World History in a Year (Week 17) - 1200s BC
This century marks a major change, with the earliest surviving writing from an area beyond the Western Asia/Eastern Mediterranean region: early Chinese characters.
The source of the earliest Chinese writing is a fascinating one. When making decisions, Chinese kings would have ritual divinations conducted. Two alternate courses of action were written on animal bones or turtle shells, and the bones were placed in the fire; ritual specialists then interpreted the pattern of cracks in the bones to advise on which course of action was favoured. These oracle bones are our source of written information from the Shang period. They give us the names of late Shang kings (all 9 kings from Wu Ding in the mid-1200s BC to the end of the Shang Dynasty are named in oracle bones and match Han-era histories), the names of some major officials, and decisions that were being considered. Writing must have been used for other purposes as well (and probably predated this time), but bone is less perishable and survived when other materials did not.
This writing coincides with many other major developments in China: around the start of the century thee Shang moved their capital to another new site (Yinxu, near the present-day city of Anyang and not far from the previous Shang capital of Huanbei), and they adopted the use of chariots at about the same time. This was the peak of the Shang Dynasty.
Chariots reached China from Central Asian peoples to their west, and they must have had enough contact with these people (whether through alliances or captured prisoners of war) to learn the techniques involved in chariot use. It wasn’t just a matter of making the chariots, but also of breeding and training chariot horses, and learning chariot-driving and tactics. Chariots, in addition to enabling formidable charges against enemy infantry, were effective as fast-moving platforms for archery and as mobile command centres allowing generals and other officers to move rapidly around the battlefield.
One of the major figures in Chinese warfare from this time was a rare female general, Fu Hao. She was a consort of king Wu Ding (and for a time the mother of the crown prince), and is named in oracle bones as the leader of multiple military campaigns against neighbouring peoples. She is also mentioned as participating in particular rituals that were usually only done by men. Her tomb, the only imperial tomb in Anyang that escaped looting, substantiates her role as a warrior and general: it contains a chariot with a team of horses as well as around 130 bronze weapons. There are also large numbers of other valuable goods like bronze ritual vessels, jade artefacts, bone hairpins, and cowrie shells (the latter were used as money).
Chariot warfare was playing a key role in other parts of Asia as well. The Indo-European-speaking Central Asian people who had migrated to the Punjab region of South Asia via Iran used chariots in their conflicts, which they fought against each other as well as against the indigenous inhabitants. Their culture centred around mobile cattle herding, and so, often, did their conflicts: one of their words for war or battle literally meant ‘cattle-stealing’ and another was the a word for two wagon-caravans (presumably from different tribes or familial groups) meeting. This way of life contrasted with the indigenous people of the Punjab, who included farmers dwelling in walled villages.
These cultural details are gleaned from the Rig Veda, hymns that were composed during this time; they are our principal source of information as the archaeological record mostly consists of various difficult-to-interpret types of pottery. From the Rig Veda we also know that the words brahmin (priest) and kshatriya (warrior nobility) already existed at this time, but they were professions or roles rather than the structured caste system that later developed.
Chariots were likewise a central feature of warfare in Western Asia. Most notably, the Battle of Kadesh (1274 BC) between the Egyptians and Hittites was the largest-known chariot battle in history, involving 5000 or more chariots. (Both sides claimed victory.) The battle is also famous for the subsequent Treaty of Kadesh, the world’s first documented peace treaty. On the Egyptian side, both the battle and the treaty date from the reign of Ramesses II, around the New Kingdom’s peak of power.
Assyria’s strength also increased, while that of the Hittites and Babylon decreased. In 1225 BC the Assyrians invaded Babylon, deposed their king, and installed their own puppet rulers. Until the mid-1300s Assyria had been claimed by Babylon as a vassal states, so this was a major reversal of power. Babylon rebelled and regained its independence after about a decade, but it still shows how much things had changed. The Hittites, although gaining a strategic advantage against Egypt in the Levant after the Battle of Kadesh, also declined in power from around the 1230s due to Assyrian attacks, raids from nomadic peoples in northern Anatolia, and rebellions of western Anatolian vassals.
One of those rebellions of Anatolian vassals is the source of a fascinating bit of historical information. The Hittites wrote a letter to a state to their west, Ahhiyawa, objecting to its harbouring of a rebellious vassal ruler, and also referencing the resolution of an earlier disagreement or conflict with Ahhiyawa about a place called Wilusa. After extensive debate, historians are now largely in agreement that Ahhiyawa is the Achaeans (Mycenaeans) and Wilusa is Ilium (i.e., Troy). They are less in agreement about whether events inspiring the legends of the Trojan War occurred. The archaeological site of Troy shows that the city burned down twice, once around 1300 BC and once a little over a century later in the Late Bronze Age Collapse (in both cases being rapidly rebuilt), either of which could have resulted from a conflict with the Mycenaeans. The conflict would have been much smaller in scale than the Homeric account makes it – the scale of fleets and armies it describes and the duration of the siege are levels of warfare far beyond what existed in the Aegean Bronze Age – but this evidence is consistent with the existence of a real historical event that inspired the Iliad.
