Writing Cast into the Inside of a Vessel

The best written source for the Western Zhou is not a book. It is the inscriptions cast into ritual bronzes, often on the inner wall of a vessel where no one could read them once the vessel was in use. They record royal appointments, grants of land and people, military successes and legal settlements, and they almost always end with a formula in which the maker dedicates the vessel to a named ancestor and expresses the wish that sons and grandsons will treasure it for ever. That combination is the point. A bronze was simultaneously a record of the family's standing, an object used to present food and drink to the ancestors at sacrifice, and an heirloom asserting that the line would continue.

The religion of the period runs through it. Ancestors were not remembered, they were fed, and the right to feed them in the proper vessels was regulated by rank, so that the number and type of vessels a family could use was itself a statement about its place. The Zhouli, a later text describing an idealised Zhou administration, presents this ritual order as a complete system of offices and observances, and Confucian writers of much later centuries treated the arrangement as the model from which their own age had fallen away.