Archaeological discoveries over the past one hundred years have resulted in repeated calls to ‘rewrite ancient Chinese history.’ This is especially true of documents written on oracle bones, bronze vessels, and bamboo strips. In
Writing Early China, Edward L. Shaughnessy surveys all of these types of documents and considers what they reveal about the creation and transmission of knowledge in ancient China. Opposed to the common view that most knowledge was transmitted orally in ancient China, Shaughnessy demonstrates that by no later than the tenth century BCE scribes were writing lengthy texts like portions of the Chinese classics, and that by the fourth century BCE the primary mode of textual transmission was by way of visual copying from one manuscript to another.
Inhoudsopgave
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Inscriptions
1. History and Inscriptions
2. The
Bin Gong Xu Inscription and the Origins of the Chinese Literary Tradition
3. The Writing of a Late Western Zhou Bronze Inscription
4. On the Casting of the Art Institute of Chicago’s
Shi Wang Ding: With Remarks on the Important Position of Writing in the Consciousness of Ancient China
Part II: The Classics
5. A Possible Lost Classic: The *
She Ming or *
Command to She
6. Varieties of Textual Variants: Evidence from the Tsinghua Bamboo-Slip *
Ming Xun Manuscript
7. Unearthed Documents and the Question of the Oral versus Written Nature of the
Shi Jing
8. A First Reading of the Anhui University Bamboo-Slip
Shi Jing
Part III: Manuscripts
9. The
Mu Tianzi Zhuan and King Mu–Period Bronzes
10. The Tsinghua Manuscript *
Zheng Wen Gong wen Tai Bo and the Question of the Production of Manuscripts in Early China
11. The Eighth Century BCE Civil War in Jin as Seen in the
Bamboo Annals: On the Nature of the Tomb Text and Its Significance for the “Current”
Bamboo Annals
12. The Qin *
Bian Nian Ji and the Beginnings of Historical Writing in China
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Over de auteur
Edward L. Shaughnessy is Creel Distinguished Service Professor of Early China in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of
Rewriting Early Chinese Texts, also published by SUNY Press.
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