Possible Western cultural innovations in early China

[cranky_laowai]

Sino-Platonic Papers has released another issue in its archives: Western Cultural Innovations in China, 1200 B.C. (July 1989), by Edward L. Shaughnessy of the University of Chicago.

In a recent article on the history of the chariot in China, I attempted to show that a West Asian prototype was introduced to the Bronze Age Shang culture of the north China plain at about 1200 B.C. I used archaeological evidence, both artifactual and figured, to suggest that the route of transmission lay across the broad plains of Central Asia and the south Siberian steppe, passing finally through the grasslands and loess plateau of Mongolia, Ningxia and northern Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces, the area traditionally referred to as the Ordos. In the course of tracing this transmission of the chariot, I discovered several other innovations in the Shang culture of this time that seemed to be introduced from the same general direction. In this brief note I will simply mention, without attempting to provide complete substantiation, the most notable of these innovations, in the hope that this may stimulate consideration of the possibility that even in antiquity Chinese culture was greatly enriched through its contacts with the West…

The entire text is now online for free as a 790 KB PDF.

[Jack_Burton]

Shaughnessy is a giant in the field.

Chariot technology has long been suspected to be a transplanted technology, not from the West, but from the Middle East, Persia, steppes, etc. that middle bit of earth, Middle-Earth.

They say farming originated in Anatolia, but perhaps as far as Europe is concerned.

They say advanced metallurgy’s oldest sites are in Yugoslavia and S.E. Asia. (so far found)

Glassware was always imported from the M.E.

I would love to see more fantasy fiction, films, books, research, documentaries, etc. exploring this great unknown period, the later prehistories of man. kinda almost like Conan, and Robert E. Howard’s worlds.