The Formative Age 7
with bronze sacrifi cial vessels, and kings were accompanied in death
by their servants, slaves, mistresses, and animals such as pigs and dogs,
all sacrifi ced to join them in their large and lavish tombs. Most of the
human victims buried in Shang tombs were military captives. When
Shang military offi cers in horse-driven chariots led a few thousand
foot soldiers into battles with hostile neighbors, they often returned
with captives who then became slaves or were killed and buried with
high-ranking members of the Shang nobility. Some royal tombs con-
tain chariots and horses that were also sacrifi ced to accompany the
deceased.
While the Shang was only one of several advanced societies in the
Yellow and Yangzi River valleys with enough agricultural surpluses
to support an elite ruling class and artisans who crafted sophisticated
weapons and ceremonial bronze and jade artifacts, only the Shang pro-
duced Chinese writing. Written Chinese is both a powerful and effi cient
means of communication. Because spoken Chinese has only about 400
distinct syllables (in contrast to about 1,200 in English), many Chinese
words are homophones that sound alike but have distinct meanings.
Written Chinese allows for these homophones by creating a unique
character for every word. Characters are not just arbitrary lines; some
are pictographs, such as mu木, for tree, or nü女, for woman (derived
from the archaic pictograph suggesting a kneeling fi gure, ). There are
also ideographs suggesting concepts such as one 一, two 二, three 三,
up上, and down 下.
And many Chinese characters are made up of compound compo-
nents such as 好 a woman and child, meaning good, or 安 a woman
under a roof, meaning peace. In addition, many characters have a pho-
netic component that indicates pronunciation and another component,
called the radical, that signifi es meaning. The following characters
are each pronounced ma and include the component 馬, which means
horse. Adding a mouth radical 口creates the particle 嗎, which has a
function similar to that of a question mark at the end of a sentence; with
a woman radical 女, it becomes the character for mother 媽; and a jade
radical玉 makes the character for a kind of quartz 瑪.
Because this written language is so powerfully symbolic, it is adapt-
able enough to accommodate spoken dialects that are mutually unin-
telligible, even to accommodate different languages altogether. Native
speakers from south China, for example, pronounced Chinese charac-
ters so differently from northerners that the two typically could not
communicate in their spoken dialects, but they both wrote and read the
same characters, so they could communicate easily in writing. Thus,