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Since 1899 more than 73,000 pieces of inscribed divination shell
and bone have been found inside the moated enclosure of the
Anyang-core at the former capital of the late Shang state. Nearly
all of these divinations were done on behalf of the Shang kingsand
has led to the apt characterization that oracle bone inscriptions
describe their motivations, experiences, and priorities. There are,
however, much smaller sets of divination accounts that were done on
behalf of members of the Shang elite other than the king.First
noticed in the early 1930's, grouped and periodized shortly
thereafter, oracle bone inscriptions produced explicitly by or on
behalf of "royal familygroups" reveal information about key aspects
of daily life in Shang societythat are barely even mentioned in
Western scholarship. The newly published Huayuanzhuang East Oracle
Bone inscriptions are a spectacular addition to the corpus of texts
from Anyang: hundreds of intact or largely intact turtle shells and
bovine scapulae densely inscribed with records of the divinations
in which they were used. They were produced on the behalf of a
mature prince of the royal family whose parents, both alive and
still very much active, almost certainly were the twenty-first
Shang king Wu Ding (r. c. 1200 B.C.) and his consort Lady Hao (fu
Hao). The Huayuanzhuang East corpus is an unusually homogeneous set
of more than two thousand five hundred divination records, produced
over a short period of time on behalf of a prince of the royal
family. There are typically multiple records of divinations
regarding the same or similar topics that can be synchronized
together, which not only allows for remarkable access into the
esoteric world of divination practice, but also produce
micro-reconstructions of what is essentially East Asia's earliest
and most complete "day and month planner." Because these texts are
unusually linguistically transparent and well preserved,
homogeneous in orthography and content, and published to an
unprecedentedly high standard, they are also ideal material for
learning to read and interpret early epigraphic texts. The
Huayuanzhuang East oracle bone inscriptions are a tremendously
important Shang archive of "material documents" that were produced
by a previously unknown divination and scribal organization. They
expose us to an entirely fresh set of perspectives and
preoccupationscentering ona member of the royal family at the
commencement of China's historical period. The completely annotated
English translation of the inscriptions is the first of its kind,
and is a vibrant new source of Shang history that can be accessedto
rewrite and supplement what we know about early Chinese
civilization and life in the ancient world. Before the discerning
reader are the motives, preoccupations, and experiences of a late
Shang prince working simultaneously in service both for his
Majesty, his parents, and hisown family.
In his last essay just weeks before his death at the age of 91,
David S. Nivison says, "Breaking into a formal system - such as a
chronology - must be like breaking into a code. If you are
successful, success will show right off." Since the late 1970's
Nivison has focused his scholarship on breaking the code of Three
Dynasties (Xia, Shang, Zhou) chronology by establishing an
innovative methodology based on mourning periods, astronomical
phenomenon, and numerical manipulations derived from them. Nivison
is most readily known in the field for revising (and then revising
again) the date of the Zhou conquest of Shang, and for his theory
that Western Zhou kings employed two calendars (His so-called "Two
yuan" theory), the second being set in effect upon the death of the
new king's predecessor and counted from the completion of
post-mourning rites for him (i.e., a "second 'first' year").
Nivison's enabling discovery that the Bamboo Annals (BA) had a
historical basis was initially designed to make Wang Guowei's
analysis of lunar phase terms (the so-called "Four quarter" theory
that separated each month into four quarters) work for Western Zhou
bronze inscriptions. In order to do so he had to assume that some
inscriptions used a second yuan counted from completion of
mourning. The king's death was the most important event late in a
reign, so this implied that a king's reign-of-record was normally
counted from the second yuan, omitting initial mourning years. It
follows that when the unexpressed mourning years are forgotten (or
edited out) but the dates of the beginning and end of the dynasty
are still known, the remaining reigns-of-record cluster toward the
beginning and end, and a reign in the middle is enlarged. Problems,
ideas, and solutions like the one described above are found
throughout this new collection of important works on chronology,
astronomy, and historiography.
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