The Shang Dynasty was a Bronze Age civilisation.

In which modern day country was Shang Dynasty?

Draw pictures about how people used to live.

Find and study artefacts to discover about how people lived in the past.

Read books about history to learn about how people used to live.

Use maps to show where people used to live.

From which civilisation do we have the earliest recorded human writing?

Which materials were Shang weapons made from? Tick ALL the correct answers.

How do we know about the Shang Dynasty?

Key Stage 2

History

The Shang Dynasty

﻿Hello everybody, my name is Mr. Hutchinson. What's your name? Oh, I feel like we know each other a little bit better already. Our first question that we're going to be exploring together is this question here. How do we know about the Shang Dynasty? So we're going to be learning about this ancient civilization from thousands of years ago, but how do historians find out about these ancient civilizations? How do they find out about what happened in the past and can we be sure about everything we know about it? Well, that's what we're going to be looking at and finding out about today. And this is what our lesson is going to look like. First of all, we're going to find out where the Shang Dynasty was, where it was in the world. Then we're going to learn about some very special people called archaeologists, and we're going to find out what archaeologists do. After that, we'll look at some ancient Chinese writing archaeologists have found, and you're going to get a chance to do some of your own Chinese writing. Then we'll look at some artefacts from the Shang dynasty, some objects that we found that were actually from the time. And finally, we're having an end of lesson quiz to lock all of that new knowledge into our brains so that we remember it forever and ever. So what will you need for this lesson? Well, the first thing you'll need is a piece of paper or a book. I found this old notebook. So I'm going to use this old notebook and you can decorate it with all of your history themes on if you wanted to, but a piece of paper will be fine as well, but you'll need to do some writing. Which means that you also need a pencil or a pen because I'm going to ask you to pause this video at certain points so that you can have a go at some of the tasks. So have those ready in front of you now. And the last thing you'll need, but most importantly, is your brain 'cause I'm going to ask you to do lots of hard thinking so you can learn all about the Shang Dynasty. And over the next few weeks, we're going to learn all of this. This is all knowledge organiser, which includes all of the key facts about the Shang dynasty. You might like to pause the video now and just read this through. Okay, so you might have seen that there's a timeline, which includes all of the key events from the Shang Dynasty right up until the modern day. Some important people that we're going to be learning about over the next few weeks, some of the vocabulary, the new special words, that were used all to do with the Shang dynasty, and then at the bottom here, a timeline of all the different dynasties. So a dynasty is a group of rulers. So rulers, normally from the same family, that pass on the leadership of a country or a civilization from father to son, it's usually from father to son, and they pass on the leadership. And when a new family comes in to take over, then we get a new dynasty, a new group of leaders, a new family taking over. And these are all of the dynasties that have been in charge of China throughout history and the Shang Dynasty, you will see, is one of the oldest. So where was the Shang dynasty? Have a look at this map and see if you can point to where we are, where do we live? Did you point to this little island here? If you did well done. That's where we live, Great Britain. We live in England in Great Britain, but we're going to be travelling thousands of miles across all of Europe, across Asia and into the Far East, into China, because China is where the ancient Shang dynasty was. Let's zoom into China now. So here's China. The country that's now China. And you see the Shang dynasty was in the north and the east, northeast of the country, and it was actually on a river called the Yellow River, the ancient civilization was on the Yellow River, and that's where all the, all of the people that were living in the Shang Dynasty, under the rulers of the Shang, that's where they lived. So how do we know about the Shang dynasty? Well, one of the things that was special about the Shang people is they were one of the first people to use metal. They used bronze. So they lived in the Bronze Age. We call it the Bronze Age because they stopped using stone tools and they started to use metal. It took humans a long time to learn how to make metal because although we find some metals in the ground, in rocks, you had to make it. You have to smash it all up and you have to heat up very, very hot and then mix it together. And that process is called smelting. Smelting, it's a fun word to say. You try and say it, smelting, smelting. And bronze is a special kind of metal that we mix, that we make by mixing together two other metals. So the first metal that we need if we're making bronze is copper and copper looks like this. And copper's quite a soft metal. It's the same colour as that one ps and two ps that you might sometimes see. But copper is very, very soft and the problem is if you want to make things like weapons out of copper, it's a bit too soft to make weapons. And so the ancient Chinese, the Shang people realise that you need to heat it up and mix it with another metal. So to copper, you add tin. Tin is the metal we make tins out of very often. So tin is a much harder metal and you can get it nice and sharp. So if you were making a weapon, then tin is a brilliant metal to use. The problem with tin is it's quite brittle, it breaks quite easily, if you smash it, it breaks. Now imagine you're in a battle and you've got a sword and you're in a fight with somebody and your sword breaks. That would be a disaster. And so the ancient Chinese, the Shang people, very cleverly realised if you melt some copper and melt some tin and mix them all together, the hot metal all together, you make a new metal called bronze and bronze has that sharpness of the tin and the softness of the copper, that durability so that it doesn't break. So it's got the best of both worlds. So the Shang people have the, have that bronze and they made lots of things out of bronze. Now because metal doesn't really break or rot away, it means that we can find things from the Shang Dynasty, even if they're buried underground. And so Bronze Age civilizations, we're able to learn things about them because we can find the artefacts, the things that they made out of bronze. So now use your brain, have a think. What sorts of things might the Shang people have made out of bronze? Now they've got this new metal and they can melt it and shape it and turn it into objects, what might they have made with their new metal? Have a think. Later, we're going to look at some of the objects that they made and we'll see if you were right. But for now, we're going to turn our attention to the people that find these objects, archaeologists. Archaeologists have a very special job because it's their job to find out all about the past. Here's an archaeologist there, you can see her finding an object from the past. And very often objects from a long time ago, especially thousands of years ago, they get buried into lots of mud as the mud sort of moves with the weather and floods. It buries all of these old objects and artefacts. Have a read of this. Now I'll read it. Archaeologists, like this lady here, find and study objects from the past to learn about how people used to live. These objects are called artefacts. Try saying that, artefacts, artefacts. Artefacts are any object that we find that people have made in the past, and they can tell us about what their life was like. These objects are often from a very long time ago, sometimes thousands of years. So they're usually buried underground over all of that time. So archaeologists have to dig and find the artefacts. Now because they're digging, they have to be very careful. Archaeologists have to be very careful when taking the artefacts out of the ground. So they'll have special tools. They'll have special kinds of spades and special brushes, so they just very gently brush the dirt off without damaging the artefacts. And these archaeologists have found so many artefacts that tell us all about the Shang Dynasty. Here's a question to see if you can remember what an archaeologist does, special quiz. First option, do archaeologists draw pictures about how people used to live? Do they find and study artefacts to discover about how people lived in the past? Do they read books about history to learn about how people used to live? Or do they use maps to show where people live? Option one, option two, option three, or option four, choose now. Well done if you got option two: an archaeologist finds and studies artefacts to discover how people lived in the past, they dig them up and they clean them up and they study them to find out about how people might have lived a long time ago. But it's not only artefacts that we can use to find out about the Shang Dynasty, we also have writing from the Shang Dynasty. And we have this writing on these very special objects called Oracle bones, or sometimes they're called dragon bones. And they're bones, not really from dragons, they're usually from a big animal, like an ox, like a shoulder blade of an ox. And they use these bones and they would write, and you can see the ancient Chinese writing here, and they would write different things, usually a priest or a priestess, they would write questions to their ancestors to see if they could find out about what was going to happen in a battle or something. So 1,400 BCE, that's 3 1/2 thousand years ago, the ancient Chinese started writing and they wrote on these Oracle bones. And now we can study what was written so that we can find out all about what their life was like. So having writing from the actual time is really useful. The ancient Chinese weren't the first people to write though. Before the ancient Chinese, over a thousand years before, the ancient Egyptians were writing using hieroglyphics. You might have seen some of those hieroglyphics before, those little pictures. And so we know about ancient Egypt. But even further back, the ancient Mesopotamians, the Sumerians, were writing in cuneiform. They'd make a special clay tablet, and then they'd use a kind of stick to poke different shapes. And they would write in those clay tablets in a kind of writing called cuneiform. So we have ancient writing from the Shang Dynasty, which is one of the earliest kinds of writing, but it's not the earliest kind of writing. There were other people in different places that were writing before the ancient Chinese. Because we didn't have phones or the internet and we couldn't even really travel long distances, different people in different places had to find, discover all these different things for themselves and they couldn't share that knowledge. And that's where we get different people writing at different places in different times. So let's look at some of the ancient Chinese writing. The ancient Chinese wrote in, the Shang Dynasty wrote in what we call characters, these kinds of sort of pictures. And this picture here is the sun, a circle with a dot in the middle. This one is water. Here is a mountain. This picture, this character is a person. Here's a tree. Here's a blade. This picture, this character is a boat. This is a net. This is what a cloud looks like and rain and an umbrella. And they would use these different characters so that they could write some stories, they could write about what was happening or even ask questions. And these pictures, these characters, are actually quite close to what even modern day Chinese writing looks like. So over time it's evolved, but it's still based on these characters from 3 1/2 thousand years ago on those Oracle bones. Let's see if we can do some Chinese writing. So you're going to use these different characters and I'd like you to write your own story. You can make it up. Use these different pictures to write a story. And the Chinese write from top to bottom. We write from left to right, but the Chinese right from top to bottom. So your first picture will go in here and I'll, I'll do the first one for you. I think that my story might start with the sun rising over the mountains. So the first character that I will draw is I will draw the mountains. And above the mountains, I'm going to draw that sun, the circle with a dot in the middle. So one day the sun rose over the mountains. I'm using my Chinese characters. What happened next in the story? Stop the video now and see if you can write, from top to bottom using these characters, your own story, Pause the video now and go. Okay, I'd love to hear your stories. My story went like this: one day, the sun rose over the mountains and a person, let's call them Chad, A person decided that they were going to go out in their boat. So I draw a person and I'll draw the character for a boat. They went out in a boat because they wanted to go fishing. So they got their nets and they went out onto the river. Now there isn't that character for a river, but what I could you use is this character for water. So they went out onto the river. I'm carefully drawing all of my characters to tell my story. They took their nets. They were in their boat onto the river. But then all of a sudden while they were fishing, a cloud came and it started to rain. So the person was worried they were going to get a bit wet under all the rain while they were out fishing. But it didn't matter because they had taken out with them an umbrella. So they put that umbrella up. And that's my story using my Chinese characters. You can pause the video and see if you could tell some other stories using all the different combinations of characters. It wasn't just ancient writing that we found from the Shang Dynasty, we've also found different artefacts, those objects that we found. Here are some different artefacts from the Shang Dynasty. What could this one be? Have a look at it. What about this one? What might that be? Have a close look at it and see what you think it could be. And lastly, what's this one? What do you think that could be? So I'd like you to pause the video now and see if you can write down what these different artefacts are. So you might start your writing with, I think the first artefact is mm because mm. Why do you think it's that object? What do you think it was? What do you think the job was? Do the same for the second one. Write a sentence saying, I think the second artefact is, what do you think this is? And why do you think it's that? And lastly, I think the third artefact is mm, because what do you think this artefact could be? So you're going to be like an archaeologist. You're going to be like a historian using the artefacts from the past to see if you can think about what they were and what they tell us about the Shang Dynasty. This is wrong here, ignore this. You're not writing a story. You just did that. You're writing about what these artefacts should be. Pause the video and write your three sentences now, one, two, three. Excellent, so I'd love to find out about what you wrote for each of these artefacts. Now, these tell us about the Shang Dynasty, because this artefact here is a kind of axe that was used in battle, you can see the sharp edge here. And this would have belonged to somebody quite rich because you can see it's got these beautiful decorations on it. And it would have been made out of bronze, that metal that we were talking about. In the middle, we've got a cauldron. So we knew that the Shang people used to cook. They used to cook using these cauldrons, like a kind of pot and the fire would go underneath the legs. Again, this will be made out of bronze, so it could heat up all of their different meals. And lastly, this is a special kind of dagger. It's actually from a dagger-ax and a stick would be fixed to the handle here so that it would be on a really long pole and people could use that to fight in battles. So we know the Shang people must have fought in battles and they must've had fights with each other 'cause they have these different weapons. And this one is actually made from jade, a kind of rock called jade. Now that's not very good for fighting, but it's very beautiful. So this must have belonged to somebody very rich because it's quite a rare rock. So you can find out about whether people were rich or poor based on the artefacts that they had. So we've got an axe, a cauldron, and a dagger, a dagger-ax here. I wonder if you've got those correct. So we've found out so much about where the Shang was and how we found out about it from the artefacts and the writing. What I'd like you to do now is see if you can answer these questions in our end of lesson quiz. First question, the Shang Dynasty was a Bronze Age civilization. True or false? Write your answer now. The second question: in which modern-day country was the Shang dynasty? Where now, which country now would you find the Shang Dynasty in? Pause the video and write your answer. Next, what does an archaeologist do? What job's an archaeologists do? Pause the video and write your answer. Next, ancient Chinese characters, those pictures that they used for writing, are the first evidence of human writing. It's the first time that people wrote. Is that true or false? Were the Shang the first humans to write? And lastly, which materials were Shang weapons made from? You can have a go at this quiz using the Google form at the end as well. Let's have a look at some answers so you can tick or fix them. You can either tick them if you got them right, or you can fix them and change the answer. And it's a good idea to change the answer 'cause then it locks the correct answer into your head. So our first question, the Shang Dynasty was a Bronze civilization. That's true, yes, they discovered bronze and they smelted it. In which modern day country was the Shang Dynasty? It was in China. Did you get that it was in China? What does an archaeologists do? Remember archaeologists dig underground, they find and study artefacts from the past and they discover how people used to live in the past using those artefacts and what they tell us. Question four, ancient Chinese characters are the first evidence of human writing. That was false, do you remember that there were hieroglyphics from Egypt and cuneiform from Mesopotamia? So it was very early writing from 3 1/2 thousand years ago, but not the first writing we have, it's just the first writing in China. And lastly, which materials were Shang weapons made from? Well, they might be made from bronze, especially if they were being used in battles, or they might have been made with jade, that kind of rock, if there were ceremonial, if they were just used by rich people to show how wealthy they were. Later on, they might have also used iron as well as they started to discover iron. But the ones that we looked at were bronze and jade. And that's it, that's our lesson. Well done. We learnt so much there about the Shang Dynasty and over the next few weeks, we're going to find out even more about this really interesting civilization a long time ago and far away. So thanks so much for your hard work. Bye.

How do we know about the Shang Dynasty?

How do we know about the Shang Dynasty?

Slide deck

Lesson details

Key learning points

Licence

Video

Exit quiz

5 Questions

Lesson appears in

UnitHistory / The Shang Dynasty

History