In 1976, archaeologists near ancient Yinxu breached a tomb sealed for over 3,000 years and found an arsenal: massive bronze battle axes, over a hundred deadly weapons, unmistakable symbols of supreme military command. Then the inscriptions were translated, and the Bronze Age warlord turned out to be a woman. Fu Hao, a contemporary of Tutankhamun and often called the Chinese version of him for her miraculously intact tomb, entered King Wu Ding's court as merely one of 64 political wives, not even the primary queen. This episode explains how she became the most powerful general of her era anyway, in a story documented not in epic poems but in oracle bones, questions carved on ox shoulder blades and turtle shells and answered by heat-induced cracks.

Those bones reveal a woman who built her own economic engine on land she personally controlled, ...