Zu Ding (), personal name Zi Xin, was a king of the Chinese

Shang dynasty The Shang dynasty (), also known as the Yin dynasty (), was a Chinese royal dynasty that ruled in the Yellow River valley during the second millennium BC, traditionally succeeding the Xia dynasty and followed by the Western Zhou d ...

Records

In the ''

Records of the Grand Historian The ''Shiji'', also known as ''Records of the Grand Historian'' or ''The Grand Scribe's Records'', is a Chinese historical text that is the first of the Twenty-Four Histories of imperial China. It was written during the late 2nd and early 1st ce ...

'' he was listed by Sima Qian as the sixteenth Shang king, succeeding his uncle Wo Jia (). He was enthroned in the year of Dingwei () with Bi () as his capital. He ruled for about 32 years before his death. He was given the posthumous name Zu Ding and was succeeded by his cousin Nan Geng ().

Oracle script Oracle bone script is the oldest attested form of written Chinese, dating to the late 2nd millennium BC. Inscriptions were made by carving characters into oracle bones, usually either the shoulder bones of oxen or the plastrons of turtl ...

inscriptions on oracle bones unearthed at

Yinxu Yinxu (; ) is a Chinese archeological site corresponding to Yin, the final capital of the Shang dynasty (). Located in present-day Anyang, Henan, Yin served as the capital during the Late Shang period () which spanned the reigns of 12 Shang ki ...

alternatively record that he was the fifteenth Shang king.

Attempts at chronological dating

The

Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project () was a multi-disciplinary project commissioned by the People's Republic of China in 1996 to determine with accuracy the location and time frame of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties. The project was d ...

, a broad Chinese academic enquiry, published results in 2000 placing Zu Ding as a contemporary of the Egyptian pharaoh

Akhenaten Akhenaten (pronounced ), also spelled Akhenaton or Echnaton ( ''ʾŪḫə-nə-yātəy'', , meaning 'Effective for the Aten'), was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh reigning or 1351–1334 BC, the tenth ruler of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, Eig ...

— the latter's reign beginning later than Zu Ding's, but both terminating in the mid-1330s BCE.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Zu Ding Kings of the Shang dynasty