Details

Subject(s)

• China—History—To 221 B.C.—Sources [Browse]
• China—History—To 221 B.C.—Historiography [Browse]
• Inscriptions, Chinese—History and criticism [Browse]
• Manuscripts, Chinese—History and criticism [Browse]
• China—History—Qin dynasty, 221-207 B.C.—Sources [Browse]
• China—History—Qin dynasty, 221-207 B.C.—Historiography [Browse]

Series

SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture [More in this series]

Summary note

• "Considers what unearthed written documents reveal about the creation and transmission of knowledge in ancient China"-- Provided by publisher.
• 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 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--back cover.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (pages 383-404) and index.

Contents

• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Inscriptions
• Chapter One: History and inscriptions
• Chapter Two: The Bin Gong Xu inscription and the beginnings of the Chinese literary tradition
• Chapter Three: The writing of a late Western Zhou Bronze inscription
• Chapter Four: 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
• Chapter Five: A possible lost classic: the *She Ming or *Command to She
• Chapter Six: Varieties of textual variants: evidence from the Tsinghua Bamboo-Slip *Ming Xun Manuscript
• Chapter Seven: Unearthed documents and the question of the oral versus written nature of the classic of poetry
• Chapter Eight: A first reading of the Anhui University Bamboo-Slip Shi Jing
• Chapter Nine: The Mu Tianzi Zhuan and King Mu-Period bronzes
• Chapter Ten: The Tsinghua Manuscript *Zheng Wen Gong wen Taibo and the question of the production of manuscripts in early China
• Chapter Eleven: The eighth century BCE Civil War in Jin as seen in the Bamboo Annals
• Chapter Twelve: The Qin *Bian Nian Ji and the beginnings of historical writing in China
• Notes
• Works cited
• Index.

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ISBN

• 9781438495224 (hardcover)
• 1438495226 (hardcover)

LCCN

2023002623

OCLC

1370175494

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