The Ancestral Landscape by David N. Keightley
Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200–1045 B.C.)
Drawing on oracle-bone inscriptions and archaeological evidence, this study reconstructs the Late Shang worldview, showing how divination, sacrificial rites, and ancestral kinship structured royal authority and everyday governance. It examines conceptions of time through ritual calendars and cyclical reckonings, and of space through the orientation of capitals, altars, and fields that linked the living to the dead. The portrait is of a community bound by lineage obligations and mediated by a king who negotiated with powerful ancestors and Di to secure order, harvests, and victory. The result is a clear synthesis of how religious practice, political power, and material culture converged to shape early Chinese civilization.
- Published
- 2000
- Nationality
- American
- Length
- Unknown
- Pages
- Unknown
- Original Language
- English
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