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The Time of the Stone Drum Inscriptions: An Excursion in the Diachronic Analysis of Chou Script*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2015

Gilbert L. Mattos
Gilbert L. Mattos*
Affiliation:
Foreign Broadcast Information Service
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Extract

In their attempts to date the ten Shih-ku, or Stone Drums (hereafter SD), which are generally regarded to be the earliest stone monuments unearthed in China to date, Chinese scholars have frequently cited the style of the script in the SD inscriptions as a telling feature of their date (e.g., Yao Ta-jung 1911, Ma Heng 1931, Ch'iang Yün-k'ai 1935, Yang Shou-ch'i 1935, Tai Chün-jen 1952, Na Chih-liang 1958, T'ang Lan 1958, Chang Kuang-yüan 1966, and so forth). Yet their analyses of the script and conclusions have differed considerably, with final assessments differing by as many as 1700 years! The primary reason for this disparity, in my opinion, is that the problem has never been approached systematically. The usual procedure has been to select a handful of graphs from the inscriptions which either point to a very early date for the SD texts or a later date, depending on the author's point of view.

Type
Articles
Information
Early China , Volume 3 , Fall 1977 , pp. 36 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Study of Early China 1977

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Footnotes

*

This is a revised version of a paper read at the 27th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, San Francisco, California, March 24-26, 1975. The latter paper was based on Part III, Chapt. 2 of my doctoral dissertation, “The Stone Drums of Ch'in,” University of Washington, 1973, written under the supervision of Professor Paul L-M. Serruys, who first suggested the Stone Drum inscriptions as a dissertation topic and whose patient and scholarly guidance contributed significantly to my work. I am also indebted to the other members of the Dissertation Supervisory Committee, Professors Jerry Norman and Wang Ching-hsien , for their valuable comments, suggestions and encouragement. I should also like to express my sincere thanks to Mrs. Dora Fugh Lee for having kindly written the modern Chinese characters appearing in Tables 1-4 in this paper.

References

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