Study On Ritual And Late Shang Society

The research on ritual activities of Shang Dynasty has always been a heated topic in academia. It can not only reflect social characteristics from various aspects, but also be conducive to the exploration of ancestors’ ideology. In contrast to other fields of Shang Dynasty, little research has been done on the ritual activities, leaving a multitude of unresolved problems for us. This thesis makes a thorough analysis of archaeological discoveries excavated in Yinxu, the capital of late Shang Dynasty, with the attempt to reveal the profound social problems reflected by it.To start with, it needs to identify the ritual remains from numerous archaeological remains. Using the factor method and the logic method together, we identify relevant remains in palace, royal cemetery, northern xiaotun, western xiaotun, southern xiaotun, hougang, northern miaopu, sasikongcun, zhangjiafen, eastern baijiafen, southern wangyukou, xiaomintun, liujiazhuang, simopan, southern xuejiazhuang, dongbaliwa, meiyuanzhuang, huayuanzhuang, and beiyuanzhuang etc.There are many types of ritual in a society. Different ritual reflect the difference of people’s cosmopology and social organization, therefore it is necessary to discuss these ritual seperately. Based on the archaeological context, we could devide them into three categories at least-ancestor worship, house-making ritual, and craft production ritual. In terms of offering, Shang people use the most precious objects in ancestor worship, and the number of offering also outweighs other two categories. The quantitativeness of offering used in house-making ritual is less than that of ancestor worship, but more than craft production ritual, which means the craft profuction ritual is the least important ritual among them. In house-making ritual, people usually use children, adult, dog, pottery, and goat, whereas they tend to use adult, horse, cattle, and pig in craft production ritual.Ritual offering is the media between ritual participants and gods. The caculation of absolute number and found probability is applied in this part. When it comes to the absolute number, we found more adult, bronze wares, pottery, goat, and dog. In terms of found probability, adult, children, dog, and horse are easier to be found. Three standards are considered when Shang people choose offerings-the purity, the importance and the function of these objects. In oracle bones, there are many documents about the treatment of these offerings, which also has reflection in archaeological remains. The offering has been decapitated, dismembered, destroied, and fired. Shang people get these objects from other places by tribute, war, and hunting. But they also produce some objects locally.Ritual density could reveal the reason why some ritual in certain society or period are more frequent that others. Using the function of point density in ArcGIS software, we could caculate the ritual density in Yinxu. We find that the ritual in Yinxu mainly concentrates in two places. The one is in the temple and palace zone, and the other is in the royal cemetery. More ritual is held in these places compared with other places. These two places could be treated as the central ritual zone. The ritual in the central ritual zone is of performance.In the end, this thesis explores the function of ritual in late Shang society. When encounter disaster or some uncertain things, Shang people tend to hold ritual to release their anxiety and fear. They hold different ritual with different motivations, which reflect their religious thought. Ritual is also of some political significance. The social order could be reflected and strengthened in ritual again and again. Shang is a combination of many different states. Although Shang state is the biggest and the strongest state among them, it is still not strong enough to control all other state. Therefore, Shang state has to take some actions to maintain the stability of their power, one of which is to establish the union ideology and the strong identity. Ritual is necessary in this respect.