Founding of the Shang Dynasty

Traditional Chinese accounts date the founding of the Shang dynasty to around 1600 BCE, when the ruler Tang overthrew Jie, remembered as the impious and cruel last king of the preceding Xia dynasty, at the Battle of Mingtiao. Modern archaeology has confirmed the Shang as the earliest Chinese dynasty firmly supported by physical evidence, most notably the more than 20,000 inscribed oracle bones recovered since the 1920s and 1930s from Yinxu, near modern Anyang, which preserve the earliest known examples of Chinese writing and record royal divination practices. Excavations at further Shang-period sites, including the massive rammed-earth walls of Zhengzhou Shang City, established by the fifteenth century BCE, and the earlier Erlitou culture sites dated to roughly 2100 to 1800 BCE, have traced organized state structures back before the dynasty's traditional founding date, though scholars continue to debate the precise correspondence between archaeological phases and the received king lists. The Shang dynasty's demonstrated existence marks the point at which Chinese civilization moves from legendary tradition into a period substantiated by contemporary written and archaeological evidence.