2026 Theses Doctoral

Bronze Inscriptions and the Beginnings of Early Chinese Literature

Lewis, Crismon S.

Ritual bronze food and drink vessels, which were used in ancestral cultic worship in Bronze Age China, began to be inscribed with clan insignias and short dedicatory statements in the latter Shang dynasty (1600–1045 BCE). In the ensuing Western Zhou (1045–771 BCE) period, meanwhile, these same inscriptions assumed a fundamentally textual nature, as they commemorate official appointment, military exploit, property transaction, and even rhythmic eulogy of deceased kin. Although most scholarship utilizes inscriptions as textual sources for reconstructing social and political history, these epigraphs are also significant textual artefacts that illuminate the nascent beginnings of literary and rhetorical expression in early China.

By comparing hundreds of inscriptions from the late Shang through the end of the Western Zhou, this dissertation (1) traces the diachronic and evolutionary development of textual inscriptions on ancient Chinese bronzeware at the turn of the first millennium BCE and (2) demonstrates how these epigraphic texts were gradually innovated for authorial modes of rhetorical and aesthetic expression. Intertextual and diachronic analysis of Shang and Zhou inscriptions reveals how the practice was adopted by literate elites as a platform for political posturing and self-presentation. As a result, a constellation of textual and aesthetic features emerges that gesture to the nascent beginnings of literary expression: patterned rhyme and meter, authorial voice, and narrative craft, among others. The inscriptions reveal how these literary and rhetorical elements take shape in written language, which find echoes among transmitted texts of later centuries, such as the Classic of Poetry, the Classic of Documents, and the Zuozhuan.