Urban landscapes: transforming spaces and reshaping communities

Yin Xu offers unique insights into early Bronze Age urbanism and literacy in China. Unlike its predecessors, such as Anyang, Yin Xu lacked city walls and clearly demarcated boundaries, with its royal precinct spanning 70 hectares and featuring over 100 building foundations. Most significantly, the site has yielded a substantial corpus of inscribed divination bones, providing rare glimpses into everyday writing from this period. This discovery challenges previous assumptions about the nature and extent of literacy in ancient Chinese urban centers, highlighting the interplay between urbanization and the transmission of written language over millennia.

Emberling, G., Clayton, S. C., & Janusek, J. W. (2015). Urban landscapes: transforming spaces and reshaping communities. The Cambridge World History, 300–316. https://doi.org/10.1017/cho9781139035606.018