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阜陽漢簡‧詩經

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Text ID
KR2p0147
Date
-600–-300
Dynasty
周

Fùyáng Hànjiǎn‧Shījīng 阜陽漢簡‧詩經

Fùyáng Han Bamboo Slips — Book of Odes (Shījīng 詩經)

(anonymous; pre-canonical manuscript tradition)

About the work

A highly fragmentary early Han bamboo-slip manuscript of the Shījīng 詩經 (Book of Odes / Book of Songs), recovered from a tomb at Shuānggǔduī 雙古堆, Fùyáng 阜陽, Ānhuī Province, excavated 1977. Probably the tomb of Xiàhóu Zào 夏侯灶, Marquis of Rǔyīn 汝陰, sealed ca. 165 BCE. It is the earliest known manuscript witness to the Shījīng and predates the standardization of the Máo 毛 recension.

Abstract

Provenance. The Shuānggǔduī tomb at Fùyáng, northwest Ānhuī, was excavated by the Ānhuī Provincial Museum in 1977. The occupant is conventionally identified as Xiàhóu Zào 夏侯灶 (d. 165 BCE), son of Xiàhóu Yīng 夏侯嬰, a general who served Liú Bāng 劉邦 in the founding of the Hàn dynasty. The tomb was sealed in 165 BCE during the reign of Emperor Wén 文帝. In addition to the Shījīng fragments, the tomb yielded bamboo-slip texts of the Cāng Jié piān 蒼頡篇 (a primer), a Rì Shū 日書 (almanac), and a fragmentary Zhuāngzǐ 莊子 text, among others.

Content and physical state. The Shījīng slips are in an extremely poor state of preservation: only c. 170 characters are legible, distributed across fragments associated with multiple sections of the text. The digital text begins with the heading 國風周南第一 (Guófēng Zhōunán dì yī), followed by the beginning of Quán ěr 卷耳 (Ode 3), and moves through Jiū mù 樛木 (Ode 4), to Shào nán dì èr 召南第二, with Quècháo 鵲巢 (Ode 12), Cǎi fán 采蘩 (Ode 13), Cǎi píng 采蘋 (Ode 15), Gān táng 甘棠 (Ode 16), Xíng lù 行露 (Ode 17), and Gāo yáng 羔羊 (Ode 18). Many odes are represented only by their title or a single line; the note 𠦜八字 (“missing eight characters”) appears for some.

Textual significance. Despite its fragmentary state, the Fùyáng Shījīng is of considerable textual importance for several reasons:

  1. It predates the received Máo Shī 毛詩 recension by roughly a century. The Máo commentary tradition (associated with Máo Hēng 毛亨 and Máo Cháng 毛萇) achieved canonical status only in the Later Hàn. The Fùyáng manuscript thus represents a pre-canonical textual state.
  2. Graphic variants in the surviving characters differ from the received Máo text, suggesting either a different recension (pài 派) or simply the normal variation of manuscript transmission. The Fùyáng text cannot be confidently identified with any of the four named Hàn Shī schools (Máo 毛, Qí 齊, Lǔ 魯, Hán 韓), partly because so little text survives.
  3. The sequential arrangement of odes, insofar as it can be verified, appears to correspond to the received ordering of the Guófēng section, suggesting that the canonical sequence had already stabilized by the early second century BCE.

Dating. The composition date for the Shījīng (the textual tradition as a whole) is conventionally placed between approximately 1000 and 600 BCE for the earlier odes, with the collection reaching its received form by the late Warring States period; the bracket notBefore: −600, notAfter: −300 reflects the probable period of final compilation. The manuscript was deposited ca. 165 BCE.

Translations and research

  • 胡平生、韓自強, 《阜陽漢簡詩經研究》, 上海古籍出版社, 1988 — standard study and transcription.
  • 韓自強, 「阜陽雙古堆漢簡概述」, 《文物》 1983.2, pp. 21–23 — excavation report.
  • Shaughnessy, Edward L. “The Fuyang Manuscript of the Shijing.” In Rewriting Early Chinese Texts. SUNY Press, 2006, pp. 135–184 — best accessible English-language analysis.
  • Kern, Martin. “The Odes in Excavated Manuscripts.” In Martin Kern, ed., Text and Ritual in Early China. University of Washington Press, 2005, pp. 149–193 — comparative study of all pre-Han Odes manuscripts.
  • Karlgren, Bernhard. The Book of Odes. Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1950 — standard translation of the received text for comparison.

Other points of interest

The Fùyáng site is unusual in yielding a Zhuāngzǐ manuscript alongside Confucian and administrative texts, indicating that early Han aristocratic libraries did not observe the sharp ideological boundaries that later tradition imposed between the classical schools. The Cāng Jié piān fragments from the same tomb are also significant for the history of Chinese primer education.

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