Shuanggudui

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Shuanggudui
双古堆
Location within China
Location Anhui, China
Coordinates 32°54′N 115°48′E / 32.9°N 115.8°E / 32.9; 115.8
Type tombs
History
Periods Han Dynasty
Events sealed 165 BCE

Shuanggudui (simplified Chinese: 双古堆; traditional Chinese: 雙古堆; pinyin: Shuānggŭduī) is an archeological site located near Fuyang in China's Anhui province. Shuanggudui grave no. 1, which belongs to Xiahou Zao (夏侯灶), the second marquis of Ruyin (汝陰侯), was sealed in 165 BCE in the early Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) and excavated in 1977. It was found to contain a large number of texts written on bamboo strips, including fragments of the Classic of Poetry and the Songs of the South, a text on breathing exercises, a "year table" (年表) recounting historical events, a manual on dogs, a version of the I Ching (Yijing) that differs from the received one, and artifacts including the oldest known cosmic board, a divinatory instrument. Like Mawangdui and Guodian, two other tombs from the area of the old state of Chu, the Shuanggudui find has shed great light on the culture and practices of the early Han dynasty.

Discovery of the tomb and reconstruction of the strips

The tomb was discovered by chance in 1977 during the construction of an airport near Fuyang in Anhui province, China.[1] Robbers who looted the tomb in the late second century CE took the bamboo strips out of the lacquered bamboo hamper in which they had been placed and left the strips on the ground of the coffin chamber.[1] That chamber itself later collapsed, and muddy water covered the strips, eventually turning them into "paper-thin sheets, fused together into clumps by ground pressure."[1] To complicate matters, the 1977 excavation took place under a heavy rainstorm, and the pump that the excavators used to remove mud from the coffin chamber also pumped out the bamboo strips.[1] It took the Bureau of Cultural Relics in Beijing almost a year just to separate the surviving fragments.[1] Historian Edward Shaughnessy, who has worked on some of the Shuanggudui texts, finds it astonishing that they could be reconstructed from such damaged material.[1]

Cosmic board

The Shuanggudui tomb contained the earliest known diviner's board (shi 式), or "cosmograph," a divinatory instrument that was widely used during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 AD).[2] This lacquered astrological board consists of a movable disk (9.5 cm in diameter) representing the Heavens mounted on a square base (13.5 x 13.5 cm) representing Earth.[3] The center of the circular top depicts the seven stars of the Northern Dipper (which was considered to be a powerful astral deity), whereas the rim of both the disk and the square base is inscribed with astro-calendrical signs that helped to perform divination.[4]

The use of such boards is described or alluded to in many ancient Chinese texts like the Chu Ci, Han Feizi, Huainanzi, and some military texts.[5] The diviner would rotate the disk until the Dipper pointed in a chosen direction, usually corresponding to the current date.[6] He would then find an answer to his question by means of numerological calculations.[7] Manipulation of this miniature model of the cosmos was supposed to bring power to its user.[8]

Numeral juxtaposition on the inner, round part of the board correlates to the Luoshu layout which was long supposed to have been invented in the Song dynasty (960–1279).[9]

Classic of Changes

The longest text found in Shuanggudui is an incomplete version of the Yijing, or Classic of Changes, in 752 fragments containing 3,119 characters.[10] The hexagram and line statements of the Shuanggudui text closely resemble the received version, yet it is too fragmentary to reconstruct the complete text of any single hexagram or even the sequence in which they were presented.[11]

Nearly two thirds of this Shuanggudui Yijing consists in "formulaic divination statements" that are present neither in the received Yijing, nor in the version that was found in a Mawangdui tomb that was also sealed in the 160s BCE.[12] Edward Shaughnessy has hypothesized that the line statements of the received Book of Changes may have originated in similar but older divination statements.[13]

Classic of Poetry

More than 170 fragments of the Shijing (詩經) or Classic of Poetry (Book of Odes), for a total of 820 characters, have also been found in Shuanggudui.[14] These fragments are longer and have been more extensively studied than other incomplete versions of the Shijing found in ancient tombs like those of Guodian (tomb sealed around 300 BCE) and Mawangdui (168 BCE).[15]

The Shuanggudui version contains portions of 65 songs from the "Airs of States" (Guofeng 國風) section and 4 from the "Xiaoya" 小雅 section.[16] Although the song titles are the same as those of the received version, its text varies substantially from the other early Han versions.[16] Since each strip contained one stanza (zhang 章), characters were written smaller when a long stanza had to fit on a single strip.[17]

Cang Jie pian

Named after the mythical inventor of Chinese writing, the Cang Jie Wordbook (Cang Jie pian 倉頡篇) was one of the earliest primers of Chinese characters.[18][19] It was compiled by Li Si (280-208 BCE), an important statesman of the Qin Dynasty, who wanted to use it to support his policies of language unification.[19] This book has long been lost, but fragments of it have been found in Shuanggudui, in Juyan 居延 (at the confines of Inner Mongolia and Gansu), and among the Dunhuang manuscripts.[20] The Shuanggudui version counts 541 characters.[21]

Wanwu

The text that Chinese editors have titled "Myriad Things" or "Ten Thousand Things" (Wanwu 萬物) is an extensive list of natural substances that historians of Chinese medicine see as a precursor of later Chinese herbology, or literature on materia medica like the Shennong bencao jing.[22] It explains how to use some substances for healing purposes,[23] but also contains technical information on how to catch animals or expel vermin.[24] In the words of historian Donald Harper, this work "catalogues human curiosity about the products of nature," noting among other things that pinellia can fatten pigs and that "a horse-gullet tube can be used to breathe under water."[25] The names of drugs and illnesses found in Wanwu correspond with those found in the Recipes for Fifty-Two Ailments, a text dating from about 200 BCE that was buried in a tomb in Mawangdui in 168 BCE.[26] These and other correspondences between the two texts show that the same knowledge of drugs was circulating in both the southern Chu region (Mawangdui) and the Yangzi River valley (Shuanggudui).[26]

Historical annals

The most fragmentary and badly damaged of the texts found in Shuanggudui is a text that the Chinese editors have called "Table" (biao 表), an annalistic compilation of events from about 850 to the end of the third century BCE, that is, from the late Western Zhou through the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States.[27] Some of the strips still carry the horizontal markers that divided the text into rows.[28] The existence of this chronological "Table" in the early second century BCE shows that Sima Qian did not invent this mode of historical representation, as he often gave the impression in his magnum opus the Shiji.[29]

Breathing exercises

An incomplete text dealing with breathing exercises was also excavated in Shuanggudui; along with similar texts found in Mawangdui, Zhangjiashan, and Shuihudi, it testifies to the widespread existence of gymnastic practices in Han times.[30]

Manual on dogs

The tomb also contained a Classic for Physiognomizing Dogs (Xiang gou jing 相狗經), "a text for assessing the qualities of dogs."[31] It has been compared to another text on dogs from Yinqueshan (tomb sealed in the second half of the second century BCE) and to a work on the physiognomy of horses that was excavated from a grave in Mawangdui (sealed in 168 BCE).[24]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Shaughnessy 2001, p. 8.
  2. ↑ Lewis 2006, p. 275 (earliest); Dorofeeva-Lichtmann 2007, p. 294 ("cosmograph"); Tseng 2011, p. 47 (widely "used"). A drawing of this board first published in the Chinese journal Kaogu ("Archeology") in 1978, is reproduced in Harper 1999, p. 840; Dorofeeva-Lichtmann 2007, p. 294; and Tseng 2011, p. 49.
  3. ↑ Harper 1999, p. 839 ("astrological instrument" and description); Tseng 2011, pp. 47 (lacquered) and 49 (measurements).
  4. ↑ Harper 1999, pp. 839 (on help for divination) and 841 (on Northern Dipper as deity); Tseng 2011, p. 47 (description of artefact).
  5. ↑ Harper 1999, pp. 841–43.
  6. ↑ Harper 1999, p. 839; Tseng 2011, pp. 47–49.
  7. ↑ Harper 1999, p. 839.
  8. ↑ Lewis 2006, p. 278.
  9. ↑ Wu 2009, pp. 83–4
  10. ↑ Shaughnessy 2001, pp. 9 ("largest single text among the Fuyang strips"; 752 fragments) and 10 (3,119 characters).
  11. ↑ Shaughnessy 2001, pp. 10 (too fragmentary; no info on sequence) and 12 (close to received text).
  12. ↑ Shaughnessy 2001, pp. 9 ("formulaic divination statements"; comparison with Mawangdui Yijing) and 10 (2,009 out of 3,119 characters are divination statements).
  13. ↑ Shaughnessy 2001, p. 18 and note.
  14. ↑ Kern 2005, pp. 152 (number of fragments) and 156 (number of characters).
  15. ↑ Kern 2005, p. 150.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Kern 2005, p. 152.
  17. ↑ Kern 2005, p. 153.
  18. ↑ Wilkinson 2000, p. 794.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Hayhoe 1992, p. 28.
  20. ↑ Wilkinson 2000, p. 49, note 38.
  21. ↑ Sabban 2000, p. 807.
  22. ↑ Harper 1998, p. 34; Unschuld & Zheng 2005, p. 21.
  23. ↑ Hsu 2010, p. 24.
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Sterckx 2002, p. 27.
  25. ↑ Harper 1998, p. 33.
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Harper 1998, p. 34.
  27. ↑ Hu 1989, pp. 1–6; Vankeerberghen 2007, p. 297. An illustration of the 32 fragments can be found in Hu 1989, pp. 24–25, and in Dorofeeva-Lichtmann 2004, p. 16.
  28. ↑ Vankeerberghen 2007, p. 298.
  29. ↑ Vankeerberghen 2007, p. 299.
  30. ↑ Graziani 2009, p. 465.
  31. ↑ Shaughnessy 2001, p. 27.

Bibliography

Works cited

  • Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, Vera (2004), "Spatial Organization of Ancient Chinese Texts (Preliminary Remarks)", in Karine Chemla (ed.), History of Science, History of Text, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 3–49, ISBN 1-4020-2320-0 .
  • Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, Vera (2007), "Mapless Mapping: Did the Maps of the Shan hai jing Ever Exist?", in Francesca Bray, Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, and Georges Métailié (eds.), Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China: The Warp and the Weft, Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, pp. 217–94, ISBN 978-90-04-16063-7 .
  • Graziani, Romain (2009), "The subject and the sovereign: exploring the self in early Chinese self-cultivation", in John Lagerwey and Mark Kalinowski (eds.), Early Chinese Religion. Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC–220 AD), Leiden: Brill, pp. 459–518, ISBN 978-90-04-16835-0 .
  • Harper, Donald (1998), Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts, London and New York: Kegan Paul International, ISBN 0-7103-0582-6 .
  • Harper, Donald (1999), "Warring States Natural Philosophy and Occult Thought", in Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 813–84, ISBN 0-521-47030-7 .
  • Hayhoe, Ruth (1992), Education and Modernization: The Chinese Experience, Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, ISBN 0-08-037411-5 .
  • Hsu, Elisabeth (2010), Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-51662-4 .
  • Hu, Pingsheng 胡平生 (1989), "Some Notes on the Organization of the Han Bamboo 'Annals' Found at Fuyang (translated by Deborah Porter)", Early China 14: 1–25 .
  • Kern, Martin (2005), "The Odes in Excavated Manuscripts", in Martin Kern (ed.), Text and Ritual in Early China, Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 149–93, ISBN 978-0-295-98787-3 .
  • Lewis, Mark Edward (2006), The Construction of Space in Early China, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, ISBN 0-7914-6608-6 .
  • Sabban, Françoise (2000), "Quand la forme transcende l'objet. Histoire des pâtes alimentaires en Chine (IIIe siècle av. J.-C.–IIIe siècle apr. J.-C.)" [When the form transcends the thing: history of pasta in China, 3rd century BC – 3rd century AD], Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 55 (4): 791–824 .
  • Shaughnessy, Edward L. (2001), "The Fuyang Zhou Yi and the Making of a Divination Manual", Asia Major, Third Series 14 (1): 7–18 .
  • Sterckx, Roel (2002), The Animal and the Daemon in Early China, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, ISBN 0-7914-5270-0 .
  • Tseng, Lillian Lan-ying (2011), Picturing Heaven in Early China, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-06069-2 .
  • Unschuld, Paul U.; Zheng, Jinsheng (2005), "Manuscripts as sources in the history of Chinese medicine (translated from German by Mitch Cohen)", in Vivienne Lo and Christopher Cullen (eds.), Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang medical manuscripts, New York: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 19–44, ISBN 0-415-34295-3 .
  • Vankeerberghen, Griet (2007), "The Tables (biao) in Sima Qian's Shi ji: Rhetoric and Remembrance", in Francesca Bray, Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, and Georges Métailié (eds.), Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China: The Warp and the Weft, Leiden and Boston: E,J. Brill, pp. 295–311, ISBN 978-90-04-16063-7 .
  • Wilkinson, Endymion (2000), Chinese History: A Manual. Revised and enlarged, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: Harvard University Asia Center, ISBN 0-674-00247-4 .
  • Wu, Zhongxian (2009), Seeking the Spirit of the Book of Change: 8 Days to Mastering a Shamanic Yijing (I Ching) Prediction System, London and Philadelphia: Singing Dragon, ISBN 978-1-84819-020-7 .

Further reading

  • Greatrex, Roger (1994), "An Early Western Han Synonymicon: The Fuyang Copy of the Cang Jie pian", in Joakim Enwall (ed.), Outstretched Leaves on His Bamboo Staff: Essays in Honour of Göran Malmqvist on his 70th Birthday, Stockholm: Association of Oriental Studies, pp. 97–113 .
  • Xing, Wen 邢文 (2003), "Hexagram Pictures and Early Yi Schools: Reconsidering the Book of Changes in Light of Excavated Yi Texts", Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies 51: 571–604 .
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