Drought, human sacrifice and the Mandate of Heaven in a lost text from the Shang shu

Abstract

In the following, I will analyse a lost text from the Shang shu the ‘Ancient documents ’. The story recorded in this text that of an ominous portent—seven years of drought which occurred at the beginning of the Shang Dynasty, of a divination in which human sacrifice was demanded of the Shang founder Tang, and of the ritual in which he offered himself as a sacrifice to the Lord on High. I will argue that this text provides a conceptual link between the role of the king in Shang times as a medium between the spirits above and the earth below and the Zhou theory of the king as the recipient of a changing mandate of Heaven.