Last time around we'd gotten as far as Shen Nong. Lovely guy,
really, but today we're going to leave him behind and move forward to the time
of the Yellow Emperor. We're just about out of the dawn-of-civilization stuff
by now; basically, if it wasn't nailed down by Fu Xi or Shen Nong or the other
guys from the last history lesson, the Yellow Emperor or his wife probably did
it.
This guy's name was Huang Di, and the list of his inventions and creations reads
like something you'd see in a biography of a neolithic Leonardo da Vinci. No
big surprise, really; we're talking about a culture that seriously values wisdom
in their kings. Besides, this is really early on. Crack open a Bible
to one of the early bits of Genesis and start flipping through the stuff that
comes immediately after the incident with the snake and the fruit. You'll get
a similar list of 'this one guy, he did x and y and z, and this other guy, he
invented musical instruments and he made 'em out of bronze and EVERY SINGLE
PERSON IN THE WHOLE WORLD who makes musical instruments, they're descended from
him or something'. Having a name to hang early inventions on is a popular theme
in most ancient cultures, I think. And let's face it - if you were living
five thousand years ago in the Chinese civilization growing up in the Yellow
River Valley, and someone came along and said 'hey, I know how to predict what
the heavens are going to do, and I can make a real boat, not just this hollowed-out
log thing, plus I know how to use those weird black stones that stick to other
stones to tell what direction I'm going even when the stars aren't out', you'd
be impressed too. I know I would.
He didn't invent the wheel, but he got the idea to the point where a useful
cart could be made from it. He's said to have figured out the basic laws of
astronomy and used 'em to put together the first calendar used by the Chinese
people. He got marked down as the guy who invented the boat, although I don't
know the details on that - I'm assuming the stories mean actual bits-of-wood-fastened-together
boat, not dugout canoe or lashed-together raft. He's even got his name all over
China's first medical textbook, the Neijing - the Yellow Emperor's Classic of
Medicine. It's composed of lengthy conversations between him and his physician
and a couple of other advisors at the court. Great stuff.
His wife was a woman named Lei Zu, and she's got silk and sericulture to her
credit. There's legends about deities and stuff being responsible for silk,
particularly one by the name of Horsehead (that's a fun story, falling
into the category of 'think before spouting off about who you'd be willing to
marry if only thus-and-such happened'), but Lei Zu was the one who really nailed
it down. Most likely silk got first noticed by accident. All it really takes
is one good famine and people start boiling anything in sight to use as food;
probably at some point during a very bad year, some ancient inhabitant of the
Yellow River valley got so desperate as to start throwing caterpillar cocoons
into the pot. Imagine their surprise when the cocoons they were boiling started
unraveling and yielding these amazingly long and supple strands of- something.
That's got to have been freaky - I mean, that was supposed to be dinner, right?
What the hell happened in the pot?
Exactly where it went from there no one knows, but if the legends are right
the queen gave this stuff a good long look and decided that she liked the idea.
Next thing you know she's figured out how to weave it and she's got other folks
working on the idea, too - plus she's determined where the stuff comes from
(specific caterpillar cocoons) and what the critters that produce it need (mulberry
leaves). Bam, we have sericulture. Sheep? Who needs sheep?
One of the things you really have to hand Huang Di is that he didn't hog all
the inventions for himself. He liked talented people, the old accounts say,
and he encouraged 'em big-time at his court. That whole thing with the black
rocks - natural magnets? Once he realized that they always aligned themselves
in a particular direction, he decided that this had to be significant. South
- the direction the Chinese always felt they pointed in - had to be a pretty
important direction if it could affect the stones that way. He wanted a cart
or chariot that'd allow the passenger to face the sacred direction all the time.
Huang Di came up with the idea and the plans, but it was one of the craftsmen
at his court, a guy named Fang Bo, who actually built the south-pointing chariot.
Other folks came up with stuff like the twelve-tone musical scale, measuring
instruments, and so on. If you had a good brain and bright ideas that'd be good
for a growing civilization, the Yellow Emperor wanted to hear from you.
I should point out here that one of the others at his court is credited with
the invention of pictographs, but this is almost certainly as much of a formal
credit tacked onto one person as 'Lei Zu invented sericulture and silk'. Pictographs
are a concept of supreme importance to Chinese writing, and it's only natural
to want to credit somebody specific with coming up with such an amazing idea.
The fact is that they're incredibly ancient. If anything, the Yellow Emperor's
ideas man probably codified existing ones or at least tried to catalog them.
We're talking serious Stone Age antecedents here. . .
See, like any other early humans, the proto-Chinese wanted answers about the
future. In some parts of the world people went about getting their answers by
ecstatic techniques like shamanism and interesting inhalants. (Don't blame me
for the fact that the ancient Greeks figured the best way to get a handle on
the future was to have an attractive woman sit over a crack in the ground and
get high on burning leaves. I didn't make the Oracle at Delphi up.) Probably
this happened in proto-Chinese civilization too, but the most popular means
of augury, far and away, involved hot stuff and animal parts. Remember Fu Xi
and his trigrams? Remember how he got them from staring at a tortoise shell?
It apparently got a lot easier to discern the patterns if you had a turtle dinner
first. Boil the shell in conjunction with the proper rituals, then go
looking for your markings. Later generations would call this 'consulting the
tortoise'. It was a different method of augury that gave rise to writing, though.
Exactly how the custom got started I don't know, but someone noticed that if
you pressed very hot material against bone or shell, it would crack. The ancient
priests and wisdom figures decided this sounded like a great way to ask
the supernatural what was going on, and who could blame them? It's got to have
been an unusual phenomenon. . . anyway, what happened was that they'd take a
likely looking bone (scapulas were popular) and make marks on 'em to indicate
possible answers to a question. Then they'd stick the bone in the fire, or they'd
stick a poker in the fire and put the poker to the bone and wait for the cracks
to start. Whichever way the cracks ran lay the answer.
The great thing about a custom like this is that it involves durable materials.
Once an oracle bone was used, it was pretty much put aside and not used again.
Archaeology revolves around bones and sherds, especially when it comes to writing.
(We know a great deal of early Greek writing from the practice of scribbling
notes or names on ostraka - fragments of pottery.) The most ancient samples
of Chinese writing in the world are on recovered oracle bones. It's fascinating
how the development of the ideograms of today can be traced back to the first
vaguely representational pictographic squiggles and scribbles on the shoulder
bones of domestic animals. Oh, the story is that they're dragon bones - apparently
there was a belief that dragons shed their bones each year the way snakes do,
although I can't find confirmation of this belief - but unless dragons are the
size of oxen, pigs, and so on, the bones are pretty much those of domestic animals.
Those of you who've read Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds may remember
a segment in the book where Ox gets so freaked out by the prospect of going
up against the Duke of Ch'in that he runs off to his childhood cave and starts
fooling with the bones there - that's this ritual. Ox says that Master Li says
the oracle bones from the city of An-yang are the only solid evidence that the
Shang dynasty actually existed, but this is a little bit of an exaggeration.
There's other artifacts - not many, but they exist - and there's some older
artifacts as well. The point is that Ox was turning to a tradition stretching
back into the dawn of recorded time. The pictures used in that tradition were
stylized over time to make them simpler to draw, and new pictures were added.
As the years went by the markings became less and less like pictures, and more
and more formalized. Some concepts - 'mountain', for example - were pretty easy
to represent. Some were more abstract, like 'home', so they started combining
the drawings for things they felt went together to describe the concept pretty
well. ('Home', the books tell me, is represented by the mark that means 'pig'
under a mark that looks like a roof. Agricultural folks know their priorities.)
They also sometimes combined signs to indicate that one word was pronounced
very much like another word, whether they had any kind of similar meaning or
not.
Eventually it got to the point where we are today - thousands upon thousands
of characters, each representing a meaning rather than a sound, although possibly
with sound cues imbedded. Words that don't have existing characters still get
'em put together the way they always did; 'computer', for example, is written
with the character for 'electric' next to the character for 'brain'. Before
you make any comments about this, please allow me to remind you that the thing
that you use to call your friends and family and talk to them from your home
was given its name from the Greek words for 'distance' (tele) and 'talk' (phonos).
It's the same no matter where you go. It's just a little more visually apparent
in the Chinese written language, that's all.
But we've drifted a long way from the histories today. I felt the diversion
was warranted, just because the writing system can be kind of a scary prospect
to people unfamiliar with it. And, well, because it's kind of exciting to realize
that it goes back in an essentially unbroken line back to a time when so much
of the rest of the world was still relying on oral expression. Egyptian hieroglyphics
can make a similar age claim, but it's not as if they developed into the primary
system of writing used by over a billion people - at least not as far as I know.
(I think demotic script might be a different story.) The pictograms credited
to the time of the Yellow Emperor became the language we know today, and that's
a hell of a thing for any linguistic invention to pull off.
I promised you the three sage-kings last time, and I'm really sorry I didn't
get to put them in this entry. The writing thing kinda distracted me. You'll
meet Yao, Shun, and Yu in the next lesson. (For the record, Yu
is the one Stargate SG1 said was a Gou'ald - to his credit, one of the more
benevolent Gou'ald on record.)
