Cangjie.Info
Cangjie.Info
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"The emergence of literacy has been an extraordinary behavioral innovation. It ranks alongside the transition to agriculture as one of the most consequential changes that our species has undergone during the Holocene, sitting at the root of a branching tree of transformational effects on technology and social institutions. All six billion of us, including those who do no read or write, are subject to some subset of literacy's implications. In a few millennia we have gone from a state where no one farmed and no one read, to one in which not only our preferred ways of life but our population figures are entirely dependent on both." (download)
"This chapter reviews the evidence for the earliest attested literacy in China and the range of interpretations that have been imposed on that evidence. The most difficult challenge confronting attempts to understand the nature of early Chinese literacy and its emergence lies in handling the gap between areas of literate productivity that are directly attested and those whose existence can (at best) only be inferred, or argued for. Undoubtedly, the extensive remains of literate productivity that we have from China's late second millennium – overwhelmingly dominated, numerically speaking, by records of divinations, or "oracle bone inscriptions", from Anyang – are only a fraction of the volume of texts that were written during the period. It is also likely that categories of written document have so far escaped direct archaeological attestation. What is not selfevident, though, is the nature of these "missing genres" – their functions, the periods during which they were current, and most importantly their quantity and the role that they played in the evolution of literacy. What kinds of evidence or reasoning may we legitimately use to reconstruct a more complete picture of early Chinese literacy, including possible missing genres of text, from the more limited basis of what is in fact attested?" (download)
In 1991, a pit (recorded as H3) containing a large number of turtle plastrons inscribed with divination records was discovered east of Huayuanzhuang 花園莊 village, within the limits of the moated enclosure at Xiaotun at the core of the Anyang site cluster. The careful disposal of the inscribed objects in a single pit, and their relative homogeneity (stylistically, and in terms of the content of the inscriptions) suggest that this was the output of a single divination workshop, one that was previously unknown and operating at a location further south within the Xiaotun enclosure than those identified hitherto. This homogeneity, and the quantity of well-preserved texts, provides an unprecedented snapshot of the workings of a single divination workshop, and allows us to reconstruct in considerable detail the activities of a group of collaborating specialists working in what this dissertation proposes was the kind of institution that fostered the early growth of Chinese literacy. (download)
"In this chapter I discuss the material evidence for how literacy skills were acquired at Anyang. I aim to show that there is plentiful evidence that literacy training was taking place within the divination workshops at Anyang, and that this training was producing specialist keepers of divination records, rather than scribal generalists. The extensive evidence for scribal training within the divination workshops supports the more general hypothesis of the present work: that the maintenance of divination records was a central rather than peripheral aspect of early Chinese literacy, and that the samples of early writing recovered archaeologically are broadly representative of the range of late second-millennium Chinese literacy. The fact that the divination workshops needed to train their scribes from scratch, rather than relying on a more widespread generalist literacy sustained by scribal schools, is in keeping with the evidence presented in Chapter 2 that literacy during the late second millennium had not yet been generalized beyond the handful of genres actually attested archaeologically. There were no scribal schools, only the specific training required for particular genres such as the maintenance of divination records." (download)
"Electronic transcriptions have the potential to transform the way we study texts. In particular, they are powerful tools for extracting quantified information from large text corpora. This is especially useful when dealing with material such as the Late Shang divination records, which are highly formulaic and repetitive. Individual inscriptions tell us little in isolation, but pooling information from large numbers of them allows us to approach more interesting questions." (download)