. It very likely extended from the areas of modern provinces Shandong and
Hebei in the north and westward until the area of the modern Henan province.
Shang sovereigns are believed to have stayed in different capitals during the story of
the dynasty, but thanks to rich archaeological finds we can believe that they settled at
Anyang from the 14th century BCE.
No real literature has survived since the era of the Shang, but we do have many
records and ceremonial inscriptions, with also family and clan names preserved in the
carvings and brushings on bone and tortoise shells. These written records we have
from the Shang are composed by pictographs, phonograms and ideograms as well,
and they are the earliest known examples of writing in china.

Figura 1, Oracle bone script, the earliest known form of written Chinese.

Culture and Society in Shang Dynasty

According to the surviving documents and other evidence, we can understand that the
Shang epoch had quite a evolved society. It was made by a stratified social system
composed by peasants and craftsmen, artisans soldiers and aristocrats.

The masses chief labour was in manifacturing and especially in agriculture. There was an
established class of nobles and the king did appoint local governors. The king also had the
authority to pronounce when to plant crops, and the society overall followed a highly
developed calendar system with a 360-day year of 12 months.

Religion in Shang Dynasty

Religion in Shang comprehended elements that are found in various religious
traditions and practices.
It was characterized by a combination of shamanism, animism, spiritual control of the
world, divination and respect and worship of ones dead ancestors.
Godlike figures represented mythological and natural elements like the sun, the moon,
wind, rain, dragon and the phoenix, and peasants used to worship these gods in order
to receive good harvests.
The kings considered themselves a divine progeny, and they consulted a supreme
being that they called Shangdi for advice and wisdom.
It was believed that the gods as well as the ancestors could have an influence on
ordinary life. Thus festivals and sacrifices were organized to please the gods, while
ones ancestors could be consulted through oracle bones, in order to understand their
approval for life decisions and to speculate on their future success in important areas
of life such as battle, hunting and harvesting.
It appears that the Shang also believed in the afterlife. We have in fact evidence of
this in the elaborate burial sites constructed for the dead sovereigns. Many objects
belonging to the ordinary life were often included especially in the tombs of deceased
rich people and kings. In such archaeological sites carriages, utensils, weapons and
sacrifical vessels can be found. The burial of a king could comprehend several dozens
of human sacrifices, with the count sometimes arriving at hundreds. Tombs could
include ornaments made with precious materials and more typically jade, which was
believed to be able to confer immortality and protect against the decaying.
Shang religion was meticulously ordered and bureaucratic. We have for example
evidence of this if we take in consideration that carved oracle bones included very
detailed information on dates, rituals, people, ancestors and various questions
associated with divination practices. The burial sites also displayed extremely ordered
arrangement of bones, with groups of bodies laid in order to face the same direction.

Human Sacrifice in Shang Dynasty

We can suppose sacrifice was popular during Shang dynasty mainly thanks to written
and visual findings. Records of the practice are found on the oracle-bone inscriptions
of the epoch. Thanks to these written traces we can interpret the functions of the
many corpses and bones stored in some of the sovereigns mausoleums.

Culture of the Human Sacrifice in Shang Dynasty

Human sacrifices had a very special significance for worshipping spirits in Shang
dynasty.
From the inscriptions we can learn that there were different methods of killing being
used in worship rituals. Some of the written words were in fact used to described the
act of killing human sacrifices in general, while many others were discovered to be

referring to specific killing methods thanks to the analysis of the characters and the
structures of language.
The recipients of the sacrifices could be many, but Im enumerating here some of the
most common.
Shangdi, or the supreme god was the first one. It was worshipped as the ultimate
spiritual power by the ruling class of Shang. They thought it could foster victory in
battle, a good or a bad harvest, weather and environmental conditions such as the
floods of the nearby Yellow River, and more in general the whole fate of the kingdom.
Shangdi was also on top of a hierarchy of other gods, being in the position of
controlling nature and also the spirits of the deceased.
The supreme god was anyway considered quite a transcendental being, it was
conceived to be very distant from the world and it was hardly reachable by ordinary
people. It was on the other hand said that the Shang kings were a divine progeny, and
through the souls of their royal ancestors they were able to make Shangdi accessible,
because they were able to join him in the afterlife. In this sense the emperors were
able to entreat Shangdi directly.
Many of the oracle bones survived until today sport prayers and demands for rain or
seek divine approval for state and military action.
Other recipients of the sacrifices were the nature powers, like the sun and mountain
powers, the former lords, who after being deceased were added to the dynastic
pantheon, the predynastic and dynastic ancestors, and also the dynastic ancestresses
and concubines of past emperors. Shang sovereigns in particular believed that the
ancestors had powers over the living and rituals and sacrifices were performed to
ascertain their intentions.

Human Sacrifice Practices in Shangdi

Oracle-bone records on human sacrifice in Shang dynasty were called rnj bc. The
term rnji refers to the ritual of killing living human individuals in order to worship
spirits. During the rnji rituals a special symbolic significance was associated to the
living human individuals offered in sacrifice. They were in fact considered a medium to
the deities.
There were different ways of sacrificing a human being, and each one had its own
peculiarities and reasons.

Beheading
The term beheading literally designs the act of cutting off a humans head.
During the Shang dynasty this sacrificial practice was done on a living person, and it
was quite common in the sacrificial activities. The sacrifices killed this way were
mainly men from alien tribes, and they were mostly killed in order to satisfy the will of
male ancestors. This method was used to show piety to spirits and deities, and at the
same time it was meant to scare the enemy tribes.
This method of killing was mostly associated with male personalities and deities since
the human sacrifices employed in this were generally male warrior prisoners taken by
male warriors and ultimately male military chiefs. Mainly for this reason the Shang
thought those werent fit to please feminine spirits and ancestors.

Splitting the body into halves

The Chinese word mo (character ) was used to design this kind of killing. The
character itself resembles a circle split by two vertical lines, and this helped
archaeologists to understand its meaning.
Also the humans sacrificed with this method were mainly male victims and were
offered to please male ancestors and deities.

Dismember bodies
Standing to the inscriptions found in oracle bones and in depictions in burial sites we
can understand that the victims of this type of killing were dismembered using a
particular kind of axe, which also can be found buried in the same tombs as the
sacrifices.
The victims of this sacrifice were mostly male, but evidence on carved burial
inscriptions tells us it could have been used also to worship female ancestresses. This
was one of the most cruel kind of killings, as the number of human sacrifices
employed in these cases reached sometimes the hundreds.

Beating to death
Humans sacrificed with this practice were beat using sticks. Most of the evidence of
this is brought us by the type of injuries and damages found on the sacrifices skulls
and bones.
The sacrifices beaten with this method were mainly of alien tribes especially Qiang
tribes and also female slaves.
Different characters used in the inscriptions design slightly different methods of
beating the victims.
We also have enough evidence to believe that this killing method was employed to
sacrifice a large number of humans reaching the order of many dozens.
As said the victims killed with this method included both male and female, and they
were offered to ancestors spirits.

Chopping to death
This was probably the method employed in killing the largest number of victims, and it
was employed for human victims as well as animal ones. We have evidence to say that
it was used to kill hundreds of humans and hundreds of animal sacrifices (typically
pigs, ovine and cattle).
We can think that victims of chopping death were mostly offered to female ancestors
spirits.

Taking blood
The ancient understood that without blood people could not live, and that more in
general life existed only when blood was circulating. Blood was therefore for some
extent the symbol of life and it was regarded as something very valuable.
It happened therefore officiants chose to take blood from sacrificial victims, and this
was made in order to please deities. Blood was extracted through the use of ordinary
weapons and was then spread on the surface of sacrifice utensils and icons. Not
necessarily it was employed in burial rituals, as it was also considered good in more
ordinary religious and divinatory rituals.

Burning
Ancient Chinese used two distinct words to design methods of sacrificing humans
burning them alive, jio
and lio
.
The term jio indicates a human victim placed on a fire to burn. It was specifically
used when the human sacrifice was killed to demand for rain. We understand from the
oracle bones that the victims killed by this method were mostly female, furthermore
we know that this sex choice was made because it was thought that female sacrifices
were more efficient for this kind of requests.
This type of sacrifice was of extreme relevance in ancient China. Peoples lives
depended in fact from agriculture, thus the weather had a huge influence on ordinary
life. The scarcity and also abundance of water could determine deadly threats.
The character lio
depicts putting a person more specifically on a funerary pyre. In
ancient peoples belief the smoke rising from the corpse would have gone up to the
sky, where it was easily received by the gods.
These kinds of sacrifices were made individually or with groups of victims.
Between jio and lio there were similarities and differences. Both of the practices
were related to farming, but their aims were different. While the jio used mainly
female sacrifices asking specifically for rain, the lio sacrifices employed male victims
with the purpose of asking for rain or, more frequently, a good harvest year.

Boiling
Boiling was one of the most ancient practices of sacrificing human victims along with
some of the other and more rudimental. Archaeologists had evidence of this when
discovering and studying the characters indicating these sacrificial rites. The exact
word for recording this method is in fact er , which equated with the er we find in
the most ancient scripts tells us that its been handed down from the very beginning of
the Shang times.

Drowning
Ancient Shang used to drown human sacrifices into a river for worship. This method
was applied on both humans and animals.
The use of drowning female human victims in rivers was continued for worshipping in
many dynasties after the Shang. The greater part of sacrifices employed in this
custom were human females, and were used to worship the spirits of nature.

Burying
It happened that human sacrifices were buried alive in a pit in order to satisfy divine
and natural spirits, in many cases also in order to ask for rain.
There wasnt a preferred gender employed in this practice, nor a particular fixed
number of victims, and also archaeologists werent able to find particular information
about the social status or provenience of the victims.

Displaying
Dead bodies were displayed as sacrifice to the spirits.
The human sacrifices killed by this method were mostly male and they were employed
to satisfy natural and ancestral spirits.
The sacrifices involved in these practices were killed and exposed on public shelves,
and they were mostly of Qiang tribe provenience.

Exposing and Drying

It sometimes happened that the choice of the officiants, instead of public displaying,
fell on exposing and drying the sacrifices bodies to the sun for worship.
The word who identified this method is ch , and it designed a method of killing
humans carving their bodies and exposing them to sunlight, in order to make them
become like dried meat.

Conclusions
We can overall say that human sacrifice was very common during Shang dynasty, not
only in the case of funerary rites for rich people and sovereigns, but also and mostly
for more ordinary religious practices meant to influence the gods will.
In all of the told sacrificing rituals the victims were of stranger tribe provenience or of
very low social status. Most of the human sacrifices of foreign provenience were taken
from prisoners of Qiang origin. What we can also understand from the quality and
quantity of oracle bone inscriptions is the great cruelty and piety of the rulers toward
spirits and deities. It is also clear that the choice of the type of the victims, whether
human or animal, male or female, depended on the purpose of the religious practice
and on the requests.
Nearly all of the methods employed to sacrifice animal victims were reputed also fit to
sacrifice humans. The methods of killing human sacrifices for praying to ancestral
spirits were much more varied than those for worshipping natural spirits. The
described methods, number of victims found and the occasions in which human
sacrifice was used tells us much about the Shang emperors despise toward common
people and in particular strangers and enemies.

Bibliography
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https://international.uiowa.edu/files/ip.uiowa.edu/files/ozarchive/wangpingMethodsofHumanSacrificeinShangNEWEDITION.doc
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangdi
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https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shang-dynasty
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http://www.ushistory.org/civ/9b.asp
Shang Dynasty, Wikipedia, English edition, consulted in July 2016
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty#CITEREFSmith1961
Shang Religion, Boundless, consulted in July 2016
https://www.boundless.com/world-history/textbooks/boundless-world-history-i-ancientcivilizations-enlightenment-textbook/early-chinese-dynasties-282/the-shang-dynasty286/shang-religion-289-13314/
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Giovanni Rabuffetti
Politecnico di Milano
Silk Road Summer School
July 2016