Page 350 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

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Ten bamboo slips

1
5
Length 64-71 (25-2/ /8), width 0.5-0.8 (V*- /*)
Warring States Period (c. mid-fourth century BCE)
From Tianxingguan, Jiangling, Hubei Province
Jingzhou Prefecture Museum, Hubei Province .

Written with brush and ink, in the script current in
Chu during the fourth century BCE, the Tianxing-
guan manuscripts take their place among a growing
collection of similar objects excavated from Chu
tombs of the Warring States period. Seventy-four
unbroken bamboo slips vary from 64-71 centi-
meters in length and from 0.5-0.8 centimeters in
width; the slips are notched in two places on the
left side, upper and lower, to facilitate binding the
slips together with cords. The binding cords had
disintegrated long ago, leaving the unbroken slips
in a jumble when they were discovered between
January and March 1978 in a compartment on the
west side of the burial chamber. Their original
order in the manuscripts must be reconstructed
by Chinese archaeologists and paleographers.
This information is not yet formally published. 1
One set of slips is a funerary document, an
official record identifying the deceased and listing
the burial goods, many of which were presented by
relatives and members of the Chu elite. It is from
this tomb inventory that we know the deceased
was named Pan Cheng, a man who held aristocratic
rank as the Lord of Diyang. Such inventories have
been found in many tombs of the Warring States,
Qin, and Han periods. For the deceased, the docu-
ment must have served in part as a declaration of
status in the other world to which he had been
transferred; for archaeologists, it is an invaluable
key to names for many of the artifacts, which allows
the matching of words in classical literature with
their corresponding material objects and deepens
our knowledge of early Chinese civilization.
These bamboo slips are from the second
manuscript, a record of divination and sacrifice
performed on behalf of Pan Cheng over a period of
years. Based on the more than half-dozen divina-
tion-sacrifice records discovered since the 19605

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