Recent excavations of bronze artifacts from the Western Zhou dynasty (1046-771 B.C.) provide the focus for this collection of essays, which analyze the nature and patterns of lineages emerging from the tombs of ancient lords of states and historically significant individuals located throughout China, including Beijing, Shandong, Shanxi, and Gansu. The editor and his nine contributors provide detailed textual analyses of the inscriptions found on excavated bronze vessels. Their essays offer careful reconstructions of the genealogies, kinship structures, political identities, and relationship networks of leading court figures from Bronze-Age China. This rich schol ..

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of documents of all sorts have been unearthed in China, opening whole new fields of study and transforming our modern understanding of ancient China. While these discoveries have necessarily taken place in China, Western scholars have also contributed to the study of these documents throughout this entire period. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of these Western scholars to the field of Chinese paleography, and especially to study of oracle-bone inscriptions, bronze and stone inscriptions, and manuscripts written on bamboo and silk. Each of these topics is provide ..

In recent years, three ancient manuscripts relating to the Yi jin g (I Ching ), or Classic of Changes , have been discovered. The earliest--the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi--dates to about 300 B.C.E. and shows evidence of the text's original circulation. The Guicang , or Returning to Be Stored , reflects another ancient Chinese divination tradition based on hexagrams similar to those of the Yi jing . In 1993, two manuscripts were found in a third-century B.C.E. tomb at Wangjiatai that contain almost exact parallels to the Guicang 's early quotations, supplying new information on the performance of early Chinese divination. Finally, the Fuyang Zhou Y i was excavated f ..