Writing at Anyang: The role of the divination record in the emergence of Chinese literacy.

摘要

This dissertation assembles evidence and argument in favor of the hypothesis that Chinese literacy emerged in the context of the management of the Shang ancestral cult, with a central role played by the divination record, sometime around the middle of the second millennium.;Chapter 1 argues that early writing systems are less likely to be products of "intelligent design" than of essentially blind evolutionary processes, and that the increasingly intensified and repetitive use of precursor sign systems, rather than utilitarian administrative needs, are what drive the emergence of literacy.;Chapter 2 reviews competing hypotheses regarding the nature and extent of writing in late second millennium China, and the evidence for writing on materials, such as wood, that may not have been preserved. The chapter argues that the increasingly intense and repetitive cult activities at the major sites of the second millennium, and the divination that informed them, provide a likely context for the emergence of writing in the terms of Chapter 1. Moreover, the limited evidence for perishable writing materials suggests that they too were associated with the management of cult activities.;Chapter 3 presents a detailed reconstruction of the organization and activities of one of the "divination workshops" at Anyang, represented by the inscribed plastrons from Huayuanzhuang dong di H3. The collaborative nature of the workshop procedures, and the frequency with which divination was performed and recorded are quantitatively assessed, in order to demonstrate that divination record-keeping was a high-frequency activity of full-time specialists, of the kind that could have supported the emergence of a writing system.;Chapter 4 provides evidence for scribal training conducted within the divination workshops at late second-millennium Anyang. The fact that divination workshops trained their own scribes suggests that literacy was not generalized or widespread, and supports the claim that the divination records were central to the use and transmission of literacy.;Chapter 5 summarizes the case for seeing the documentation of increasingly complex, repetitive and frequent Shang cult practices, including divination, as the primary area of literate activity during the second millennium BC.