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Dr. Zucker: Where does history begin?
Dr. Harris: History begins with writing.
That's how we use the term "prehistoric", before writing.
Dr. Zucker: But of course we're not satisfied
with only knowing literate cultures.
We want to push back further and understand
the cultures that are preliterate.
In order to invent writing, you have to have a society,
you have to have some stability.
We find that at the end of the neolithic period.
Dr. Harris: The neolithic period begins
around 10,000 BCE, when we have human beings
who can settle down because they've figured out
how to domesticate animals, they figured out
how to farm, how to raise crops, and that brings
some stability.
They don't have to live
a hunter-gatherer existence anymore.
Dr. Zucker: This is known as the Neolithic Revolution.
Dr. Harris: And it really was a revolution.
It completely changed human beings' way
of relating to nature.
We could, for the first time, control nature
to some degree.
Dr. Zucker: This takes place after the end
of the last ice age and it may have to do
with the environment becoming more hospitable.
We see this Neolithic Revolution in areas
all over the world that were disassociated
from each other.
Dr. Harris: Sometime around 3,000,
many of those cultures also developed writing.
Dr. Zucker: Writing is seen as one of the hallmarks
of civilization and we see the development
of what we recognize as civilization.
That is, early cities, farming techniques, writing,
developing in the great river valleys around the world.
Most famously, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia,
in the Indus Valley, and in China.
Dr. Harris: There are several areas in China
that had sophisticated neolithic culture.
One in particular is called Liangzhu.
This culture developed around what is today Shanghai
and Yangzi River.
Dr. Zucker: Right at the delta of the Yangzi River.
Dr. Harris: Just like Egypt developed right around
the delta of the Nile and ancient Mesopotamia developed
between the Tigris and Euphrates River.
It made sense.
These were places where you could irrigate crops.
Dr. Zucker: In fact, the Liangzhu people seemed
to have become expert rice growers and were able
to create a surplus, which allowed them not to worry
about eating, not to worry about feeding themselves.
It allowed at least certain elements of society
to begin to develop in more sophisticated ways.
Dr. Harris: Liangzhu culture was especially known
for producing beautiful jade objects,
specifically something that we call cong.
Square, hollow tubes that are decorated with lines
and sometimes circles that represent faces.
Some of them are short and some of them seem
to be stacks that are quite tall and we're looking,
actually, at several examples here at the
British Museum.
Dr. Zucker: These were found in graves.
Sometimes there were many cong in graves.
There were also objects called bi.
These are round disks, also with holes in the center.
We have no idea what any of this means.
This is a culture where we have found no traces
of writing.
It's possible that they were preliterate or it's possible
that they wrote on a material that didn't survive,
but the result is all of the ideas that surround
these objects are theories.
Dr. Harris: Because they clearly represent faces,
whether they're monster faces or animal faces
or human faces, this clearly meant something.
Dr. Zucker: And there's a great degree of regularity
and specificity.
Now this jade is true jade, or nephrite,
and it is extremely hard.
This culture did not have tools that were harder
than this nephrite.
That is, they couldn't carve it.
Dr. Harris: You can't incise into it.
You can't take a knife and cut into it.
It's just too hard.
Dr. Zucker: You can't even really scratch it.
So when you look at these objects that are so precise,
it's almost impossible to imagine
that they were produced by rubbing sand.
Dr. Harris: Some of the lines are very, very fine
and run parallel to each other.
It's important to think about the care with which
these objects are made.
Dr. Zucker: They are clearly symbols.
There's a uniformity, there's an intentionality,
there's a clarity, and there is tremendous effort.
Though we don't speak this language, we recognize it
as the product of a human mind.
Dr. Harris: A human mind that was trying
to say something about power, perhaps,
about our relationship to nature,
about the spiritual world, about what happens
after death.
The kinds of questions that human beings ask
all the time still.
Their verticality, the repetition of these parallel lines,
it's hard not to think about these in relationship
to issues of power.
Dr. Zucker: Some scholars have suggested
that the rectilinear quality of the cong is a symbol
for Earth.
That the round interior is a symbol of the heavens,
of the sky, of the sun.
These are symbols that develop later in China
and it's very seductive to link this neolithic culture
with later bronze age cultures.
Dr. Harris: To read that definition back into time,
it's definitely tempting.
Dr. Zucker: It is possible that this is the origin
of those symbols, but we can't really know.
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