global final review

8/2/2019 Global Final Review

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Ancient India

Introduction

Indian thinkers have consistently held a fundamental belief in the unityof all life, establishing no dividing line between the human and the divine.

This pervasive belief in the unity of life has made possible theassimilation and synthesis of a variety of beliefs and customs from both

native and foreign cultures.

Thus, despite its almost continual political disunity, India has achievedand maintained a fundamental cultural unity.

While political disunity has characterized most of India's history, China

has been united for more than 2000 years - the longest-lived political

institution in world history.

While religion had dominated the customs and attitudes of India's people,

the Chinese have been much more humanistic and worldly.

"We find in China neither that subordination of the human order to the

divine order nor that vision of the world as a creation born of ritual and

maintained by ritual which are part of the mental universe of India." ^1

The Chinese attitude toward life had led to a concern for the art of

government, the keeping of voluminous historical records, and the

formulation of down-to-earth ethical standards.

[Footnote 1: Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 28]

This chapter traces the important threads of Indian and Chinese historyto the beginning of the third century A.D., a time when the Pax Romana in

the West was coming to an end.


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Through the Khyber and other mountain passes in the northwest havecome the armed conquerors, restless tribes, and merchants and travelers

who did much to shape India's turbulent history.

In addition to the northern mountain belt, which shields India from coldArctic winds, the Indian subcontinent comprises two other majorgeographical regions, both characterized by India's most important

ecological feature, an enervating subtropical climate.

In the north is the great plain known as Hindustan, which extends from

the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal.

It forms the watersheds of two great river systems, the Indus and theGanges, which have their sources in the Himalayas.

South of this great plain rises a high plateau that covers most of thesouthern, or peninsular, part of India and is called the Deccan (the

"South").

The mountains along the western edge of the Deccan plateau, called theWestern Ghats ("Steps"), caused the monsoon winds that blow across the

Arabian Sea to drop their rain on the Malabar coast.

Since Roman times, the pepper and other spices that grow abundantly onthis coast have attracted Western traders.

Our focus is presently on western Hindustan, now part of the state of

Pakistan, where India's earliest civilization arose.

This area is made up of an alluvial plain watered by the upper Indus andits tributaries (called the Punjab, "Land of the Five Rivers"), and theregion of the lower Indus (called Sind, from sindhu, meaning "river," andthe origin of the terms Hindu and India).

The Indus Civilization (c. 2500-1500 B.C.)


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The rise of civilization in the Indus valley around 2500 B.C. duplicateswhat occurred in Mesopotamia nearly one thousand years earlier.

In both areas, Neolithic farmers lived in food-producing villages situated

on the hilly flanks of a large river valley.

Under pressure from increased population and the need for more land and

water, they moved to the more abundant and fertile soil of the rivervalley.

Here their successful adaptation to a new environment led to the more

complex way of life called a civilization. In India's case, four or five of

the farming villages had grown into large cities with as many as 40,000inhabitants by 2300 B.C.

Excavations of two of these cities, Mohenjo-Daro in Sind and Harappa inthe Punjab, have provided most of our knowledge of this civilization.

Although Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were 400 miles apart, the Indus

River made possible the maintenance of a uniform administration andeconomy over the large area.

The cities were carefully planned, with straight paved streets

intersecting at right angles and an elaborate drainage system withunderground channels.

A standard system of weights was used throughout the area. The

spacious two-storied houses of the well-to-do contained bathrooms andwere constructed with the same type of baked bricks used for roads.

A uniform script employing some 400 pictographic signs has not yet beendeciphered. The only known use of the script was on engraved stamp-seals, which were probably used to mark property with the name of the

owner.


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The economy of the Indus civilization, like that of Babylonia and Egypt,was based on irrigation farming.

Wheat and barley were the chief crops, and the state collected these

grains as taxes and stored them in huge granaries.

The importance of agriculture explains the presence of numerous mother-

goddess figurines; representing the principle of fertility, they exaggeratefemale anatomy.

For the first known time in world history, chickens were domesticated as

a food source, and cotton was grown and used in making textiles. The

spinning and weaving of cotton continues in modern times to be India'schief industry.

Copper and bronze were used for tools and weapons, but the rarity ofweapons indicates that warfare was uncommon. Trade was sufficiently

well organized to obtain needed raw materials - copper, tin, silver, gold,

and timber - from the mountain regions to the west.

There is also evidence of active trade contacts with Mesopotamia, some

1500 miles to the west, as early as 2300 B.C. (the time of Sargon ofAkkad).

For centuries the people of the Indus valley pursued a relativelyunchanging way of life. However, excavations of Mohenjo-Daro show

clearly that decline had set in about 1700 B.C., when a series of great

floods caused by earthquakes altered the course of the Indus.

Harappa to the north appears to have suffered a similar disaster. The

invaders who came through the northwest passes about 1500 B.C. foundlittle remaining of a once-flourishing civilization.

The Aryan Invasion And The Early Vedic Age (c. 1500-1000 B.C.)

The invaders who brought an end to what was left of Indus civilization


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called themselves Aryans, meaning "nobles."

They spoke Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, and were a part of thegreat Indo-European migrations of the second millennium B.C., whose

profound effects on the ancient world we have noted in earlier chapters.

The Aryans were pastoralists who counted their wealth in cattle and

whose chief interests were war and cattle rustling.

Like

the Homeric heroes of Greece, no greater shame could befall thesewarriors than to take flight in the face of the enemy. Their horse-drawn

chariots, which were new to India, made them invincible.

The native population, later called Dravidians, was either conquered by

the Aryans as they expanded eastward into the Ganges plain, or driven

south into the Deccan.

The Aryans contemptuously referred to these darker-skinned but morecivilized conquered people as Dasas, "slaves."

We know more about the Aryans than we know about their Indus

civilization predecessors.

Our knowledge comes largely from the four Vedas ("Knowledge"), great

collections of hymns to the gods and ritual texts composed and handed

down orally between 1500 and 500 B.C. by the Aryan priests, the

Brahmins.

Hence this thousand-year period is commonly called the Vedic Age.

The earliest and most important of the Vedas, the Rig-Veda ("RoyalVeda"), the earliest surviving Indo-European work of literature, gives an


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insight into the institutions and ideas of the Early Vedic Age, which endedabout 1000 B.C.

Each tribe was headed by a war leader called rajah, a word closely related

to the Latin word for king, rex. Like the early kings of Sumer, Greece,and Rome, the rajah was not considered divine; nor was he an absolutemonarch.

Two tribal assemblies, one a small council of the great men of the tribe

and the other a larger gathering of the heads of families, approved his

accession to office and advised him on important matters.

The earliest hymns in the Rig-Veda mention only two social classes, theKshatriyas (nobility) and the Vaishyas (commoners).

But by the end of the Early Vedic Age two additional classes wererecognized: the Brahmins, or priests, who because of their specialized

religious knowledge had begun to assume the highest social rank;

and the Shudras, the non-Aryan conquered population of workers andserfs at the bottom of the social scale.

From these four classes the famous caste system of India was to develop

during the Later Vedic Age.

The early Aryans had an unsophisticated premoral religion. It involved

making sacrifices to the deified forces of nature in return for such

material gains as victory in war, long life, and many offspring.

The gods were conceived in the image of humans - virile and warlike, fond

of charioteering, dancing, and gambling (dice, like chess, is an Indianinvention).

They were addicted to an intoxicating drink called soma, which was

believed to make them immortal. The most popular god of the Rig-Veda


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was Indra, storm-god and patron of warriors, who is described leading theAryans in destroying the forts of the Dasas.

Virile and boisterous, Indra personified the heroic virtues of the Aryan

warrior aristocracy as he drove his chariot across the sky, wielded histhunderbolts, ate bulls by the score, and quaffed entire lakes ofintoxicating soma.

Another major Aryan god was Varuna, the sky-god. Viewed as the king of

the gods, he lived in a great palace in the heavens where one of his

associates was Mitra, known as Mithras to the Persians and widely

worshiped in the Roman Empire.

Varuna was the guardian of rita, which is the right order of things. Rita is

both the cosmic law of nature (the regularity of the seasons, for

example), and the customary tribal law of the Aryans.

The Later Vedic Age (c. 1000-500 B.C.)

Most of our knowledge about the five hundred years that comprise theLater Vedic Age is gleaned from two great epics, the Mahabharata and

the Ramayana, and from the religious compositions of the Brahminpriests. The latter comprise three major groups:

(1) the three later Vedas, containing many hymns along with spells andincantations designed to avoid harm or secure blessings to the worshiper,

(2) the Brahmanas, which describe and explain the priestly ritual ofsacrifice and reflect the dominant position achieved by the Brahmin class

in society; and

(3) the more philosophical speculations collectively known asthe Upanishads.

The kernel of the two Indian epics, which glorify the Kshatriyan (noble or

warrior) class, was originally secular rather than religious.


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The core of

the Mahabharata is a great war between rivals for the throne of an Aryanstate situated in the upper Ganges plain in the region of the modernDelhi.

Many passages dwell on the warriors' joy of battle as they fight for glory

and booty.

As in the Greek Iliad's account of the Trojan War, all rulers of AryanIndia participate in a decisive battle, which rages for eighteen days near

the beginning of the Later Vedic Age.

The epic came to be used in royal sacrificial ritual, and a long succession

of priestly editors added many long passages on religious duties, morals,

and statecraft.

One of the most famous additions is the Bhagavad-Gita (The Lord'sSong), a philosophical dialogue which stresses the performance of duty,

or dharma, without passion or fear.

It is still the most treasured piece in Hindu literature.

Dharma, whose broad meaning is moral law and is often translated as

"virtue," had by this time replaced the earlier Vedic term rita which, as

noted above, originally meant premoral customary and cosmic law.

The other great epic, the Ramayana, has been likened to the Greek

Odyssey. It recounts the wanderings of the banished prince Rama and his

faithful wife Sita's long vigil before they are reunited and Rama gains his

rightful throne.


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In the course of time priestly editors transformed this simple adventurestory into a book of devotion.

Rama became the ideal man and the incarnation of the great

god Vishnu, while Sita emerged as the perfect woman, devoted andsubmissive to her husband. Her words were memorized by almost everyHindu bride:

Car and steed and gilded palace,

vain are these to woman's life;

Dearer is her husband's shadow

to the loved and loving wife.

The two epics, together with the last three Vedas and the Brahmanas,

reflect the many changes that occurred in Indian life during the Later

Vedic Age.

By the beginning of this age, the Aryans had mastered iron metallurgy,which they may have learned from the Near East.

The Aryans had also moved eastward from the Punjab, conquering the

native population and forming larger and frequently warring states in theupper Ganges valley.

These were territorial rather than tribal states. Although some were

oligarchic republics, most were ruled by rajahs.Despite the presence of an advisory council of nobles and priests, the

rajahs' powers were greater than those of the tribal leaders of the

earlier period.


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The rajahs now lived in palaces and collected taxes - in the form of goodsfrom the villages - in order to sustain their courts and armies. A few

small cities arose, some as administrative centers connected with a

palace, and some as commercial centers.

Trade contacts with Mesopotamia were renewed, and merchants probablybrought back from the West the use of coinage and the Aramaic

alphabet, which was adapted to Sanskrit.

Village, Caste, And Family

In the Later Vedic Age, the three pillars of traditional Indian society the

autonomous village, caste, and the joint family - were established. Indiahas always been primarily agricultural, and its countryside is still a

patchwork of thousands of villages.

The ancient village was made up of joint families governed by a headman

and a council of elders. Villages enjoyed considerable autonomy; the

rajah's government hardly interfered at all as long as it received its

quota of taxes.

The four classes, or castes -Kshatriyas (nobles), Vaishyas (commoners), Brahmins (priests),

and Shudras (workers or serfs) - have remained constant throughout

India's history. But during the Later Vedic Age, the Brahmins assumedthe highest social rank.

The four castes also began to subdivide into numerous subcastes, each

with a special social, occupational, or religious character. For example,such new occupational groups as merchants and artisans became

subcastes of the Vaishyas.


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Furthermore, another main social division was formed, consisting of thosewhose occupations were the most menial and degrading - scavengers,

sweepers, tanners (because they handled the carcasses

of dead animals), and carriers of human and animal waste.

These outcasts were called Untouchables because their touch was

considered defiling to the upper castes.

Although the inequalities of the caste system clearly contributed to the

wealth and influence of the upper castes, the lower caste groups came to

accept the system.

One reason for this was the manner in which a caste performed thefunctions of a guild in maintaining a monopoly for the caste in its

occupation and in securing other favorable conditions for its members.

By maintaining discipline in accordance with caste rules, the caste leaders

in each village also gave Indian society a stability that partially

compensated for the lack of political stability over a wide area throughmuch of Indian history.

The third pillar of Indian society was the joint family, in which the wives

of all the sons of the patriarch of the family came to live and raise thechildren.

When the patriarch died, his authority was transferred to his eldest son,

but his property was divided equally among all his sons. Women could notinherit property.

Nor could they participate in sacrifices to the gods; their presence at thesacrifice was considered a source of pollution.

The emphasis placed on the interest and security of the group rather

than on the individual is a common denominator of the three pillars of


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Indian society - the autonomous village, the caste system, and the jointfamily.

Thus Indian society has always been concerned with stability rather than

with progress in the Western sense, and the Indians have had a morepassive outlook toward life than their Western counterparts.

The Brahmanas And The Upanishads

Radical changes in Indian religion and thought occurred during the Later

Vedic Age, producing what became one of the world's most complex

religious and philosophical systems.

The first phase of this development is clearly seen in the Brahmanas. Itbegan about 1000 B.C. and is often called Brahmanism because it was the

product of the emergence of the Brahmin priests to a position of supremepower and privilege in society.

During the Early Vedic Age, sacrifice had been only a means of influencing

the gods in favor of the offeror; now it became the means of compellingthe gods to act, provided the correct ritual was employed.

Since only the priests possessed the technical expertise to perform the

complex and lengthy rites of sacrifice (some of which lasted for months),and since the slightest variation in ritual was thought to turn the godsagainst people, the Brahmins strengthened their position over the nobles

and rulers of the Kshatriya class.

Equally important, the priests gave the caste system a religious sanction

by extending the concept of dharma, moral duty, to include the

performance of caste functions as social duty - behavior suitable to aperson's hereditary caste.

The more than 250 Upanishads were composed between 800 and 600 B.C.

by some members of the Brahmin and Kshatriya classes who rejected


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both the simple nature worship of the Rig-Veda and the complicatedsacrificial system of the Brahmanas.

The Upanishadic thinkers speculated on the nature of reality, the purpose

of life, and immortality. (The Rig-Vedic Aryans, pursuing their heroicwarrior values, had not been particularly interested in life after death.)

These first Indian gurus wandered in the forests as hermits, where theymeditated and taught their disciples. One of them summed up their quest

as follows:

From the unreal lead me to the real!

From darkness lead me to light!

From death lead me to immortality!

The following beliefs ultimately became an integral part of Indian religion

and philosophy:

1.The fundamental reality, the essence of all things, is notsomething material, as most of the early Greek philosophers

at about the same time concluded, but spiritual - the World

Soul.

2.Each individual possesses a soul, which is a part of theWorld Soul.

3.The material world is an illusion (maya) and the cause of allsuffering. As long as such earthly goals as fame, power, and

wealth are sought, the result will be pain and sorrow.

4.Salvation, or deliverance from maya, can only come throughthe reabsorption of the individual soul into the World Soul.


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5.This release from maya is part of a complicated process ofreincarnation. The individual soul must go through a long series

of earthly reincarnations from one body to another.

6.Intertwined with the doctrine of reincarnation is theimmutable

law called karma (meaning "deed").

This law holds that the

consequences of one's deeds determine one's futureafter death. A person's status at any particular point is not

the result of chance but depends on his or her soul's actionsin previous existences.

Together with the doctrine of maya, karma gives a

satisfactory explanation to the question of why sufferingexists, a question that

has troubled thoughtful people all over the world.

The Indian answer is that the wicked who prosper will pay later, while the

righteous who suffer are being punished for acts committed in formerexistences.


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China: The Formative Centuries

The formative period of Chinese history - the era of the Shang and Chou

dynasties, before China was unified politically - was, like the early history


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of India before its unification by the Mauryan Dynasty, a time duringwhich most of China's cultural tradition arose. As in India, this tradition

has lasted into the present century.

The Land

Chinese civilization arose and developed in a vast area, one-third larger

than the United States if such dependencies as Manchuria, InnerMongolia, and Tibet are included.

For centuries China was almost completely isolated from the other

centers of civilization by mountains, deserts, and seas. This isolation

helps explain the great originality of China's culture.China proper is a vast watershed drained by three river systems that rise

close together on the high Tibetan plateau and flow eastward to thePacific.

Three mountain systems also rise in the west, diminishing in altitude as

they slope eastward between the river systems. The Yellow River (HuangHo), traditionally known as "China's Sorrow" because of the misery caused

by its periodic flooding, traverses the North China plain.

In this area, the original homeland of Chinese culture, the climate is likethat of western Europe.

The Yangtze River and its valley forms the second river system. South of

this valley lie the subtropical lands of South China, the home of ancientcultures that were destroyed or transformed by Chinese expansion from

the north.

Here the shorter rivers and valleys converging on present-day Cantonformed the third major river system.

This pattern of mountain ranges and river systems has, throughout

China's history, created problems of political unity.
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At the same time, the great river valleys facilitated the spread of ahomogeneous culture over a greater land area than any other civilization

in the world.

China's Prehistory

The discovery of Peking man in 1927 made it evident that ancient

humanlike creatures with an early Paleolithic culture had dwelled in China.

Certain physical characteristics of Peking man are thought to be

distinctive marks of the Mongoloid branch of the human race. Skulls of

modern humans (Homo sapiens) have also been found.

Until recently, archaeologists believed that the earliest Neolithic farmingvillages (the Yang Shao culture) appeared in the Yellow River valley about

4500 B.C.

Now a series of newly discovered sites has pushed back the Neolithic Age

in China to 6500 B.C. The evidence indicates that China's Neolithic

culture, which cultivated millet and domesticated the pig, originatedindependently from that in the Near East.

The people of China's last Neolithic culture, called Lung Shan, lived in

walled towns and produced a wheel-made black pottery. Their culturespread widely in North China.

Most scholars believe that this Neolithic culture immediately preceded

the Shang period, when civilization emerged in China about 1700 B.C.

Others now believe that the Hsia Dynasty, considered - like the Shang

had been - to be purely legendary, actually existed and flourished forsome three centuries before it was conquered by the Shang.

The Shang Dynasty: China Enters History
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With the establishment of Shang rule over most of North China and theappearance of the first written texts, Chinacompleted the transition

from Neolithic culture to civilization.

Shang originally was the name of a nomadic tribe whose vigorous leaderssucceeded in establishing themselves as the overlords of other triballeaders in North China.

The Shang capital, a walled city to which the tribal leaders came to pay

tribute, changed frequently; the last capital was at modern Anyang.

The Shang people developed bronze metallurgy and carried it to heights

hardly surpassed in world history.

Bronze was used to cast elaborate ceremonial and drinking vessels (theShang leaders were notorious for their drinking bouts) and weapons, all

intricately decorated with both incised and high-relief designs.

[See Bronze Vessel: Bronze vessels, such as this one from the early tenthcentury B.C., were designed to contain water, wine, meat, or grain used

during the sacrificial rites in which the Shang and Chou prayed to thememory of their ancestors.

Animals were a major motif of ritual bronzes. Courtesy of the Freer

Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institutuion, Washington, DC]

The Shang people also developed a distinctive writing system employingnearly 5000 characters, some of which are still in use today.

These characters represent individual words rather than sounds andconsist of pictographs, recognizable as pictures of observable objects,and ideographs representing ideas.

Most Shang writing is found on thousands of "oracle bones," fragments of

animal bones and tortoise shells on which were inscribed questions put to
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the gods and ancestral spirits, which were thought to continue a closerelationship with their living descendants as members of the family group.

The diviner would ask such questions as "Will the king's child be a son?"

and "If we raise an army of 3000 men to drive X away from Y, will wesucceed?"

The shell or bone would then be heated and the resulting cracks would beinterpreted as an answer to the question.

Shang China was ruled by hereditary kings who were also priests acting as

intermediaries between the people and the spirit world.

Their power was not absolute, being constantly limited by an aristocratic

"Council of the Great and Small."

The oracle bones reveal that the kings often appealed to the ancestral

spirits in order to overcome the opposition of the council.

Shang kings and nobles lived in imposing buildings, went to battle in horse-

drawn chariots resembling those of Homer's Greece, and were buried insumptuous tombs together with their chariots, still-living servants and

war captives.

Warfare was frequent, and the chariot, a new military weapon, facilitatedthe spread of Shang power through North China.

The power of the kings and nobles rested on their ownership of the land,

their monopoly of bronze metallurgy, their possession of expensive war

chariots, and the kings' religious functions.

Unlike the common people, the kings and nobles had recorded ancestors

and belonged to a clan.


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They were the descendants in the male line from a common ancestor towhom they rendered worship and who was usually a god or a hero, but

sometimes a fish, an animal, or a bird.

The chief deity, called God on High, was the ancestor of the king's ownclan. There were regular animal sacrifices and libations of a beerlikeliquor were poured on the ground. The object was to win the aid or avoid

the displeasure of the spirits.

Magic was employed to maintain the balance of nature, which was thought

to function through the interaction of two opposed but complementary

forces called yang and yin.

Yang was associated with the sun and all things male, strong, warm, and

active.

Yin was associated with the moon and all things female, dark, cold, weak,

and passive.

In later ages, Chinese philosophers all male - would employ these conceptsto work out the behavior pattern of obedience and passivity that was

expected of women.

The common people were peasants who belonged to no clans andapparently worshiped no ancestors.

Their gods were the elementary spirits of nature, such as rivers,

mountains, earth, wind, rain, and heavenly bodies.

Peasants were virtual serfs, owning no land but working plots periodically

assigned to them by royal and noble landowners. They collectivelycultivated the fields retained by their lords.

Farming methods were primitive, not having advanced beyond the

Neolithic level.


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Bronze was used for weapons, not tools or implements, and the peasantscontinued to reap wheat and millet with stone sickles and till their

allotted fields with wooden plows.

[See Ancient China: Shang and Chou Dynasties.]

The Chou Dynasty: The Feudal Age

Around 1122 B.C., the leader of the Chou tribe overthrew the Shang

ruler, who, it was claimed, had failed to rule fairly and benevolently.

The Chou leader announced that Heaven (Tien) had given him a mandate toreplace the Shang. This was more than a rationalization of the seizure of

power.

It introduced a new aspect of Chinese thought: the cosmos is ruled by animpersonal and all-powerful Heaven, which sits in judgment over the

human ruler, who is the intermediary between Heaven's commands and

human fate.

The Chou was a western frontier tribe that had maintained its martial

spirit and fighting ability.

Its conquest of the Shang can be compared with Macedonia's unificationof Greece.

The other Chinese tribes switched their loyalty to the Chou leader, who

went on to establish a dynasty that lasted for more than 800 years (1122-256 B.C.), the longest in Chinese history.

Comprising most of North China, the large Chou domain made theestablishment of a unified state impossible.

Consequently, the Chou kings set up a feudal system of government by

delegating local authority to relatives and noble magnates.


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These vassal lords, whose power was hereditary, recognized the over-lordship of the Chou kings and supplied them with military aid.

The early Chou kings were vigorous leaders who were able to retain the

allegiance of their vassals (when necessary, by their superior militarypower) and fend off attacks from barbarians on the frontiers.

In time, however, weak kings succeeded to the throne, and the power andindependence of their vassals increased.

By the eighth century B.C., the vassals no longer went to the Chou capital

for investiture by the Son of Heaven, as the Chou king called himself.

The remnants of Chou royal power disappeared completely in 771 B.C.,when an alliance of dissident vassals and barbarians destroyed the capital

and killed the king.

Part of the royal family managed to escape eastward to Lo-yang, however,

where the dynasty survived for another five centuries doing little more

than performing state religious rituals as the Son of Heaven.

Seven of the stronger feudal princes gradually conquered their weakerneighbors.

In the process they assumed the title wang ("king"), formerly used only

by the Chou ruler, and began to extinguish the feudal rights of their own

vassals and establish centralized administrations.

Warfare among these emerging centralized states was incessant,

particularly during the two centuries known as the Period of Warring

States (c. 450-221 B.C.).

By 221 B.C., the ruler of the Ch'in, the most advanced of the sevenwarring states, had conquered all his rivals and established a unified

empire with himself as absolute ruler.


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Chou Economy And Society

Despite its political instability, the Chou period is unrivaled by any later

period in Chinese history for its material and cultural progress.

These developments led the Chinese to distinguish between their own

high civilization and the nomadic ways of the "barbarian dogs" beyond

their frontiers.

A sense of the superiority of their own civilization became a lasting

characteristic of the Chinese.

During the sixth century B.C., iron was introduced and mass producing

cast iron objects from molds came into general use by the end of theChou period.

(The first successful attempts at casting iron were not made in Europe

until the end of the Middle Ages.)

The ox-drawn iron-tipped plow, together with the use of manure and thegrowth of large-scale irrigation and water-control projects, led to great

population growth based on increased agricultural yields.

Canals were constructed to facilitate moving commodities over longdistances. Commerce and wealth grew rapidly, and a merchant and artisan

class emerged.

Brightly colored shells, bolts of silk, and ingots of precious metals werethe media of exchange; by the end of the Chou period small round copper

coins with square holes were being minted.

Chopsticks and finely lacquered objects, today universally considered assymbols of Chinese and East Asian culture, were also in use by the end ofthe period.


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Class divisions and consciousness became highly developed under Choufeudalism and have remained until modern times.

The king and the aristocracy were sharply separated from the mass of

the people on the basis of land ownership and family descent.

The core units of aristocratic society were the elementary family, the

extended family, and the clan, held together by patriarchal authority andancestor worship.

Marriages were formally arranged unions between families. Among the

peasants, however, marriage took place after a woman became pregnant

following the Spring Festival at which boys and girls, beginning at agefifteen, sang and danced naked.

The customs of the nobles can be compared in a general way to those of

Europe's feudal nobility.

Underlying the society was a complex code of chivalry, called li, practicedin both war and peace. It symbolized the ideal of the noble warrior, and

men devoted years to its mastery.

The art of horseback riding, developed among the nomads of central Asia,greatly influenced late Chou China.

In response to the threat of mounted

nomads, rulers of the Warring States period began constructing

defensive walls, later joined together to become the Great Wall of China.

Inside China itself, chariots were largely replaced by swifter and more

mobile cavalry troops wearing tunics and trousers adopted from the

nomads.

The peasant masses, still attached serflike to their villages, worked as

tenants of noble land-holders, paying one tenth of their crop as rent.


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Despite increased agricultural production, resulting from large-scaleirrigation and the ox-drawn iron-tipped plow, the peasants had difficulty

eking out an existence.

Many were forced into debt slavery. A major problem in the Chineseeconomy, evident by late Chou times, has been that the majority offarmers have worked fields so small that they could not produce a crop

surplus to tide them over periods of scarcity.

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