According to the historical sources of the early Zhou dynasty, the of the Shang kingdom included and . In the late oracle-bone inscriptions, and were mentioned side by side, and so were and . In the Western Zhou period, were all princes. The in oracle inscriptions was considered by most scholars as a kind of prince too. The author of this paper does not quite agree with this point of view. According to the fact that were often mentioned as , and that some of the places where were staying were located in the fiefs of or the author believes that were originally officials who were sent by the king to be stationed at places beyond the capital of the Shang kingdom to engage in cultivation. But in the late Shang period, many became princes.

The situation of and , was similar to that of . They were often referred to as and respectively in oracle-bone inscriptions. The former was sent to be stationed at some place to engage in livestock husbandry, and the latter to defend the kingdom. A number of them also became princes afterwards.

This paper provides an outline of the agricultural geography of the Yin (Shang) Dynasty by means of the study of agricultural geographical names in the oracle inscriptions. The agricultural districts of Yin (Shang) were either within the suburbs of the capital, or within the territories that could be directly controlled by Yin, or within the friendly states. Such a study may increase our understanding of the politics and lives of the Yin people.

With this aim in view, I distinguish the agricultural from other oracle inscriptions, dividing them into four classes: (1) used for divining agriculture; (2) used for divining the condition of the harvest; (3) used for divining agricultural damage; and (4) used for divining rituals about agriculture. I have discovered that the agricultural names in (1) and (2) are more frequent than those in (3) and (4).

On the basis of inscriptional evidence, it is proposed that the following principles governed the system of succession and inheritance among the lineages forming the Shang dynasty:

(1) The great Royal Lineage consisted of certain kings (Great Ancestors) and their consorts, selected from a federation of ten patrilineages, named by the ten kan stems; these patrilineages were linked by ties of marriage and consanguinity.

(2) Kan names were inherited through the male line; sons and daughters both inherited the kan name of their biological father.

(3) Marriage was exogamous; a male could not marry a female bearing the same kan name as his own; nor could he, in general, marry a female who bore the same kan name as his mother.

(4) When kingship remained in the same generation it passed from one classificatory “brother” to another. When kingship descended a generation, it passed not from the king to his son, but from the king to his consort's sister's son. Only a king who was the son of a king's consort's sister and whose consort's sister was the mother of a king was eligible for Great Ancestor status.

(5) Kings of the same generation had to be of different kan; when a kan lineage had occupied the kingship in one generation, it could not do so again in the generation immediately succeeding.