Gǔjīn wénzì biǎo 古今文字表
Table of Ancient and Modern Graphs by 蕭繹 (撰)
About the work
A modern reconstruction of 蕭繹 Xiāo Yì’s lost Gǔjīn wénzì biǎo 古今文字表 — a paleographic table compiled by the Liáng prince and bibliophile Xiāo Yì (later Liáng Emperor Yuán, r. 552–555). The work survives chiefly as the Shàng biǎo 上表 (memorial of presentation) and a few illustrative entries. Suí shū jīngjí zhì 隋書‧經籍志 records the work; it was lost in the burning of the Jiānglíng library in 554, of which Xiāo Yì himself was the principal author of destruction. The CHANT reconstruction (CH2f1220) draws from leishū citations in the Yìwén lèijù 藝文類聚 and Tàipíng yùlǎn 太平御覽.
Abstract
The principal preserved fragment is the Shàng biǎo — the formal memorial of presentation, in classical parallel prose — that opens with the canonical claim for the origins of writing:
“Your servant has heard: Fú-xī arose and the eight trigrams gave figural form to his stroke; Xuān-yuán prospered and the spirit-tortoise displayed its lustrous pattern. Of ancient antiquity, Cāng-jié — observing the duplex symbol of the yáo lines, watching the tracks of birds and beasts — separately devised graphs to replace the knotted cords, and used the script-and-tally to keep affairs in order.”
This is the standard Liáng-period rehearsal of the origin of writing, transitioning from cosmological figuration (bā guà of Fú-xī) through divinatory imagery (the líng-guī of Xuān-yuán) to the graphic invention of Cāng-jié. The memorial then transitions to the substantive case for a Gǔjīn wénzì biǎo — i.e., a tabular comparison of ancient (gǔ) and current (jīn) graphic forms.
The work itself survives only as a small number of representative entries; the bulk of the substance is now lost. The dating bracket (552–554) follows the conventional dating of the biǎo to Xiāo Yì’s brief reign as Liáng Yuándì, when he could plausibly have presented such a memorial to the throne (or to himself).
Translations and research
No substantial dedicated Western-language secondary literature located.
- Rén Dàchūn 任大椿, Xiǎoxué gōuchén 小學鉤沈.
- Mǎ Guóhàn 馬國翰, Yùhánshānfáng jíyìshū 玉函山房輯佚書.
Other points of interest
The destruction of the work in the Jiānglíng fénshū 江陵焚書 of 554, by its own author and chief patron, is one of the great ironies of Six-Dynasties intellectual history; even Xiāo Yì’s xiǎoxué compilation was consumed in his order to burn the imperial library rather than surrender it. The surviving Shàng biǎo is essentially a posthumous artifact preserved only because copies had circulated outside the imperial collection before the burning.
Links
- Suí shū jīngjí zhì — xiǎoxué: https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&res=613103
- Yìwén lèijù: https://ctext.org/yiwen-leiju