Ancestor worship

CHINA

Veneration for the ancestors has a long history in China, from the remote prehistoric past to the present. Ancestor worship during the period of the late Shang dynasty (13th-11th centuries b. c.e.) is well attested through texts inscribed on oracle bones. There were three principal ways of undertaking the appropriate rituals for dead ancestors. One was by burning offerings, another by leaving offerings in water, and the third by burying sacrificial objects, including humans and animals, in the ground near the burial place of a notable ancestor or in the vicinity of an ancestral temple. Thus at the royal necropolis at

ANYANG (1200-1050 B. C.E.), thousands of sacrificial victims have been unearthed. Similar rituals have been documented at many later historic sites, such as Majiazhuang in Shaanxi province, an eastern zhou dynasty (770-221 B. C.E.) royal center where the ancestral temples incorporated sacrificial pits containing the remains of people, sheep, cattle, and chariots.

The association of highly ranked individuals in society with sacrificial offerings can be traced back into the prehistoric past. The longshan culture (2500-1900 B. C.E.), for example, included many sites from Shandong to the upper reaches of the Huang (Yellow) River. The excavated cemeteries reveal the presence of a limited number of rich individuals, interred with objects known to have had important ritual uses later during the historic period. At the Shandong Longshan site of chengzi, four groups of graves were identified by rank. The excavators found that only the richest were associated with pits containing ash, complete pottery vessels, and pig bones. These pits have been interpreted as containing offerings for important ancestors.

Drums with alligator-skin covers were restricted to royal graves at Anyang (1200-1050 b. c.e.). Such a drum has been found with a rich grave at the Longshan cemetery of taosi (2200-2000 b. c.e.). Earlier still, at the Ban-shan phase yangshao culture site of Yangshan in Qinghai province, excavations uncovered 218 burials thought to represent an entire cemetery dated to about 2300 B. C.E. Three particularly rich graves with multiple burials included ceramic drums, as well as marble tubes and beads and ceremonial axes. These rich interments were also those around which sacrificial pits clustered. Similar associations of pits containing the remains of sacrificed animals, stone tools, and pottery vessels have been recovered at Longgangsi in southern Shaanxi province. This site belongs to the Banpo phase of the yangshao CULTURE and dates to the late fifth millennium b. c.e.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

Throughout the late prehistoric period in mainland Southeast Asia, the dead were interred in patterned cemeteries structured, it is thought, on the basis of family or ancestral relationships. Proximity to the ancestors was evidently an important factor in determining where people were interred. Infants were often buried in the arms of a female or in a pottery vessel beside a woman’s head or feet. With the historic period and the availability of written records, it is possible to turn to inscriptions to evaluate the role played by ancestors in determining an individual’s status in society. It is known that archivists and genealogists maintained records. Thus the official Sukavarman at preah vihear in Cambodia maintained the royal archives on leaves stored in the temple. These records traced the royal genealogy back to the mythical founders of the kingdom of angkor in Cambodia.