Визуальный самоучитель работы на ноутбуке. Алексей Знаменский

times may yet substantiate this.

      Considering the difficulties of translation, and considering the ‘shorthand’ form of expression necessitated by the cramped confines of a corner of bone, it is surprising how many of the inscriptions are intelligible. Perhaps the most frequently asked ‘charges’ (that is ‘questions’, but phrased as statements) merely invite reassurance from the other world: ‘Tonight there will be no disasters’ or ‘In the next ten days [i.e. a Shang ‘week’] there will be no disasters’. To these the desired ‘answer’ is the character meaning ‘auspicious’, that is ‘affirmative’; the cracking has been ‘read’ as approving the ‘charge’; no disasters tonight. Often the charge is formulated in a ‘will it/won’t it’ form for double reassurance: ‘On the next day…[we] should not make offering to Ancestor Yi’ is followed by ‘On the next day…we should make offering to Ancestor Yi’. In asking the same question twice any ambiguity in one cracked response might be clarified by the other. Sometimes multiple-choice charges are posed – Fu is to inspect the district of Lin; it should be Qin who does it; it should be Bing who does it. An ‘auspicious’ endorsement of any of these settles the matter.¹⁹

      ‘One reason the king divined so much was precisely because he had so much to divine about,’ says David Keightley.²⁰ Everything, from the vagaries of the weather to the likely source of the royal toothache, the best day for a successful hunt or the prospects of victory over an enemy, had to be submitted for consideration by the supernatural concourse of gods and ancestors. It was as if the king conceived of himself as the pivotal persona in a transcendental bureaucratic hierarchy; its lower, earthly, departments were comprised of clan subordinates with their own local jurisdictions and its higher, celestial, departments of those ancestors and deities with a superior and sometimes specialised knowledge whom only the king, via divination, could approach. ‘The living and the dead were thus engaged in a communal, ritually structured conversation in which, just as the king’s allies and officers made reports to him, so the Shang king made reports to his ancestors…’²¹

      Though constituting a hierarchy of their own, ancestors, spirits and deities are not easy to distinguish. Di, the supreme deity equivalent to the king, was usually invoked indirectly and may or may not have been equated with the progenitor of the Shang lineage. But he seems to have fallen out of favour towards the end of the Anyang period and would disappear altogether under the Zhou dynasty. Other spirits responsible for the crops and the rivers were also consulted, as were once-ruling ancestors of the direct lineage plus a few Great Lords who were not royal ancestors. All these might be asked to intercede with Di or to act on their own. The ancestors, in particular, were expected to show loyalty to their lineage and to engage in its temporal concerns as actively as they had in life. Thus the stocking of royal tombs with food and drink in ritual bronze or ceramic vessels may not have been intended simply to provide sustenance for the deceased but also to ensure that they had the means to fulfil this inter-cessionary role by conducting their own ritual offerings.

      Many such ancestors are named in the divinatory inscriptions. It was by identifying the names of some of them with those of kings as given in later texts that scholars were able to corroborate the Shang’s historicity. But if the ancestors were usually on the side of the Shang, the supernatural concourse as a whole was far from being a rubber stamp. Royal proposals were not invariably endorsed, and Di especially could be a stern master. He might incite the Shang’s enemies rather than connive with the Shang against them, or inflict catastrophe rather than avert it. A famous example concerned ‘Lady Hao’, who is identified in the inscriptions as a consort of King Wu Ding and who is presumed to be she of the extravagantly furnished tomb excavated intact at Anyang. When Lady Hao became pregnant, Wu Ding hoped for a male heir – the Shang succession was patrilinear – and duly lobbied the gods to that effect. His ‘charge’ that ‘Lady Hao’s child-bearing will be good’ did not, however, bring the desired response. As ‘read’ by Wu Ding from the cracking, it said only that ‘If it be on a ding day that she gives birth, there will be prolonged luck’. This was much too vague, so the king tried again. The response was still ambiguous: all now depended on the baby being born on either a ding day or a geng day, these being like, say, Thursday and Saturday in the Shang’s ten-day week. The odds were still stacked against a happy outcome, and sure enough, ‘After 31 days, on jiayin day, she gave birth and it was not good; it was a girl.’

      Verificatory comments like this, added some time after the divination, are comparatively rare. Occasionally a weather forecast proved accurate – ‘It really did rain’ – or a hunt productive – the whole bag is listed. But the outcome of weightier matters, such as wars, is often uncertain and has to be inferred. Evidently the solemn performance of ritual consultation was more important than the efficacy or accuracy of the response. The object of the exercise was to exalt the Shang lineage, both living and dead, by demonstrating to dependants, subjects and enemies alike how long and distinguished this lineage was and how diligently the king strove to engage and mobilise it.

      Such reassurance was needed in an environment that was both physically and politically hostile to the formation of a proto-state and a sophisticated culture. It has been deduced that the climate of the Yellow River basin was warmer and wetter in the second millennium BC than it is today. Average temperatures could have been as much as 2–4 degrees Celsius higher and scrub and woodland that much thicker. But the winters must still have been harsh. The usual grains were millets and perhaps wheat, rarely rice. Presumably because of the frosts, freshwater turtles were in short supply and plastrons had to be solicited from the Shang’s southern neighbours; when some arrived alive, they were kept in ponds, but it does not appear that they bred. Other game was plentiful; buffalo, boar, deer and tigers are specified. But the tigers were probably of the Siberian species; and tropical trophies such as elephants and peacocks are rarely mentioned. Written sources from the succeeding Zhou period describe rivers so frozen that armies could march across the ice. Early autumn snowfalls and late spring frosts were accounted occupational hazards, critical for farmers and dynasts alike since no natural disaster was devoid of political portent.

      Elsewhere in the ancient world, the famous zones of precocious literacy and urbanisation in the Nile, Tigris/Euphrates and Indus valleys were spared such conditions; there, as the weather warmed, the rising rivers obligingly irrigated the fields; when it cooled, gentle rains watered winter crops; the living was easy and the seeds of civilisation might germinate almost spontaneously. But five to ten latitudinal degrees farther north, upper China was no such incubator. Here life was precarious and survival laborious. Irrigation was almost unknown in Shang times, harvests were hit and miss, and meat, both hunted and reared, figured prominently in the dietary and sacrificial regimen. It may not be fanciful to suggest that the confidence with which the Shang used fire to melt bronze and crack bones owed something to discrimination acquired in fuel foraging and to long cold nights huddled round a glowing hearth.

      The political climate was no more benign. The late Shang polity is usually described as ‘a segmentary state’, meaning that those under its direct rule were few while those under its outlying subordinates could be many. Subordinates and allies were usually joined to the Shang lineage by ties of kinship; they were the sons or brothers of kings, or descendants of such. They upheld Shang ritual observance and were in turn upheld by it. They revered the same divine-cum-ancestral host, followed the same mortuary customs and doubtless used the same script and calendar. Yet such shared interests did not guarantee their unflinching loyalty nor preclude their taking independent local action.

      In between these centres of Shang power, numerous scattered and despised communities, probably speaking a different language, retained a full and sometimes formidable autonomy. Because of this presence, the Shang territories were neither contiguous nor easily defined. Kinship, not territory, linked the Shang domains. But from place-names and lineages mentioned in the oracular inscriptions it seems that at the end of the second millennium BC the Shang realm reached no farther than what is now northern Henan province and south-eastern Shanxi. Beyond were other ‘segmentary states’, some of them just as powerful with, as already noted, their own bronze-casting