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.