October 2008

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Another motif that links several of the bronzes of this group and provides a further clue for understanding the sources of these unusual bronze designs incorporating realistic creatures is an alternating band of smooth and textured v-shapes, somewhat like a sequence of arrow-heads. These appear, for example, on a you in the Shanghai Museum (Fig. 8), where they adorn the body and tail of a bird that carries the unusual pronged horns seen on the Compton Verney you and the Anyang moulds. This same band is found on a number of other vessels dated by excavation or by their inscriptions to the Shang period.7

Interestingly, the same arrow-like pattern has recently been linked with chariot embellishment in the early Zhou.8 Chariots are an essential clue to this late Shang and early Zhou fascination with realistic creatures and with unusual motifs, including the arrow pattern. The Shang gained the chariot from the inner Asian peoples on their borders. Realistic animal heads and geometric designs were all typical of the bronzes of this so-called Northern Zone and the related groups of people living further west, near the Yellow River, where it runs north to south, and in the extreme west, in what is today Gansu province. It seems that these border peoples provided the chariots and perhaps the people to manage both the vehicles and the horses, skilled professions not initially developed by the Shang.

For both the Shang and the Zhou, chariots, and all their weaponry and ornaments, were highly valued status symbols. They were also as highly valued for the afterlife as they had been in life. This much is evident from the very large numbers buried in royal and noble cemeteries, which were presumably for use by the dead rulers and élites. The introduction and spread of the chariot seems to coincide with the use of realistic animals on vessels and the appearance of pronged horns and the arrow patterns. This major change in the technology of prestige and of war demanded new object categories and new motifs from the bronze foundries. If the bronze-casters chose realistic animal heads to adorn chariot fittings, borrowing them from their neighbours, it was only a small step to including similar motifs on some vessel surfaces, and above all on handles. A demand for chariot parts may have been one of the many stimuli that led to new ways of decorating ritual vessels.

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