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.

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.

This article uses evidence from textiles, bamboo, and bronzes to explore what the elites wore, who made up the design communities behind the elites, and how luxurious these items were considered to be in 500–300 b.c.e. China. It first examines the reliability of the art historical sources available for the reconstruction of this history and cautions the readers against certain past interpretations of the textiles and accessories of the period. It then delineates a brief history of how certain textile patterns and weaving techniques developed and how their producers selected and obtained sources of inspiration and interacted and exchanged ideas with producers of other types of artifacts. It argues that textile designers seemed to favor certain types of sources and had formed their own distinct, though not impervious, community. After carefully examining the weaving techniques of several pieces of fabric, it proposes a means of building a more reliable and solid foundation for art historical reconstruction. Textiles and accessories were symbols of the wealth, status, and power of individuals who wore them. This article will explain how a combination of the production techniques of textiles and accessories, together with a sharing of designs and techniques within the community of producers, contributed to the formation of those symbols.

This article introduces and translates an excavated text from the Juyan region here referred to as “Evaluating Swords.” Dating to the Han-Xin period, it instructs its reader on how make a general determination of the quality of steel swords based on a visual inspection. The introduction to the translation discusses the background of the text, its present condition, and the problems of orthography and usage that complicate its understanding. A transcription and additional textual and interpretive commentary accompany the English translation of the text.

The primary expertise of Noel Barnard, who died on February 14, 2016, was in bronze casting, Chu silk manuscripts, and their associated research, and he was internationally renowned for his knowledge of Chinese history and archaeology. Barnard's most important academic works included his ground-breaking Metallurgical Remains of Ancient China, with Satō Tamotsu, published in 1975, and Rubbings and Hand Copies of Bronze Inscriptions in Chinese, Japanese, European, American, and Australasian Collections 中日歐美澳紐所見所拓所摹金文彙編, with Cheong Kwong-yue. His three-volume book manuscript, Inscriptions of Chin and the San-Chin, on which he had spent almost twenty years before its completion, will be published soon. In this obituary, the author recalls his experiences, friendship, and collaboration with him.

The mythical origins of the Chinese qin have been forged by ancient literature ever since the age of Confucius, nevertheless, very little is known about the morphology of the ancient qin and its embodied symbolism. This article, by analyzing a most recently discovered ancient qin found in a fourth-century b.c.e. tomb in Jiuliandun, Zaoyang city, Hubei province, in 2002, will explore the relief carving and lacquered drawings found on the instrument itself and their symbolic significance as a representation of the worldview and philosophical state of mind of the Warring States period. I will suggest that a qin contemporaneous to Confucius and played by him looks distinctly different from the version produced by the fertile imagination of the medieval Chinese; instead, it was divided into five registers, and it is this segmented subdivision which defines the ancient qin and differentiates it fundamentally from its classical counterpart. Strikingly, the symbolic depictions in which it was clad represent not only the fertile imagination of the Chu aristocracy, but also include portrayal of the more menial tasks of the ordinary Chu farmer and herdsman as he proceeds through the cycle of the agricultural year, and thus provide the modern scholar with an extraordinarily vivid insight into contemporary Chu life.

The Iron-Age Eurasian nomads created and circulated elaborate metalworks embellished with images of entwined, abbreviated, or contorted zoomorphic anatomies. This approach to zoomorphism has entered scholarly discourse under the blanket name “animal style,” a term often used to describe a vast corpus of zoomorphic images associated with the arts of steppe pastoralists. Numerous Warring States burials across the Ordos Loop indicate the transmission and adaptation of steppe-inspired zoomorphism into the funerary cultures of China's northern zone (beifang diqu 北方地區) and the Eastern Steppe more broadly. In the Han dynasty, animal-style images seem to have been transmitted even more widely, reaching China's southern periphery at the Kingdom of Nanyue 南越 and Lelang 樂浪 in the northern Korean peninsula. The Xianbei hegemony in the post-Han period marked a new trajectory for these designs, which reached Kofun Japan in the fifth century. Thus, the original trans-steppe visual formula underwent significant regional and local translations on a material and conceptual level to fit already established Chinese design strategies, techniques, and conceptions of animality. In this essay, I explore the regional alterations applied to the “supra” animal-style visuality in the Chinese northern periphery and other regions of Chinese political influence in North and Central Asia. In so doing, I seek to understand the swift entry of nomadic visual tropes, namely a specific “pars-pro-toto” device, into the visual vocabulary of early Chinese craftsmen from the Eastern Zhou to the Northern dynasties.

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.

The early Chinese spindle-wheel was originally invented in conjunction with silk-technology and was linked to silk production, as pictured in some Han stone reliefs. It is concluded that the spindle-wheel is a Chinese Invention which may be dated to the early years of the Warring States period. In the course of time people realized the advantages of the spindle-wheel and it was adopted for plant fiber production.

The spindle-wheel may have been brought to Europe at the same time as silk-technology was introduced, most probably in the second half of the first millenium A.D. Only when the continuously working spinning-wheel with flyer was invented in fifteenth century Europe did a better and more efficient spinning device become available.

Overseen by hungry gods on the one hand or structured by impersonal cyclic forces on the other, the Eastern Han cosmos eluded a single consistent model accepted by everyone. Yet these cosmological perspectives were not competing arguments held by different people; they were inconsistent genres of discourse found within the same people and sometimes even within the same texts. Late Eastern Han mountain inscriptions may ritually appease sacrifice-eating gods with their hymns of praise, but they simultaneously describe the cosmos as a single pervasive system of qi-vapors, yinyang, and the five phases. How could these two models coexist?

Dated to 183 C.E., the “Stele to the Spirit Lord of Baishi Mountain” (baishi shenjun bei 白石神君碑) demonstrates how certain compromise positions existed between a universe overseen by external agencies and that consisting of resonating cycles. The inscription explains why this mountain deity merited sacrifice, describes the official process in which permission to sacrifice was secured, and identifies this hungry deity as one component within ritualized systems within spatial lineages and geographic bureaucracies and so he is not recognized as an entirely free agent. In addition, the inscription systematizes him by obligating him to participate in mechanical rituals of recompense and by reducing him to a ritualized Classicist stereotype, further diminishing his independence and individuality. The stele inscription s focus on ritual demonstrates how ritual lessens any perceived inconsistency between cosmic agencies and cosmic system.

This article first surveys the Han history of mountain sacrifices and mountain stelae, thereby placing the Spirit Lord of Baishi Mountain into historical context. The translation of the inscription dedicated to him follows, which for the purpose of analysis I divide into eight sections that address themes such as rituals of recompense, the generation of rain, and the transformation of the god into a Classicist hero. The conclusion summarizes how human structures such as lineage and bureaucracy fill in the gaps between these inconsistent genres of discourse human structures that result in impersonal qi-vapors becoming more human and personalized mountain deities becoming more structured.