Battle of Muye

By the 12th century BC, Shang influence extended west to the Wei River valley, a region that was occupied by clans known as the Zhou. King Wen of Zhou, the ruler of the Zhou and vassal of the Shang king, was given the title "Overlord of the West"[2] by Di Xin of Shang (King Zhou).[lower-alpha 3] Di Xin used King Wen to guard his rear while he was involved in a south-eastern campaign.

Eventually, Di Xin came to fear King Wen's growing power and imprisoned him. Although Wen was later released, the tension between Shang and Zhou grew. Wen prepared his army and conquered a few smaller states which were loyal to Shang, slowly weakening Shang's allies. King Wen died in 1050 BC before Zhou's actual offensive against Shang.

Di Xin did not stress about Zhou's local conquests in the Wei River valley, as he viewed himself as a rightful ruler, appointed by his divine ancestors. Other records describe him as overindulging in alcohol and sex with his consort Daji.

King Wen's son King Wu of Zhou led the Zhou in a revolt a few years later. The reason for this delay was that King Wu believed that the heavenly order to conquer Shang had not been given, as well as the advice of Jiang Ziya to wait for the right opportunity.

Sentiment towards Di Xin is difficult to gauge. Subsequent histories were politically and culturally aligned with the conquering Zhou, and historical accounts of Di Xin grew more egregious over time. In earlier sources, he is depicted as benighted and ineffectual; whereas after a few centuries, he is described as a monstrous torturer, universally despised.[3]

With Jiang Ziya as the strategist, King Wu of Zhou led an army of about 50,000. Di Xin's army was at war in the east, but he still had about 530,000 men to defend the capital city of Yin. But to further secure his victory, he gave weapons to about 170,000 slaves to protect the capital. These slaves did not want to fight for the corrupt Shang dynasty and defected to the Zhou army instead.

This event greatly lowered the morale of the Shang troops. When engaged, many Shang soldiers did not fight and held their spears upside down, as a sign that they no longer wanted to fight for the corrupt Shang. Some Shang soldiers joined the Zhou outright.

Still, many loyal Shang troops fought on, and a very bloody battle followed, depicted at the end of a poem in the Shijing:

The troops of Yin-Shang,
Were collected like a forest,
And marshaled in the wilderness of Muh.
...
The wilderness of Muh spread out extensively;
Bright shone the chariots of sandal;
The teams of bays, black-maned and white-bellied, galloped along;
The grand-master Shang-foo,
Was like an eagle on the wing,
Assisting king Woo,
Who at one onset smote the great Shang.

— James Legge (translation), in Da ming (大明, "Great brightness", poem #236), Shijing[lower-alpha 4]

The Zhou troops were much better trained, and their morale was high. In one of the chariot charges, King Wu broke through the Shang's defense line. Di Xin was forced to flee to his palace, and the remaining Shang troops fell into further chaos. The Zhou were victorious and showed little mercy to the defeated Shang, shedding enough blood "to float a log".

After the battle, Di Xin burned himself to death in his palace on the Deer Terrace Pavilion.[5] A later tradition has Di Xin covering himself with precious jades prior to immolation.[8] King Wu killed Daji after he found her. The order to execute her was given by Jiang Ziya. Shang officials were released without charge with some later working as Zhou officials. The imperial grain store was opened immediately after the battle to feed the starving population. The battle marked the end of the Shang dynasty and the beginning of the Zhou dynasty.

Although the day and month on which the Battle of Muye was fought are certain, there is doubt about the year.[9] Prior to the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project, previous chronologies had proposed at least 44 different dates for this event, ranging from 1130 to 1018 BC.[10][11] The most popular had been 1122 BC, calculated by the Han dynasty astronomer Liu Xin, and 1027 BC, deduced from a statement in the "old text" Bamboo Annals that the Western Zhou (whose endpoint is known to be 770 BC) had lasted 257 years.[12][13]

A few documents relate astronomical observations to this event:

• A quotation in the Book of Han from the lost Wǔchéng 武成 chapter of the Book of Documents appears to describe a lunar eclipse just before the beginning of King Wu's campaign. This date, and the date of his victory, are given as months and sexagenary days.[14][15]
• A passage in the Guoyu gives the positions of the Sun, Moon, Jupiter, and two stars on the day King Wu attacked the Shang.[13][15]
• The "current text" Bamboo Annals mentions conjunctions of all five planets occurring before and after the Zhou conquest. Han-period texts mention the first conjunction as occurring in the 32nd year of the reign of the last king. Such events are rare, but all five planets did gather on 28 May 1059 BC and again on 26 September 1019 BC. Although the recorded positions in the sky of these two events are the reverse of what occurred, they could not have been retrospectively calculated at the time the account first appears.[16]

The strategy adopted by the Project was to use the archeological investigation to narrow the range of dates that would need to be compared with the astronomical data. Although no archaeological traces of King Wu's campaign have been found, the pre-conquest Zhou capital at Fengxi in Shaanxi has been excavated and strata at the site have been identified with the pre-dynastic Zhou. Radiocarbon dating of samples from the site as well as at late Yinxu and early Zhou capitals, using the wiggle matching technique, yielded a date for the conquest between 1050 and 1020 BC. The only date within that range matching all the astronomical data is 20 January 1046 BC. This date had previously been proposed by David Pankenier, who had matched the above passages from the classics with the same astronomical events, but here it resulted from a thorough consideration of a broader range of evidence.[17][18][19]

Other scholars have raised several criticisms of this process. The connection between the layers at the archaeological sites and the conquest is uncertain.[20] The narrow range of radiocarbon dates is cited with a less stringent confidence interval (68%) than the standard requirement of 95%, which would have produced a much wider range.[21] The texts describing the relevant astronomical phenomena are extremely obscure.[22][23] For example, the inscription on the Li gui, a key text used in dating the conquest, can be interpreted in several different ways, with one alternative reading leading to the date of 9 January 1044 BC.[13]