Shang Dynasty 

(1570?-1045? BC), Chinese dynasty with the earliest-known written records. It

is the most ancient of the Chinese dynasties for which documents are known to exist, marking
the beginning of China’s written history. The cultural, religious, and political practices of the
Shang elites strongly influenced the Zhou, who conquered the Shang in about 1045 BC and
established the Zhou dynasty. A dynasty is a succession of rulers from the same family.

The Shang texts exist primarily in the form of carvings in the Shang script on animal bones
and shells. These inscriptions recorded the king’s divinations (ritual acts designed to forecast
the future). More than 200,000 fragments of the so-called oracle-bone inscriptions have been
found. They provide an account of the daily concerns of the last nine Shang kings, from the
21st king, Wu Ding, to the 29th king, Di Xin. Their period of rule, from about the late 1200s
to about 1045 BC, is known as the Late Shang.

The Shang state was centered in what is now called the Huabei Pingyuan (North China Plain),
an expansive lowland area extending across north central China. Significant population
growth and cultural interaction had been taking place there in the 3rd millennium BC, during
China’s Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age. The Shang culture that emerged in the 2nd
millennium BC, during China’s Bronze Age, was a product of that interaction.

The Late Shang kings exercised varying degrees of influence over present-day northern

Henan, southwest Shanxi, and western Shandong provinces. At the same time, several other
early states existed in and beyond this area, notably in the lower and middle Yangtze River
valley, but they left few, if any, written records.

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