The Shape Of The Turtle Chapter Summary

The author is very clear at presenting her subject. In the book The Shape of the Turtle Sarah Allan attempts to decipher the missing Shang ideas and concepts of political order and its relationship to the world, but more importantly China. It is based on a mixture of references from her previous book, The Heir and the Sage: Dynastic Legend in Early China, a large amount of enigmatic art found on bronze vessels, and the brief inscriptions on oracle bones excavated from Shang sites in the twentieth century. Oracle bones, for those who are not familiar with, are the shoulder blades of cattle and the plastrons, or the lower shells, of turtles and tortoises. The chapter that best illustrates her point that the Shang had myths, and that Shang myths reflect Shang religious belief is, “Sons of Suns”. At this point no one has done as much research as she has, she spent many years solving and filling in missing information from multiple sources, like stories from opposing dynasties and also often coming up with her own theories.

Sarah Allan does not begin by assembling inscriptions from the Shang period but, rather, assembles material rom post-Shang literary texts. Allan's …show more content…
The people and kings of the Shang Dynasty acted like they were the founders of the civilization of China, but since there was no strong or concrete basis of this in history, Sarah Allen attempts to etch them into it. Her attempt to reconstruct the myths and ideas and to figure out if the Shang Dynasty was literate from mainly scraps of information is noteworthy and I praise her for it. Information like this can make a huge difference and can over ride any arguments many archeologists or whoever studies this and make things more

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