Dynasties · c. 1600 – 1046 BC

Shang商

The first Chinese dynasty confirmed by its own writing rather than by later legend, and the confirmation is one of the odder stories in archaeology: in the 1890s scholars noticed that 'dragon bones' sold in Beijing pharmacies as medicine were carved with an unknown script. They were ox scapulae and turtle plastrons used for divination three thousand years earlier, and the script was the direct ancestor of the characters on a Chinese street sign today. The Shang also cast ritual bronzes at a technical level nobody has convincingly explained — enormous, thin-walled, covered in a dense zoomorphic decoration called the taotie.