The most important affairs of the state are sacrifice and war: digital visualization of the scattered early Zhou epics in the <i>Book of Songs</i>

Abstract The aim of this article is to discuss the characteristics of the culture of the Zhou Dynasty of China and try to find out some similarities at the early development of human civilization. For the research purpose, the author selected five epic poems about the early Zhou ethnicity scattered in the Book of Songs: Shengmin, Gongliu, Mian, Huangyi, and Daming, and established digital maps of the early Zhou epic, including a family relationship map and a full events map with the help of natural language model that label people, places, actions, and related things in the epic poems, and made them into directed graph and relationship network through visual digital relationship networking tools. Through text mining and visualizing, the results show the unique culture of the Zhou ethnicity embedded in the early Zhou epics: the sacrifice culture and the war culture. Moreover, the project also analyzes the common features of the development of early human civilization in the Zhou epics with a broader perspective. The innovation of this article is that it is an initial attempt to text-mine the Upper Chinese text into an overall digital map. It also critically reflects on the misunderstanding of cultural identity of Zhou as an agrarian civilization that has arisen in close reading due to the ‘subjective bias’ of the writer of the epics.