ABSTRACT
The history of the Zhou royal house (1045–256 bc) was the longest among its kind that ever ruled China. At its height, the Western Zhou state (1045–771 bc) ruled over a large network of cities and settlements that extended to much of the Yellow River region and a part of the Yangtze region in the south. Despite its early decline, the Western Zhou state left behind a cultural complex featuring a set of unique political and ritual institutions ever venerated as the foundation of Chinese civilization. The Zhou also created a model of state whose structural and organizational logic was meaningfully different from that of the known empires and early states such as the Greek “city states”. We are only now beginning to understand the true nature of the Zhou polity on the basis of an expanding pool of new data, archaeological, inscriptional, and textual, but we are yet to seriously address its comparative value for the study of early civilizations of the world.
