Warring States Project
Chronology
The chronology of a classical text, its placement in time, is the single most useful piece of information about that text. To recover that information for the entire corpus of classical Chinese texts has been the central focus of Project research. We are accordingly pleased to be collaborating on chronology with the Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS) project, based at Oslo University and on-line at Heidelberg University. TLS has a long history under the direction of Christoph Harbsmeier, with programming assistance from Jens Østergaard Petersen, and supervision at Heidelberg by Michael Lüdke. It aims to give access to the Chinese wordstock in a way analogous to that provided for Latin by the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, still being compiled at Munich after more than a century. For details, see the TLS General Introduction.
The Project Contribution
During 2007, the Project composed for TLS short descriptions of the 36 texts in the classical portion of the TLS database. We then arranged these and other text descriptions in chronological order. The result is an overview of the early Chinese texts as a whole. Some of these brief descriptions are linked to the more detailed information available in our on-line feature, Classical Chinese Texts. We here offer that page as a convenience to TLS readers, and as a service to Sinology at large.
An Overview of Selected Classical Chinese Texts
Ultimately, the CCT entries will become a monograph, and the Overview will be its concluding section.
Dating is not agreeable to all users of texts, and the principles involved are sometimes disputed even among those who find dating valuable. As methodological background, we have therefore added the following notes.
Texts can be dated in one of two ways: by locating them on a scale of years (absolute dating) or by determing which of them precede or follow others (relative dating). It often happens, especially with ancient materials, that relative dating is all that is possible. If an absolute date can be assigned to one or more points in a relatively dated system, so much the better. But relative dating in itself gives us a lot. It shows the intellectual historian the order in which ideas arose, and the way in which they influenced each other as they developed.
If a text includes materials of different date, then precise dating is only possible for each portion separately. For the text as a whole, the correct date is a span. Accretional texts are common in classical China, and are not unknown in the Mediterranean Classical situation, nor will the concept be strange to students of the Mahabharata. These are thrice told tales.
Discovering that a text has a history behind it, and resolving it into its constituents and placing them in chronological context, is a matter of technique. We here give a link to some information about technique, together with a few sample graphic presentations. The second of those presentations shows how easy it is to envision the solution of certain problems, when you have a map to look at. It is the system of relative text dates that provides that map.
- Theory
- Technique
- [see in our Philology section]
- A Graphic View of Some Major Warring States Texts
The next of our collaborations is international in scope:
15 Dec 2007 / Contact The Project / Exit to Home Page
