OTHER, CENTERS:OF CIVILIZATION 
New Stone Age. They went on living in their own clan 
villages and tilling the soil, a large portion of the produce 
being turned over to their masters and landlords. Ancient 
Chinese writings state specifically that the common people 
had no part in the ancestor worship of the aristocracy. 
They undoubtedly kept up, however, the practice of their 
old nature worship, with its belief in magic, and we know 
that the far more civilized ruling classes put down human 
sacrifice only with difficulty. 
Again, just as in Babylonia, the numerous small city- 
states tended to coalesce into larger units which came in 
time to form in northern China a sort of loose confederacy, 
with a priest-king at the head regarded as in some way 
related to the Sky God. In fact, down to the very end of 
the Empire, in 1911, the real title of the Chinese Emperor 
was “The Son of Heaven.”’ 
The historical period in China only begins about 
‘ 1000 B. c., and records continue very scanty and full of 
gaps for some hundreds of years longer. Legendary ac- 
counts exist of early emperors and dynasties reaching 
back even before 2000 B. c., but the researches of modern 
scholars, largely Chinese themselves, have stamped these 
as unworthy of credit. Our first actual written accounts, 
of a very fragmentary nature, relate to certain kings of the 
Shang Dynasty who ruled about the end of the second 
millenium B. c. 
An invasion from the west overthrew this dynasty 
shortly afterward. Some of the new rulers seem to have 
been great conquerors who extended their authority be- 
yond the valley of the Yellow River. But the power of the 
royal house soon dwindled, and by the eighth century 
B. C., the country had come to be divided into a number 
of practically independent states. These states, held to- 
gether only loosely by a common culture and a vague 
allegiance, more religious than political, to the “Son of 
Heaven,’ waged incessant wars among themselves and 
against the surrounding barbarians. That part of China 
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