“The Qiang and the Question of Human Sacrifice in the Late Shang Period”, 1996-03 ():
The character that many scholars read as Qiang appears in more than 800 known late Shang oracle bone inscriptions, most of which refer to the ritual sacrifice of Qiang people. More than half of all the human victims mentioned in the inscriptions are identified as Qiang, and among all the neighbors of Shang named in the inscriptions, only the Qiang are specifically mentioned as human sacrifices…The Shang and their allies are described as “hunting” Qiang people…Qiang captives were certainly an important commodity to the Shang court.
Why were the Qiang so important and why were such large numbers of Qiang victims sacrificed during Shang court rituals? Contrary to the usual identification of the Qiang as a tribe of nomadic herdsmen, archaeological data point to a society that practiced a mixed economy, lived in permanent or semi-permanent settlements, and had a developed social hierarchy.
The Qiang were politically independent from the Shang and maintained a substantially different cultural and symbolic system. Comparison with known ethnographic examples of human sacrifice and analysis of the context in which these ceremonies were performed by the Shang suggest that sacrificing Qiang war captives was a mechanism by which the Shang elite legitimized their political power.
Ethnographic comparisons suggest that human sacrifice was important for the Shang, as for other societies where social stratification is already very developed but where the system is not yet institutionalized or very stable. In this context, human sacrifice is viewed as part of a dynamic process that led to the development of social complexity.
[Twitter: The Shang dynasty sacrificed at least 14,197 people looking at totals from oracle bones over 200 years, half of them were the Qiang its main political rival. There are more than 1,000 sacrificial pits containing skeletons of victims found in their Capital. Since it seems a minority of prisoners were sacrificed, one inscription states 30,000 were captured and 300 sacrificed, the Shang must have captured hundreds of thousands in their wars of expansion, and likely killed as many in warfare as well.
Shang’s regular army amounted to 3,000 people, mostly infantry some campaigns lasted over 7 months. Greater army sizes are recorded as well: “During one campaign against the Qiang-fang, they deployed 13,000 soldiers, while against other fang polities, they used only 3,000–5,000”.
Sacrificial pits in the Shang capital are filled with decapitated male skeletons, eg. the human skull ditch.]