The present article on the recently excavated neolithic painted pottery fron Ta-ti-wan, Kansu, is intended as a follow-up to a comprehensive treatment of neolithic pottery published in the BMFEA 1981 and is written in light of a re-assessment by some Chinese scholars of the relationships between the Kansu and Central Plains styles. According to the view offered here, the Miao-ti-kou style is seen in its nascent phase at Ta-ti-wan and is explained as having developed from a combination of elements from the Pan-p'o and Wei River styles. The Wei River style is perceived to derive from Ma-chia-yao, although the later stages of Ma-chia-yao may have been coeval with the florescence of Miao-ti-kou.

Scholars trained in Taiwan tend to read the oracle-bone crack notation as shang chi, “highly auspicious”; scholars in the People's Republic read the same graphs as erh kao,“two reports.” In the first part of this article, a reexamination of the evidence, which was significantly assisted by Ho Hou-hsüan's presence at Berkeley, leads me to conclude that, contrary to what I wrote in Sources of Shang History, erh kao is the correct reading. The second part of the article considers the possible meaning of various kao crack notations, how certain strategic period II inscriptions might be punctuated and translated, and how we can explain the disappearance of kao and the appearance of chi, “auspicious,” as a crack notation in period III and later; some account of the discussions at the Berkeley “Workshop on Divination and Portent Interpretation in China” is provided. Finally, I suggest that kao, “report,” may have referred to the sounds produced by the cracking, but it is clear that we need to know more about the technical aspects of crack production. The comments of five scholars on the hypotheses proposed are given at the end of the article, together with my reply.

Scholarly opinion is divided on the question of whether the cultural remains of Erlitou Periods III and IV belong to the early Shang. This paper carries the analysis of the remains from these two periods one step further, emphasizing a group of new cultural elements, including li-cauldrons, wide-mouthed zun-beakers, curled lip round-bottom pen-basins, and narrow-mouthed long-necked weng-jars and jia-tripods. These artifacts are compared to similar remains from Zhengzhou Erligang and the obvious similarities between the two are pointed out. The Erlitou III and IV group of cultural elements exhibits a tendency to replace and assimilate that group of cultural elements originally presented in Erlitou Periods I and II, thus making clear that the differences and changes between the remains of II and III have epoch-making significance. A similar phenomenon can be observed to take place in the cultural features of the Central Plains with the change in dynasties between the Shang and Zhou and between the Zhou and Qin periods. It is proposed that the changes appearing between the Period II and Period III remains reflect a contemporary social change. Since the foundations of a large palace were discovered among the Period III cultural remains from the Yanshi Erlitou site, and since this site agrees with the location of Tang's capital Xi Bo, as recorded in surviving literature, Erlitou Periods III and IV may already belong to the Shang dynasty. On the basis of this analysis we have reason to believe that during the time of Cheng Tang the development of the culture of the Shang tribe reached a major turning point. At the time of its establishment the Shang kingdom appears on the Central Plains as an early slave state possessing a certain level of civilization. The discovery and identification of the cultural remains of the early Shang will be significant in the exploration of pre-Shang or Xia culture.

The “Duo You ding,” discovered in 1980 in Chang'an county, Shaanxi, contains a 270-graph inscription recording a major battle between Zhou and Xianyun chariotry. In addition to presenting a complete translation of the inscription, this paper attempts to specify the date of the events narrated. The argument is developed along three lines of inquiry. First, it is shown that personal names mentioned in the inscription require that the events took place shortly after the tenth year of King Xuan's reign (i.e., 818 B.C.). Second, evidence from other bronze inscriptions is adduced to show that there was fighting between the Zhou and Xianyun in the years 816-15, suggesting that the battle described in the “Duo You ding” may have been part of this larger warfare. Third, comparison of internal calendrical notations in the inscription with other evidence for the calendrical significance of Zhou victory celebrations not only confirms the first two conclusions but also allows the date to be specified as the tenth month of 816 B.C. Finally, all of this information is correlated to give a rough outline of the Zhou-Xianyun war and to suggest some of its historical significance.

The Zhengzhou Shang dynasty site is the location of an early Shang city, vast in area and abundant in archaeological remains, which was discovered by Chinese archaeologists in the middle and lower Yellow River basin during the early fifties. Within the site there is a Shang dynasty rammed-earth wall extending north-south in a rectangular shape and having a circumference of 6960 meters. These are the earliest Shang wall remains discovered to date.

Based on the stratigraphy and vessel types discovered in the course of excavating the four sides of the wall, it is certain that this wall is slightly later than the late Erlitou period, and that construction on it began before the lower strata of the Shang Erligang period, the “Yin Ruins” at Anyang. The discovery of the Zhengzhou Shang site was definitely not accidental. It represents an important stage in the development of ancient Chinese rammed-earth wall architecture. The method of construction places it in a continuous line of development from the rammed-earth wall of the Henan area middle and late Longshan culture and the late Erlitou rammed-earth platform foundation to the rammed-earth foundations of the palaces of the Yin Ruins at Anyang.

The grand scale of the Zhengzhou Shang wall, and the fact that inside and outside the wall were found palace foundations and workshops for the production of bronze, bone, and ceramic articles as well as numerous widespread storage pits, wells, ditches, house foundations, and tombs, and that many bronze, jade, primitive porcelain, pottery, stone, bone, and clamshell artifacts have been excavated here, including also some carved ivory pieces, pottery sculpture, and inscribed bones and pottery, lead us to conclude that the Zhengzhou Shang site was one of the early Shang capitals. Whether it is to be identified as Ao or Bo we cannot now say. In any case, the discovery and excavation of this site has supplied direct evidence of the greatest importance for the history of early Shang politics, economics, cultural, and military affairs.

Twenty-two bronze nao-bells dating to the late Shang and early Western Zhou periods have been unearthed from the five southern provinces of Hunan, Jiangsi, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Fujian. Of these, sixteen were from Hunan, three from Zhejiang, and one each from the remaining three provinces. These bells can be classified into four categories: type A has an animal mask decoration (eleven examples); type B has a cloud pattern (three examples); type C has nipples (only one example); type D has stalks (mei, seven examples).

The nao is a bell that can produce two tones. It can be used in sacrificial offerings as well as war. Because most of these bells have been discovered at the top, mid-section, or foot of mountains or on the banks of a river, we surmise that they may have been used in contemporary sacrifices to the mountains and streams, wind and rain, and stars, etc. Based on the periodization of the style of their shape and decoration we conclude that type A may be as early as late Shang, type B can be assigned to the end of the Shang, type C is from the beginning of the Zhou and type D belongs to the early Western Zhou. They developed from type A to B to C to D and then to the yong-bell. The characteristics of southern nao bells are: they are large, thick and heavy; most have whorls on the circular handle; many animal masks and cloud and lightning patterns are formed from thick lines among the decoration; the entire body is usually covered with decoration; most appear singly, and they were set up on their stands with the mouth facing up. In contrast, northern nao-bells are very small, they have no whorls on the handle, their decoration is simple, and they are unearthed in groups of several together.

The old accepted theories concerning the direction of cultural influence between China and the Eurasian steppes during the Eastern Zhou period need to be reassessed in the light of recent archaeological discoveries. The pictorial scenes on the “Hunting Hu,” the trend toward naturalism, the long sword and scabbard slide, all credited at one time or another to northern barbarian influence, can now be shown to reflect Chinese innovations instead. A Shang priority can be recognized for the coiled feline, which was to become a leitmotif of the steppe “Animal Style” world. In the future, extreme caution is suggested when attempting to identify the ultimate cultural source for any unusual steppe or Chinese feature that seems exotic.

The hypothesis presented here is that in Classical Chinese syntax, nouns and noun phrases show signs of being, like verbs, capable of functioning as main predications. A definition of the noun and verb in Classical Chinese is offered, based on analysis of passages from pre-Han and Han texts, and it is argued that Classical Chinese can be more precisely understood by application of the principles of formal logic to the study of quantification, negation, conditionals, and pronominalization. This approach contrasts with approaches based on more traditional phonological, etymological, or philological methods.

The northern border of Shang culture moved south during the Yinxu period. At the same time bronzes belonging to the Northern complex spread through a vast region to the north of the Shang cultural area.

The appearance of Northern bronzes, characterized by specific types of short swords, fu battle-axes and daggers -- which we may take to represent the Northern bronzes of Period 1 -- must predate the Yinxu culture. During the early Yinxu period they exerted a fairly consider able influence. Analysis of the bronzes unearthed from the Fu Hao tomb reveals that, at the time of Wu Ding, the Shang were already using some Northern bronze articles. The Shang artisans not only copied Northern bronzes, they also adopted their chemical composition to improve traditional Shang tools and weapons.

On the other hand, bronzes from the Shang culture area exerted a similar influence on Northern bronzes. Some of these influences were limited to relatively close areas, whereas the ripples of other influence extended far into the distant regions. For example, the Northern “beak halberd” the creation of which was influenced by the Shang ge-halberd, was diffused as far as the Minusinsk Basin. The origin of the bronze bow-shaped article, however, which has, in the past, been taken as strong evidence for the extension of Shang influence as far as this basin may very well be in the region to the north of the Shang culture, and the Yinxu style bow-shaped bronze may, on the contrary, have been a variant of the Northern article which developed during the early Yinxu period. The influence of the authentic Yinxu style bow-shaped article only extended as far as the area of Jibei . The lobeless, geometric-patterned, hollow-socketed fu-axe, which developed from the hollow-socketed fu of the Erligang to Yinxu periods, may have early on exerted an influence as far as the southern edges of the Eastern Siberian forest.

A reexamination of the ties between the Karasuk and Yinxu cultures is needed. The theory that Seima bronzes exerted an influence on the Yinxu culture must be abandoned.

At the time of the Shang's arrival at Yinxu their material culture was characterized by: (1) oracle-bone inscriptions; (2) bronze decor in Loehr Styles IV and V; (3) bronzes inscribed with societal emblems and ancestral “dedications”; (4) particular ceramic forms; (5) rammed-earth house foundations; and (6) pit graves lined with wooden chambers. These features appear for the first time in association with Tomb 5, that of Fu Hao, the consort of Wu Ding. Shang cultural data at Yinxu earlier than the Tomb 5 period are scarce and scattered. They involve: (1) the architectural remains at Xiaotun before the rammed earth house foundations; (2) earlier Shang tombs (M188, 232, 333, 388); and (3) an earlier Shang tomb at Wuguancun Locus North. Conspicuous cultural changes took place from Pottery Period I (prior to the Tomb 5 period) to Pottery Period II (Tomb 5 period), including: (1) expansion of the area of occupation; (2) oracle-bone inscriptions, rammed-earth house foundations, and large tombs, all evidently associated with the royal house; (3) Period II pottery becomes predominant and Loehr's bronze Styles IV and V come to replace I-III, with inscriptions becoming numerous. It is suggested that the series of changes that occurred with the onset of the Tomb 5 period resulted from Pangeng's move of his capital to this site. If this is so, then the period of the three kings from Pangeng to Xiaoyi must be found within the period of Tomb 5 rather than within the Pottery Period I.

One of the chief aims of my recently completed intellectual biography of Wang Kuo-wei (1877-1927) is to provide a critical account of the evolution of that scholar's ideas in, and the substance of his contribution to, the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history. Because Wang Kuo-wei: An Intellectual Biography will not be published until 1986 (Harvard University Press, Harvard East Asian Series 101), I have drawn on those pages of my manuscript that bear most closely on the interests of Early China readers to provide the following research note regarding the claim of Li Chi, Fu Ssu-nien, Kuo Mo-jo, P'u-i, and others that Lo Chen-yü's major works on oracle-bone inscriptions were, in fact, plagiarized.

Since April 1982, Professor Dr. Ulrich Unger (Ostasiatisches Seminar der Universitat Münster, 4400 Münster, Prinzipalmarkt 3811, West Germany) has been circulating a series of research notes in German under the title “Hao Ku : Sinologische Rundbriefe.” The following brief English abstracts have been prepared by Lisbeth Egerod Hubbard of the Department of Oriental Languages, University of California, Berkeley. Interested scholars may obtain copies of the German originals by writing Unger directly.

The late Shang represents a peak in bronze culture, and was the culmination of a long period of development. The words of the Duke of Zhou in the “Wu yi” chapter of the Shang shu that “The kings who arose after [Zu Jia], during their (whole) life enjoyed ease …. After this there were none who had any chance of reaching a high age…” is not sufficient to be relied upon. Nor is it appropriate to evaluate the entirety of Late Shang history solely on the basis of the large number of oracle bones from the reign of Wu Ding. The primary purpose of this paper is to demonstrate, through an analysis of the contents of oracle-bone inscriptions from the Middle Late Shang, i.e., from Lin Xin to Wen Wu Ding, that there was continued progress in the fields of society, economy, and culture and in the political and military affairs of the ruling house.

Agriculture under the direct control of the Shang ruling house, including all sorts of agricultural activities, continued as before, and in some cases advanced beyond that of the previous age. In the area of handicrafts, metal casting, the “hundred craftsmen,” organizations of craftsmen and the official position of Director of Craftsmen all appear in the oracle bones. In terms of archaeology, the number, shape, manufacture, decoration, and inscriptions of bronze vessels reached a new plateau. The palace architecture and the geographical extent of residences at Yinxu were greatly expanded.

This paper tries to study the typology, terminology, and functions of the jades of the Shang dynasty by using an archaeological approach based mainly on archaeological materials from scientific excavations. This contrasts with the old method which relied upon questionable textual evidence and less well-documented jades in public and private collections. The main points of the paper are as follows:

(1) Ceremonial jades: Some jades of the Shang dynasty were ceremonial not practical objects, but the system of six jades called rui yu (auspicious jades) in the three Books of Rites is a fabrication devised by the Confucian scholars of the period of the late Zhou and early Han dynasties, who used what they could find of the surviving jade objects and customs of use and supplemented old texts and oral traditions with their own imaginations so as to make the system perfectly rational according to Confucian standards. In our excavations, we have not found a single case in which the jades were grouped in a set of six, nor have we found any evidence to verify the uses mentioned in the Books of Rites.

In a previous article in these pages (EC 7.1981-82:2-37) I reported on the discovery in the jinben version of the Bamboo Annals of verifiable records of the planetary conjunctions of 1576 and 1059 B.C. I argued that literary and chronological evidence drawn from a variety of Zhou and Han sources indicates that the two celestial events were taken at the time to signal Heaven's conferral of legitimate right to rule on the new dynasty, first Shang and then Zhou.

If this view is correct, the discoveries not only establish the historicity, and indeed the great antiquity, of certain chronological and atronomical records in the Bamboo Annals, they also prove that a concept akin to the Zhou “Mandate of Heaven” must have existed as early as the founding of the Shang in the midsecond millennium B.C., just as implied in the Shangshu. Equally noteworthy is the finding that numerous Zhou and Han works, including those of a notoriously “soft” variety such as the apocryphal “weft” commentaries of mid-Han date, contain mythicized though recognizable accounts of the same celestial phenomena.

This paper takes the position that the “late Wu Ting” or “Period II” dating for M5, now accepted by many scholars, cannot be reconciled with the advanced typological and stylistic qualities exhibited by so many of its bronze vessels, and that therefore the reading of the M5 bronze inscriptions as “Fu Hao” and the viewing of this as the name of a single individual woman, the consort of Wu Ting, constitute a methodology which must be rejected. Instead, the inscriptions could be read as “Fu Tzu,” with Tzu ( ) recognized as the feminization of the Shang surname Tzu ( ). Since this name would have been inherited by all daughters of the Tzu clan, there would have been at any one time a sizable number of royal women of various ages appropriately titled “Fu Tzu” ; and the necessity of identifying the Fu Tzu of the M5 inscriptions only with a woman named in the Wu Ting oracle bones can be eliminated. It is, moreover, likely that even in the Wu Ting oracle-bone inscriptions the references to “Fu Tzu” actually concerned several different ladies of the royal clan—daughters or aunts of the king, as well as consorts (the royal clan being endogamous).

One of the characteristic forms of the Shih Chi taken over by Pan Ku in his Han Shu is the short passage of critical appraisal appended to each chapter. Both Pan Ku and Ssu-ma Ch'ien felt free to use these passages to express their personal opinions--sometimes directly and sometimes with subtle indirection—not only on the facts presented in the preceding chapter but also on pressing issues of their own day. Students of the Han Shu refer to these passages as tsan, after the phrase with which they are introduced in that work, tsan yüeh (“In appraisal we say”). These tsan vary in length from a few lines to several pages.

One of the most highly developed of all Pan Ku's tsan is that appended to Han Shu 94, the “Memoir on the Hsiung-nu.” It is a substantial, well-written essay and at over one thousand characters in length, by far the longest in the entire Han Shu. It reveals much about Pan Ku's historical method and also provides us with the key to his attitude toward barbarian management in his own day. Without the understanding provided by the tsan, it is not possible to appreciate fully the implications of the form and organization of the “Memoir on the Hsiung-nu” itself.