escended from a wide-spread Yellow River valley Neolithic culture known as the Longshan culture, famous for their black-lacquered pottery.
             The Shang dynasty ruled from 1750 – 1040 BCE. They were a very bloodthirsty society but also a very advanced society that are known for their bronze work and most complete record of Chinese writings.
             1100 – 221 BCE was the ruling times of the Zhou dynasty. This dynasty was broken into two periods of Western Zhou and Eastern Zhou and the Eastern Zhou dynasty was further broken into two periods of Spring & Autumn (722 - 481 BC) and The Warring States (403 - 221 BC). The Zhou were considered more "Chinese" than the Shang and ruled over a number of quasi-independent principalities. With their principality in the center called the Middle Kingdom. The Zhou were able to maintain peace and stability through the hegemony system for a few hundred years; then in 771 BC, the capital was sacked by barbarians from the west forcing the Zhou to move east.
             The Eastern Zhou began to lose some of their power but the so-called Spring & Autumn period, named after a book (The Spring and Autumn Annals) that provides a history of period, saw a proliferation of new ideas and philosophies. The three most important, from a historical standpoint, were Daoism, Confucianism, and Legalism.
             The politics of the Warring States period were much the same as those of the Spring & Autumn period; the major difference was that while in the earlier period, armies were small and battles lasted only a day, much like in pre-Napoleonic wars, the later period featured what modern strategists would call "total war." Massive armies (half a million per army was not an uncommon figure), long battles, sieges, were all common features of the Warring States battlefield.
             The Qin dynasty is where the first Emperor declares himself so because the other dynastic heads only called themselves kings. Qin Shihuangdi c...