According to a Chinese belief, certain wise and understanding people can understand what lies above and below, and have the insight to perceive the distant. It is they who supervise the positions of the spirits during rituals. They alone had access to the heavens. The shang rulers were such persons. They visited the heavens and brought down prayers and songs of various rituals to the earth.
The ritual bronze vessels that we have mentioned were used for sacrificial feasts. The decorations on them depicted all manner of real and mythical beasts in a highly schematic way. It is these creatures who helped the kings to cross over in to the heavens and make connection with ancestors. Actual animals and human sacrifices were also made. You may remember that such vessels were buried with the dead kings.
In the case of Mesopotamia, the royal burials of Ur involved the deposition of all kinds costly and skillfully crafted items with the dead. Great amounts of silver and gold, and precious stones and shell, much art work too, went into royal’s burials. More intriguing, guards armed with weapons, musicians and domestic staffs were also buried with the dead. As elsewhere, there were rituals each year. At this time, the sacral Marriage was ritually re-enacted between the deities Dumuzi(the king) and Inanna(personified by a high priestess). We have numerous erotic love songs recorded on clay tablets, which had accompanied this ritual.
The declines of the Bronze Age states: — it is natural phenomenon that everything in the world to decay. The Bronze Age societies also declined due to many states. The end came much sooner in south Asia. Although numerous folk traditions undoubtedly survived, we know that the Hrappan great tradition came to an almost abrupt end. The greater Indus valley did not play a central role in any latter Indian empire.
There is no hard evidence for massive floods of the Indus. In 1826, this lake burst its banks and there was a devastating flood. Thus, however “gigantic” a flood, we cannot expect one such event or even a series of floods, to have brought an entire civilization to an end.
The end of the temple and palace entered polities of the western Asiatic Bronze age have, in the past, been attributed variously to climatic Ghanga, earthquakes/ volkanos, famines or floods. Such arguments enjoy little credibility today, because it is acknowledged that natural disasters have been frequent in history, and culture/civilization have survived them.
Many cities on the coats of Anatolia, Syria and Palestine and inland cities such as Hattusha, the capital of the Hitler empire, were destroyed by marauding migrants. Know as the sea peoples, who arrived suddenly in the Mediterranean. The destruction of a Bronze Age city meant the destruction of the economic nerve centre of the concerned polity.