Reading about the Shang dynasty this week as well as the warrior queen was very interesting. In both excerpts given the reader learns about the ritual of oracle bones and the role that they played within society as not only a predictor of events, weather, as well as general indications of good and bad fortune. This practice was only ever done however by the king as he attempted to communicate with his ancestors as well as Di (the deity they worshipped). The kings\u2019 findings were then communicated to the rest of the population by his court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These rituals were regularly done on bone with the combination of melted bronze. Coming to class I thought that this practice seemed quite unique and might have been something that early Chinese historians might have used to identify the Shang. Although this has an element of accuracy to it, it was interesting in our class discuss to hear that similar types of bones were found prior to the Shang. In addition to this the Shang\u2019s using of these bones in their rituals was a practice that continued into the Zhou dynasty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition to learning about this tradition it was also quite unique to read a piece that was told from a reenacted first-person perspective. Although reading this I had to take much of what was inferred about the warrior queen with a \u2018grain of salt\u2019 it helped me to better understand the time and her role within the Shang dynasty. This account also helped to communicate to the reader how her ferocity served to break her out of any molded gender norms that were pushed on her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps the most interesting part of these readings though was seeing how these dynasties used a combination of myth and religious activities to provide a unique platform of power from which they were able to determine the future action of the dynasty. Moving forward I think that the relationship between myth within Chinese society and the power that they helped to instill could definitely become a major component of my project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reading about the Shang dynasty this week as well as the warrior queen was very interesting. In both excerpts given the reader learns about the ritual of oracle bones and the role that they played within society as not only a predictor of events, weather, as well as general indications of good and bad fortune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hst269"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhentybrown.bergbuilds.domains\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhentybrown.bergbuilds.domains\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhentybrown.bergbuilds.domains\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhentybrown.bergbuilds.domains\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhentybrown.bergbuilds.domains\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nhentybrown.bergbuilds.domains\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/nhentybrown.bergbuilds.domains\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhentybrown.bergbuilds.domains\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhentybrown.bergbuilds.domains\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhentybrown.bergbuilds.domains\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}