OUYANG XIU (1007-1072) AND HIS COLLECTION OF STONE INSCRIPTIONS (original) (raw)
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Literacy in Ancient Everyday Life, edited by Anne Kolb, 2018
In an effort to understand the significance of literacy in the everyday life of Early China, the present paper identifies three stages in literacy’s development before Empire: 1) An incipient stage (ca. 3000 BC-1250 BC) from the late Neolithic period when signs of writing (and reading) began to appear in the late Liangzhu culture in the south and Longshan culture in the north until the mid-Shang period when the condition for practicing full writing was ripe; 2) a stage marked by the use of a mature system of writing carved mainly on bones and shells for divination in the late Shang (ca. 1250-1046 BC), but the ability to do so was restricted to the group of professional scribes and some diviners; 3) during the Western Zhou period (1045-771 BC), writing moved beyond the hands of the specialized scribes to reach larger social circles, and the activity of reading and appreciation of the written words became widespread among the Zhou social elites. Particularly on the nature of the bronze inscriptions, the paper offers concrete evidence that inscribed bronzes were used in domestic as well as legal-economic contexts and so inscribed for documentary purposes, thus beyond the narrow religious perimeter. As the textual content of the inscription is usually independent of the function of the vessel that carried it, the bronzes were indeed vehicles for the written words to reach broad social contexts. In other words, the inscribed bronzes were not only very relevant to the everyday life of the Western Zhou elites, but they are part of their effort to distill, celebrate, and interpret their life experience, and even to influence their future.
Orison in Jade: Reading the Zengsun Yin 曾孫駰 tablet inscriptions
Two jade tablets, allegedly excavated in the vicinity of Mt. Huá in Shaanxi, and currently in the possession of an anonymous Beijing collector, first became known in late 1999 and have since been studied by several eminent paleographers (Li Ling 1999, Li Xuwqin 2000, Wang Hui 2001, Li Jiahao 2001, Zeng Xiantong et al. 2001, Chou Feng-wu 2001). The two texts on the tablets (ca. 23 x 4 x 0,5 cm), written in a rather undexterous hand reminiscent of Qin tile and weapon inscriptions, are by and large identical, although in diverging conditions of preservation. These allow for an overall restitution of close to 300 words represented by the extant characters, which include many ligatures and punctuation marks. While the inscriptions have so far been predominantly approached either from a purely paleographical perspective, as historical documents via comparison with contemporary and earlier Qín bronze inscriptions and later accounts in the edited literature, or, to a lesser degree, as documents akin to Hàn and Early Medieval religious writing, little attention has so far been directed to their literary and aesthetic aspects. These are especially prominent in the well-structured, partly rhymed prayer and sacrificial sermons constituting the formal counterpart of an unexpectedly frank “do ut des-relationship with the spirits” (cf. Pines 2004) ritually negotiated in the texts. In my talk I will thus present a full phonological reconstruction of the texts in order to situate their prosody, rhetoric, peculiar pronoun usage and syntax vis-à-vis the tradition of Qín rhyming bronze and stone stelae inscriptions (on which see Kern 2000) and several other Late Warring States excavated texts, encountered on the poorly studied so-called “minor implement inscriptions” (xaoqiming), known from rubbings and reproductions in the edited literature. Finally, I will comment on the continuity of usage of jade tablets as writing supports for prosodically structured ritual communications well into the medieval period and present a few preliminary thoughts about the interrelationship between the poetics of word magic and the materiality of such texts.