CHINA ARQUEOLOGIA golden-age-chinese-archayeolog

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Bronze yue axe
Height 39.5 (15 Viz), maximum width 37.3 (i4 5 /s),
weight 9 (19 3 / 4 )
Late Shang Yinxu Period II (c. 1200 BCE)
From Xiaotun Locus North, at Yinxu, Anyang,
Henan Province
The Institute of Archaeology, CASS, Beijing
Large, flat axes (yue) appear in bronze in the Early
Shang, although they have precursors in hardstone
that date much earlier. While not as common as the
ge dagger-axe and mao spear-point, more than three
dozen examples of bronze yue are known. 1 Only a
few are classified as "largeyue," including four examples
from Fu Hao's tomb, of which this is one. 2
The large axe is associated in traditional texts with
the granting of military authority, as when a lord
was invested with the power to wage a campaign,
but it was also evidently used for the punishment of
decapitation; several graphic attestations to the
practice appear in oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions.
Transmitted texts tell us that the last Shang
king, the evil Zhou Xin, was beheaded with a "yellow
yue" by the victorious founder of the new dynasty,
Wu Wang. Many scholars believe that the
logograph for "king" (wang) originated in a pictographic
representation of such large axes; such an
etymology suggests that flat axes may have served as
royal insignia.
The shape of this example is characteristic of
its type: the wide tang is flanked by a pair of slots
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