Harappan 'non-texts'?

[Steve Farmer]

M. Witzel wrote:

>  The Chinese script of 300 BCE is not that of 300 CE!

Stephen Hodge responded:

> But it is !!   For example, I have a facsimile text of the Dao-de-jing
> from the (slightly later) 160 BCE Mawangdui tombs which I can read
> just as well as a medieval printing of the text.  By 300 BCE the
> writing of Chinese had in fact largely stabilized but each era had its
> preferred calligraphic style but this again does not intrinsically
> affect the structure or meaning of the majority of characters -- no
> more than writing roman script in "gothic" black letter or italic
> does.

I think that this is based on a misconception, Stephen. In defense
of what Michael has said, here is what Robert G. Henricks (1989: xv)
says in his introduction to his translation of the Laozi (=
Dao-de-jing) from the two extant Mawangdui manuscripts (tomb dated to
c. 168 BCE):

  In terms of differences in style, the characters in Text A
  are written in 'small seal' form, an old style of writing
  that was to be abandoned in the Han;  the characters in Text B
  by way of contrast, are written in the more modern "clerical"
  script. This is one indication that Text A was copied before Text B.

This indicates rapid changes in the script -- and not just
calligraphical variations -- in the relatively short period between
the time that the two Mawangdui versions of the Laozi were copied.
Indeed, Henricks uses those differences to give relative dates to the
texts! Conceivably, the facimile that Stephen Hodge saw was of the
more "modern" text B. It is quite dissimilar from Text A in script.

Other texts found in the Mawangdui tombs too show evidence of rapid
evolution in the form of the script. Edward Shaughnessy (1997: 15-16),
in his introduction to his commentary on the Yijing (Classic of
Changes) and its commentaries found at Mawangdui writes:

  As do the manuscript copies of the Laozi, comparison with the
  received texts of the Zhouyi [= Yijing] and of the Appended
  Statements (Xici) [= commentaries on the Changes Classic]
  reveals that the manuscript contains many phonetic
  loan characters and forms of characters more or less unorthodox;
  some of these variora may signal significant syntactic differences.

Even more *radical* differences in script are found in the recent
versions of the Laozi found in the Guodian tombs -- dating from c. 300
BCE -- in which the script is even further removed from those found in
the Han period (and, of course, further still from modern Chinese).
Henricks promises a translation and commentary on these Guodian
versions of the work later this year (a big event in Sinology)!

You will find very similar judgments about the evolution of old
Chinese script by William G. Boltz in the new _Cambridge History of
Ancient China: From the Beginnings to 221 BC_ (1999: 106-23). Boltz
strongly emphasizes clear stages in the evolution of the script,
affirming that all indications are that Chinese script "developed
according to the same pattern that characterized the appearance and
early development" of writing systems in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and
Mesoamerica. (Note that this same pattern is NOT seen, as I
emphasized at the beginning of this thread, and as M. Witzel has
likewise affirmed, in Harappan.)

Boltz also writes of "the group of manuscripts written on silk from
the tombs at Mawandui," confirming the views cited above from
Henricks and Shaughnessy. Specifically, Boltz writes:

  Because these manuscripts were written largely prior to, and
  independent of, efforts to standardize the writing system
  emanating from the Qin capital in the north [later center of
  the Qin empire] they show literally hundreds of examples of
  paronomastic uses of characters that would be viewed as
  nonstandard and eccentric, or even wrong relative to what
  came later to be extablished as the precepts and conventions
  for a standard orthography.

("Paronomastic" = what Indologists generally refer to as "rebus"
use of symbols.) Boltz goes on to discuss several "baffling"
uses of Chinese characters found in the text.

Finally please note -- since Witzel's response was to claims by
another poster (*not* Stephen Hodge) that Chinese hadn't changed from
c. 300 BCE to the present (!) -- that the 15 texts found in the tombs
at Guodian in 1994 from around that precise time -- c. 300 BCE -- are
all transcribed into modern Chinese before publication. The reason
is that the majority of specialists in ancient Chinese otherwise
wouldn't be able to read them.

M. Witzel is right: All specialists agree that before the Han
dynasty ancient Chinese was anything *but* "fixed"!

> The Chinese script of 300 BCE is not that of 300 CE!

My best,
Steve Farmer