Kingship, Ritual, and Royal Ideology in Western Zhou China

Book excerpt: "With the defeat of the Shang, the Zhou royal house positioned itself at the ideological center of a network held together by personal relationships with the early kings. To maintain this central position in the new post-Shang hierarchy, and to pursue their project of state-building through delegation of authority, the Zhou kings drew on one of their primary cultural advantages: their familiarity with Shang-style ancestral ritual. In doing so, the royal family faced the challenge of retooling the well-established Shang ritual system, centered on a supreme lineage tracing its ancestry back more than twenty generations, to meet the needs of a recently forged coalition of elite populations. The following analysis explores the political details of this Western Zhou adaptation of Shang ancestral ritual. Through a close look at the records of individual ritual techniques, it shows that royal ancestral ceremonies reinforced the king's role as arbiter of prestige in Zhou elite society and inculcated principles of Zhou social organization. High-ranking elites attended these ceremonies, took part in them, and duplicated them within their own domains, in some cases at the king's express recommendation. They cast inscribed bronzes commemorating their attendance and used them in their own ancestral cults and burial practices, appropriating the memories of these ceremonies as tools for building personal and lineage identities"--