imitate them. In addition, they had in their religion of Heaven a
conception of the existence of mutual relations between Heaven and
Earth: all that went on in the skies had an influence on earth, and vice
versa. Thus, if any ceremony was "wrongly" performed, it had an evil
effect on Heaven--there would be no rain, or the cold weather would
arrive too soon, or some such misfortune would come. It was therefore of
great importance that everything should be done "correctly". Hence the
Chou rulers were glad to call in the old priests as performers of
ceremonies and teachers of morality similar to the ancient Indian rulers
who needed the Brahmans for the correct performance of all rites. There
thus came into existence in the early Chou empire a new social group,
later called "scholars", men who were not regarded as belonging to the
lower class represented by the subjugated population but were not
included in the nobility; men who were not productively employed but
belonged to a sort of independent profession. They became of very great
importance in later centuries.

In the first centuries of the Chou dynasty the ruling house steadily
lost power. Some of the emperors proved weak, or were killed at war;
above all, the empire was too big and its administration too
slow-moving. The feudal lords and nobles were occupied with their own
problems in securing the submission of the surrounding villages to their
garrisons and in governing them; they soon paid little attention to the
distant central authority. In addition to this, the situation at the
centre of the empire was more difficult than that of its feudal states
farther east. The settlements around the garrisons in the east were
inhabited by agrarian tribes, but the subjugated population around the
centre at Sian was made up of nomadic tribes of Turks and Mongols
together with semi-nomadic Tibetans. Sian lies in the valley of the
river Wei; the riverside country certainly belonged, though perhaps only