EARLY CHINESE CULTURES— EBERHARD 527 



gether with its style of ornamentation. In short, they borrowed 

 nearly all the features of the Shang civilization. It was not until 

 about the middle of the first millennium before our era that they began 

 to lay aside the Shang culture traits in favor of their own. 



They had begun this process of culture borrowing long before their 

 conquest of the Shang kingdom; and they continued it for several 

 centuries thereafter. In its course they had followed a precedent 

 often seen in the subjugation of an agrarian culture by a predomi- 

 nantly pastoral and nomad one; that is to say, the Chous, as con- 

 querors, became a ruUng class. In bringing this about, they had 

 settled groups of their own people at points of strategic importance all 

 through the country, to govern the lower class, composed of the Shang 

 people who occupied the region. There thus grew up as a character- 

 istic of the Chou culture a feudal system — the only one, in the cir- 

 cumstances, by which a numerous conquered people could be held in 

 subjection. The nature of this feudal system and the way in which it 

 imposed itself upon the old agrarian culture of the Shangs explain also 

 the following fact. As we learn from the texts again, in the first 

 millennium B. C. the population which considered itself as "Chinese," 

 viz, the ruling group of the Chous and that part of the conquered 

 element which had come into the closest contact with the latter, was 

 sparsely distributed, in widely separated settlements and city states, 

 over a region otherwise peopled by folk whom they distinguished as 

 "barbarians" and who belonged to the old agrarian culture. Outside 

 the territory under Chou control, again, were still other peoples who 

 belonged to one or another of the earlier cultures. These, in the first 

 millennium B. C. at all events, occupied scattered enclaves throughout 

 the entire region under discussion. ^^ Further significant of this con- 

 dition is the fact that not until around the seventh century B. C. did 

 the distinction between "Chinese" and "barbarians" appear. By 

 that time, as a consequence of this imposition of the Chou culture 

 upon that of the Shangs, there had begun to develop a civilization 

 which we may call Chinese and whose possessors had begun to feel 

 themselves as being somehow different and superior to their neighbors, 

 to whom they had in reality originally been so closely related. During 

 Shang times the neighboring peoples had been denoted by a word 

 which meant something like "land" or "region" and which only later 

 took on the significance of "barbarian." 



The above-described fundamental differences between the Chou and 

 the Shang cultures also explain the sociological contrasts between the 

 two. In that of the Shangs, predominantly agricultural in nature and 

 hence basically allied to the Southern Culture, there had been as in 

 all agrarian cultures with an organization of small peasant holdings 

 instead of great landed estates, no necessity for slave labor. In its 



» See In regard to this the references given in the Zeitschr. f. Ethnol., vol. 63, p. 425, 



