Lesson video

Welcome back to history.

I'm Mr. Hutchinson and we're learning all about the Shang Dynasty.

If you haven't watched these videos before, you can go back and watch the previous videos so that you can catch up with all of our learning so far about the Shang dynasty.

If you have seen the videos before then welcome back, you know that you need to make sure that you have a pen or a pencil, have it in your hand ready, so that when I say pause you are ready to write.

You need a piece of paper or a book, because if you write on the kitchen table, then your parents will be cross with you, and you also need your brain so that you're ready to learn.

Okay, are you ready to go? Let's start.

Today, our lesson is going to be all about what the Shang people believed.

What did the Shang people believe? What belief did they have? Now of course, people believe all sorts of different things.

Right now people believe also have different sorts of beliefs in different sorts of faiths.

And so the Shang people would have believed different things, but we're going to look at some common beliefs, and some of these beliefs would have been similar to people in other civilizations, and some would have been a bit different.

And that's what we're going to be investigating today.

If you were living in the Shang dynasty, what might you have believed? So this is what our lesson is going to look like.

You should have already done the quiz.

I've got to check.

Have you already done the quiz? If you did, did you get five out of five? Well done if you've got five out of five, give yourself a pat on the back.

If you didn't get five out of five, don't worry.

It's absolutely fine to make mistakes.

That's why we put the quizzes because even if you get the wrong answer, it fixes the correct answer in your head because you think, Oh no, I got that one wrong.

And then the right answer sticks in your head.

So don't worry if you get them wrong, it's still good to do the quiz.

Well done everybody for doing that quiz, if you haven't done it yet, stop the video, do the quiz first.

Right, back to the lesson.

The first thing we're going to do is look at ancient Chinese religions, sometimes called folk religion.

The religions that the Chinese, ancient Chinese, the Shang people had.

Then we'll look at what the Shang believed about the afterlife.

What happens after people die? Then we'll look back at some oracle bones, we've already looked a little about oracle bones, where we found Chinese writing.

We'll see which, today we're going to find out a little bit about, well we've seen these oracle bones.

What were the ancient Chinese writing on these oracle bones? What were the Shang people writing or these Oracle bones that was so important? Today we're going to find out.

And of course we will finish with our important quiz, which is going to make sure that all that knowledge is locked in your brain for ever and ever.

First part of our lesson.

Ancient Chinese religion.

So before we get into ancient Chinese religion, what people believe about God and gods.

Here's a little test for you.

Can you write down now, take maybe, maybe take like one minute and that's it just one minute.

And in that time, pause the video and write down all of the religions that you know, in a list.

So I've had a go at doing the first one.

I know that Christianity is a religion.

I know that lots of people are Christians and Christianity is a religion.

What other religions do I know? Pause the video one minute.

How many religions can you list down? Go.

Okay.

And stop.

Right, count how many you got.

How many religions do you know about count? Count how many you got? How many was it say it to the screen.

Don't worry if you didn't get too many, you might have written down about Islam.

You might've written down about Judaism.

You may have written down about Buddhism.

You might've written down about Sikhism.

You might've written down about Hinduism.

I wonder if there are any of the religions that you wrote down.

If you got one that I didn't say then, wow well done.

Maybe you could send that in.

So some of you have been sending, work in over Twitter.

Your parents have been taking photos and sending work in.

I love reading your work and looking at your work.

I'm so impressed with it, so you can feel free to do that.

There were lots of different religions.

Some of these religions are quite new though.

So Christianity for example, started in about the year zero.

And the Shang dynasty was way before that, the Shang dynasty was 1,600 years before Jesus was even around living.

So what did this Shang dynasty believe if it was before Jesus was walking around and it was far away from the Jews in the middle East in Sinai and following Moses.

So what did the ancient Shang believe? Well, a lot of religions today, especially the Abrahamic religions are what we call monotheistic.

It's a long word, but it's important to know.

Monotheism, you try and say it.

Your turn.

Monotheism, say it again.

Monotheism.

Good.

Mono just means one.

So when you see the prefix mono, it means one, and theism is to do with God.

So monotheism means one God, monotheism one God.

And lots of people believe that there's only one God.

So especially the Abrahamic religions, which is Judaism, so Jews, Christianity, so Christians and Islam so Muslims. They all believe that there is just one God, the Jews it's Yahweh, for Christians it's God and Jesus, so God and Jesus the same for Christians and for Muslims it's Allah.

So those religions believe that there's just one God.

But that's quite new.

The idea of there being just one God.

Previously before the Abrahamic religions came along, like Judaism, Islam and Christianity, lots of people believe that there was more than one God.

And this idea is called polytheism.

So the theism is the same still God, but poly means many.

So when you see poly it means many.

So we've got two different ideas here.

We've got the idea of polytheism on one side, lots of gods.

And then we've got the idea of monotheism on the other side, one God.

And there are still lots of polytheistic religions today, but Christianity, Islam and Judaism are monotheistic religions.

So what about the ancient Shang? What kind of, what were they, were they monotheists? Did they believe that there was just one God, or were they polytheists? Did they believe that there's more than one God? Have a guess, point to which one you think is correct.

Were they polytheists? Did they believed that there was more than one God, or monotheists, just one God? Point now, what's your guess? If you guess polytheist you are right.

Well done.

For the ancient Shang there were lots of gods and spirits and different gods that they could worship.

However they did have a main God.

They had a really important god.

And here's a picture here of what they thought he might have looked like.

And he was called Shangdi.

You try and say Shangdi.

And Shangdi means supreme god, the king of the gods, the heavenly father.

Deity just means God, so the Supreme God.

And I remember this, 'coz it rhymes, Shangdi, Supreme Deity.

Shangdi, Supreme Deity, that's how I remember it.

Maybe you might like to remember it like that too, Shangdi, Supreme Deity.

So for the ancient Chinese they believed that Shandy was the most important god that they could worship.

Should we try and write his name? I know that lots of people had a lot of fun writing their Chinese characters.

So I have found Shangdi's name in ancient Chinese characters.

I'm going to put it up now, so that you can pause the video, and learn another word in ancient Chinese characters, Shangdi's name, the most important god.

Are you ready? Here it is.

So two Chinese characters and the second is very complicated.

So you're going to have to be really careful.

Pause the video and see if you can write Shangdi's name in your neatest writing.

Go! How's it looking? Did you need to start again? They can be quite tricky to do, those ancient Chinese characters.

So don't worry if you need to start them again.

I've seen some great examples that people have put in over the internet there on Twitter.

So well done if you've got a great example of Shangdi's name.

So that was the ancient religion within the Shang dynasty.

But we also have evidence from the Shang dynasty of what they might have believe happened to people after they died, because we can look at their tombs where they buried people to see what they believed.

The first thing though is that within the ancient, the Shang dynasty, they really respected their ancestors, your ancestors are your family members who have died a long time ago.

And within the Shang dynasty, everybody really respected their ancestors.

But they believed that they could still speak to their ancestors, their ancestor spirits.

They believed that the ancestors were up in the sky in the stars because they looked up in the sky and the stars and for them, that was like the heavens.

The stary night sky was like the heavens for them.

And so they would worship the stars and they would worship the heavens and they would worship their ancestors.

And we already know that the mandate of heaven, when the stars lined up, told the ancient Shang that there's time for a new leader.

And so we can see why now they believed in the mandate of heaven because they believe that it was their ancestors giving them guidance and telling them they need to do something.

So within the ancient Shang dynasty, their ancestors were up in the sky.

That's the spirits, that's the gods that they worship and the spirits that they worshipped.

We also have evidence from ancient tombs.

So this is a burial tomb of somebody called Fu Hao, and she was a famous warrior and priestess.

And we're going to find out about her, she's got a lesson all to herself in the next lesson.

We're going to find out about her more.

But one thing we have is her tomb.

And we know from her tomb all sorts of things about what the ancient Chinese thought about the afterlife, because we can look in a tomb and see which objects they put there.

And the ancient Chinese put lots of different objects.

They put things that they thought that Fu Hao would need in the afterlife.

So things like cowrie shells, remember that money that they used, they would include things like beautiful ornaments made out of jade.

They would include things like pots in case Fu Hao needed to cook in the afterlife, and they would even, and yeah true, this is maybe a little bit gory, but they would even include servants and horses and things that they thought that Fu Howard needed to take to the afterlife.

Because the ancient Shang believed in sacrifice in killing animals and sometimes even humans to please the gods.

So we know a little bit about what the ancient Shang people believed about the afterlife by looking at their tombs and what they left with people after they died, because they thought that they would take it with them through to the afterlife.

So I've got a new task for you here.

I'd like you to put all of that, I've given you lots of different information there about what the Shang people believed about the afterlife and about spirits and about their ancestors.

So can you complete this sentence for me? And before I give you the sentence, I'm going to give you some key words that I want you to include.

This is your challenge.

Can you include these words? Number one, can you include the word heavens? Can you include the word worship? Can you include the word ancestors? Can you include the word tomb? And can you include the word afterlife? Can you include any of those words or even if you're really, really clever all of those words in your answer? So let's put them up again.

I'm going to say them, and you're going to say them.

Heavens, worship ancestors, tomb, afterlife.

And here's your sentence starter.

The Shang people believe that, finish that sentence using all of your keywords.

Pause the video now and go.

Great, how did you do? I'd love to see some of those answers.

If you'd like to, you can take a photo and send it on Twitter, hashtag #LearnwithOak and I will be able to read them and I'll read everyone and I'll be really, really proud of you.

'Coz I know that you're working really hard and I'm very, very impressed.

So keep it up.

Last, we need to find out about oracle bones.

We already know a little bit about Oracle bones because we've seen them before.

So our oracle bones sometimes called dragon bones.

They're those bones that the ancient Chinese, the Shang people wrote on.

They usually came from animals, from oxen because they had big bones and they would usually be the shoulder blade.

So having looked at your shoulder now, you can actually move it.

So if you move your arm about, then you'll be able to feel our shoulder blade, it's a big flat bone that goes in the back of your ribcage and joins up with your shoulder.

And if you move about you'll be able to feel that nice flat blade.

And oxen have really big ones.

And so those oracle bones were exactly what the Chinese use to write on.

And they might have looked a little bit like this, and can see if you look closely, you can see that ancient Chinese writing.

We didn't know about oracle bones for a long time.

We only discovered Oracle bones in 1899.

So about 121 years ago.

That's when we discovered them.

Well, not about exactly 121 years ago.

That's when we discovered them, even though they'd been around for over 3000 years, we only found them about 120 years ago.

And that's brilliant.

That's exactly what history is like.

We're finding out new things all of the time.

And as we find out new things, we add to our knowledge of a particular period.

And if you want to go and become an archaeologist or historian, then you could discover new things about the past, like the Shang period.

Maybe you could grow up and you could fly to China and you could find out things all about the ancient Shang by discovering new artefacts and finding out about them.

Because in 1899 we found out more because we discovered oracle bones.

So I'll tell you a story about how we discovered the oracle bones.

It was a doctor who was living in 1899 and he had an illness.

He had an illness called malaria.

It's a kind of illness you get when a mosquito bites you and it can be very, very bad.

And the ancient Chinese believed that if you got these bones, these oracle bones, these old bones that they'd found, they thought they were just old bones.

If you got them and you ground them up into a powder, and then you ate that, then you would be cured of diseases.

Now that's not true.

You can't cure diseases by grinding up old bones and eating them, you need real medicine.

And we have real medicine now for malaria, things like doxycycline, malarone which will help people to not get malaria.

But back then they thought that the dragon bones would do it.

And this doctor was looking at this oracle bone, looking at this bone.

And he suddenly noticed that there was writing there.

And so he didn't crush it up into a powder to make it into a medicine.

Instead he took it to a museum to study it.

And they realised that this was from 3000 years ago and contained all of this interesting writing about the Shang dynasty.

And they thought, "Oh my gosh, we've been so silly, because we've been grinding up all of these precious bones from 3000 or 3,500 years ago that have these writing from all that time ago." That was so silly and so they stopped grinding it down and they started studying them so they could find out about the Shang people.

And here's what they discovered.

They found out that these bones were used by priests or priestesses, the religious leaders at the time.

So priest if you're a man or a priestess if you're a woman.

Sometimes you can still use priest for a woman as well.

I've got a little symbol there of what a priest might look like.

In the Shang dynasty they wouldn't have looked like that, but that's just to give you an idea to remind you.

And they used these oracle bones for divination, new word, my turn, your turn, divination, divination, good.

Divination, what that means is it's when you try to communicate with spirits to find something out, maybe about the future, maybe about something that's going to happen, you try and communicate with spirits and you divine or you try and find out what's going to happen.

And that's what the priest and the priestesses were doing.

With the oracle bones they were trying to find out what might happen.

So a symbol that we could use for this is like thinking, 'coz they're thinking what's going to happen? They defining what's going to happen.

And they did this through what's called pyromancy.

So three new words for you here, but I know that you're very, very clever.

And so you're going to learn them all, priest or priestess, divination, finding out about the past asking questions and pyromancy.

Now pyromancy is a special way of doing this.

Pyromancy is all to do with fire.

Pyro means fire.

What does pyro mean? Good, what does pyro mean? Good pyro means fire.

And here's what they would do.

They would take the oracle bone, take a close look at it and you will see the writing and they would ask questions.

They would write questions.

Now the questions might be something like, maybe there's a battle coming.

And they might say, "Who is going to win in the battle?" Or maybe it hasn't rained for a while.

So they might say, hmm "Is it going to rain this month? Are we going to get rain?" And they would write those questions that they wanted the ancestors to answer.

And they wrote them down.

You can see them with the writing.

And then they would take a bronze metal rod, we learned about the bronze age.

They'd take a bronze metal rod and they put it in the fire until it got very, very, very hot.

That's why it's called pyromancy because they put the metal rod in the fire.

And then they put the metal rod into the oracle bone while it's still really, really hot.

And the oracle bone would crack because it was so hot.

Look carefully, can you see the cracks? Well done, point to them point.

I can see, I think I can see to cracks there.

Can you see two cracks? In fact, there are some more cracks.

There are two holes and other cracks.

And the priest or the priestesses would look where those cracks went and that would give them that answer.

So they might even write down some answers, and that would give them that answer of what they thought was going to happen.

'Coz they thought that the spirits were making a crack on the correct answer.

Now that's really helpful 'coz we can then find out about what battles were happening in the past.

'Coz they were writing them down on these oracle bones.

I'm going to test you on your new vocabulary now to see if you can remember.

So have a close look, if you need to pause it, then you can do that now.

Priest means the person that was trying to communicate with ancestors.

Divination means when you are asking ancestors questions and pyromancy, when you are heating up a hot stick of metal to make the oracle bone crack on the answer.

So, I've got the three different symbols here, and you'll see that I've muddled them all up, the symbols to the wrong word.

I'm going to say the word and I want you to point to the correct symbol.

So pyromancy, which symbol are you pointing out for pyromancy? Are you pointing at the fire? If you're pointing at the fire then well done, pyromancy is when they used the hot metal is metal stick to crack the oracle bone.

Here's another one, priest or priestess.

Point to which one, point to the symbol, priest or priestess.

Well done.

The priest or the priestess was the person who was finding all of this out by trying to communicate to ancestors.

And the last one, divination.

Point to divination, the symbol that's divination.

Are you pointing to this one? Well done.

Divination was when the priests would try and ask questions and find out from the spirits.

That process is called divination when you're trying to find out from spirits.

So I've only got one more task left for you.

I want you to imagine that you're a priest or a priestess in the Shang dynasty.

And I want you to imagine that you're doing some divination.

You're doing some pyromancy.

So if you were in the Shang dynasty and you were a priest doing some pyromancy and some domination, what questions would you write on your oracle bone? What would you ask to the ancestors, to the spirits in the heavens? What would you want to find out about what's going to happen in the future? Write down your questions, you could even trace the oracle bone, so you could draw a shape like an oracle bone, so that you can write like you're writing on a real oracle bone.

That would be a really cool activity to do.

You can maybe even cut it out if you are feeling specially creative, you could cut out a kind of oracle bone and write your questions down so that you can imagine that you're doing some divination.

Do not do any pyromancy unless you have a grownup with you, and even then don't do any pyromancy 'coz it's too dangerous.

They did it in the Shang dynasty, but don't do any pyromancy, okay.

Only for the Shang people 3,500 years ago.

Promise me, good, right.

That's the end of our lesson.

The only thing that's left to do guys is the quiz.

Okay I'm going to go back to that to make 'coz I didn't give you a chance to pause it.

So you can pause here and do your task.

Great, well done.

I would love to see some of those.

And so this next slide has our hashtags on.

If you ask your parents to go onto Twitter and put hashtag #LearnwithOak and a photo of your work, then I will see it 'coz I see all of the ones that have #LearnedwithOak on.

For now, the only thing left to do is to do your end of lesson quiz, to lock in all of your new knowledge in your brain.

Thank you, well done for working so hard and see you next week for our next lesson on the Shang dynasty.

Bye everyone.