The Origins of the Early States in China and Israel: Through A Comparative Study

By: Xinhui Luo, Beijing Normal University, China, Noble Group Fellow

During my fellowship at the Albright, my main project was entitled “Ideology of the Early State: East and West.” The goal of this project was to examine the ideologies of the early states in Mesopotamia and in China, and to find the similarities and the differences between the two.

The first step was to compare the ideology reflected by royal images. I collected relevant materials on the image of the kings of the Western Zhou Dynasty (ca 1046 BC-771 BC), and compared them with the image of Gudea, the ruler of the state of Lagash in Southern Mesopotamia (ca. 2144-2124BC).

Scholars have pointed out that sculptures of the image of Gudea do not represent accurate, realistic portrayals of the king; that the image of Gudea is not a private, but an official one. The image resembled the divine figures and was considered to be molded by the gods in order to make him recognizable as one fit to rule.

Even though the kings and ancestors of the Western Zhou Dynasty were worshipped by the people and their progenies, sculptures of their images have not been found. Traditionally, the Zhou people carved inscriptions onto bronze vessels to eulogize their kings or ancestors, so we may have a glimpse of how the kings were portrayed through these inscriptions. Generally speaking, the kings are depicted as powerful and brilliant and are serious and even awe-inspiring, but at the same time peaceful and joyful. Actually, the depictions do not reflect the real image of the kings; they are uniform, suggesting that the Zhou people had a fixed way of depicting the image. Therefore, the depictions are not of specific kings or ancestors. From Chinese classical books, we see that the kings or the fathers were serious and strict when they were alive; however, on the other hand, they were also tranquil and joyful. Therefore, it is reasonable for the progenies to describe the kings or the ancestors as stern as well as peaceful. So to some extent, the image came from reality. The kings, however, are also beyond reality and are perhaps divinely inspired since they are depicted as powerful and brilliant. I suspect that the Zhou people used heaven as a reference for the image of the kings.

Comparing the image of Gudea of Lagas with the kings of the Western Zhou Dynasty, we can say that there are differences; the most obvious one is that Gudea’s image is much more connected to the divine, while the image of the Western Zhou kings is more related to real life. Nevertheless, there are also similarities: the image is not a representation of realistic individual kings and both of them were idealized and deified. So the royal image is formed according to norms of value rather than of visual verifiability. The images of Gudea and of the kings of the Western Zhou Dynasty were both made or depicted as divine and they both have appropriate attributes which implied that they were fit to rule. This is the ideology reflected by the royal image of the early state.

One part of my research was presented at a workshop entitled, Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China held at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University. My presentation/paper, “The Zhou Concept of the Mandate of Heaven as Seen in the `Cheng Wu’ Manuscript of Qing-hua Bamboo Texts” will appear in the publication of the conference proceedings in the fall of 2012. I was able to achieve these results of my research thanks to the fellowship provided by the Noble Group of Hong Kong.

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