demonstration was seen as a sign of true manliness (and won over the
woman in question).^8 It was not that thefirst man was incapable of the
same sort of martial display, but he had not thought to use such a demon-
stration of his battlefield skills in courting a bride–and thus he lost her.
Finally, archery’s importance in hunting was critical to the social bonds
of the aristocracy. Sharing meat taken in hunts was a basic medium of
social, and therefore political, intercourse. Portions of animals killed by an
aristocrat were distributed both up and down the social hierarchy in care-
fully prescribed amounts. This was also a ritual of warfare, one among a
highly formalized set of practices established to reinforce aristocratic
culture and identity. Hunting was primarily dependent upon archery,
and so, in a sense, the aristocratic social structure was based upon the
martial art of archery.
The Dagger-Axe (Ge), Axe, and Spear
While Stone Age Chinese made extensive use of axes for work and warfare,
they also produced a weapon unique to China: thegeor dagger-axe. The
dagger-axe was a dagger-like stone, and later bronze, head affixed to a pole
at a right angle. This may have developed out of the sickle, a common
agricultural tool. Unlike the axe, however, the dagger-axe was only useful
as a weapon of war. In this sense, it is thefirst non-dual-use tool of violence
in Chinese history. The dagger-axe was designed to kill other men and is as
ubiquitous in Stone Age and Shang tombs as arrowheads (and thus bows).
If there is an original martial art in China that was only concerned with
fighting other men, it was the skill of using a dagger-axe in battle.
The dagger-axe is a curious weapon. It appeared long before cavalry or
even chariots took thefield in China, but certainly after simple wooden
spears. This chronology tells us that it was not designed, as some might
otherwise guess, to drag down a horse-rider or chariot passenger. Dagger-
axes evolved in form over time without changing the essential concept of a
bladefixed perpendicular to a shaft. The shaft itself could be short, for
close combat like a hatchet or tomahawk, or much longer, closer in size to
a spear. At least based upon current archaeology, the dagger-axe was a
much more important battlefield weapon than the spear in the early Shang.
While large numbers of bronze spearheads have been excavated for
the late Shang, the dominance of the dagger-axe makes it clear that
the infantry battles of the early and middle Shang were fought in fairly
open formation. Dagger-axes needed to be swung to be effective, and
a tightly packed group of men would have rendered the weapon unusable.
18 Stone Age through the Spring and Autumn Period