This study examines the development of memory media and the beginnings of writing the past in ancient China. It is a diachronic and synchronic approach, based on a memory and media perspective, that seeks to explore the emergence and development of a genre of visualized or written histories that store and organize memories of the past in early China. In the article, I summarize the aspects of memory media in ancient China, from the Neolithic period around 10,000 BC to the end of the Shang dynasty around 1,000 BC, and identify the beginnings and characteristics of historical writing.
The analysis of the accumulated patterns of ancient Chinese pottery inscriptions, oracle bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions, and jade and stone inscriptions shows that in the huge historical space and time of ancient China, covering thousands of years from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, more than a dozen cultural communities with different languages and symbolic traditions existed. They preserved, expressed, and expanded their individual and collective memories through a variety of media, including auditory, visual, and audiovisual. The continuous creation and utilization of records, especially in durable media such as bone, pottery, jade and stone, and metal, was a consistent and continuous effort by the ancient Chinese to affirm and make “permanence” their individual and collective identities.
The media innovations and materialization of memory in the late Shang dynasty, at the height of the Bronze Age, are impressive. The processing techniques and maximization of durable recording media as a luxury good that dominate the preceding periods suggest a transformation and development of media technologies not found in earlier periods, from bone, pottery, jade, stone, and bronze. Above all, the invention, systematization, and mass production of high-level audiovisual media that can make intangible memories tangible, or the practice of “Shang writing system,” is a massive and sophisticated development that cannot be compared to the early Bronze Age culture just a few hundred years earlier.
Implementing a sentence-structured record on a highly durable medium, historical writing in the late Shang Dynasty seems to be characterized by ‘commemoration’ and ‘vigilance’. The selective writing of the past by elites in control of materials and texts focuses on revealing the identity and glory of themselves and their groups, as well as warning of the dangers and anxieties facing them. And this commemorative and vigilant writing of history is reinforced by a system of regular historical writing that combines luxury and materiality and prepares the future (or past) on a weekly basis.