the earliest named royal dynasty in China is the Shang
old scholarship had it that "[b]efore the Shang, nothing particularly interesting was supposed to have happened" (323), but now there appears to be a "yawning chasm between the birth of cities and the appearance of [...] the Shang"
a 'Late Neolithic' or "Long-shan" period "marked by what can be described, without equivocation, as cities," including "in the far north, on the frontier with Mongolia," where we find "a 4,000-year-old city, extending over 400 hectares, with a great stone wall enclosing palaces and a step-pyramid [...] nearly 1000 years pre-Shang" (324-5)