Warring States Project
Chronology
The chronology of a classical text, its placement in time relative to events or to other texts, is the single most useful piece of information about that text. To recover that information for the entire corpus of classical Chinese texts, as far as may now be possible, has been the central focus of Warring States Project research over the years. We are accordingly pleased to be collaborating on chronology with the Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (TLS) project, based at Oslo University and currently being implemented on-line at the Sinological Institute, Heidelberg University. TLS has a long history under the direction of Christoph Harbsmeier, with major programming assistance from Jens Østergaard Petersen, and with supervision at the Heidelberg end by Michael Lüdke. TLS aims to provide access to the classical Chinese wordstock in a way analogous to that provided for Latin by the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, currently being compiled under the auspices of the Saur firm at Munich, and still incomplete after more than a century of collaborative work. For detailed information, see the TLS General Introduction.
The Project Contribution
For the TLS enterprise, and at its request, the Project during 2007 composed short descriptions of the 36 texts which, as of December of that year, made up the classical portion of the TLS database. We subsequently added descriptions of other texts, to keep up with additions to TLS and to fill in the larger picture, and arranged the whole in chronological order. The result is an overview of the early Chinese text situation as a whole; one which early readers have found persuasive and useful. Some of these brief descriptions are linked in turn to the more detailed information available in our on-line feature, Classical Chinese Texts. We here offer that page not only as a convenience to TLS readers, but as a service to Sinology at large.
An Overview of Selected Classical Chinese Texts
Ultimately, the CCT entries will become the main portion of our monograph Prolegomena to the Classical Chinese Texts; the Overview will be the concluding section of that work. The Overview page thus amounts to a preview of part of the monograph, plus an index to certain sections of the other part.
Dating is not agreeable to all users of texts (some of whom have reasons for preferring the greater interpretational latitude which inexact dating allows, and which no dating at all positively invites). The principles involved are sometimes disputed even among those who find dating valuable. As methodological background, for readers of TLS or for any other interested persons, we have therefore added the following notes.
Texts can be dated in one of two ways: either by locating them on a scale of years (absolute dating) or by including them in a system of texts which are known to precede or follow each other (relative dating). It often happens, especially with ancient materials, that relative dating is all that is possible. If at some point in an investigation an absolute date can be assigned to one or more texts in a relatively dated system, the system as a whole becomes that much more precisely fixed in absolute time. But relative dating by itself will give us a great deal. To the intellectual historian, it shows the order in which ideas arose, and implies 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 constituent portion separately. For the text as a whole, we can only specify the span of included dates. This accretional text situation is very common in the classical Chinese corpus. Such texts are not unknown in the Mediterranean Classical situation either, nor will the concept be strange to students of the Mahabharata: these are thrice told tales.
How one discovers that a given text has a history behind it, and how one resolves such a text into its constituents and places them in chronological context, is a matter of technique. We have give a link to some information about technique, together with a discussion of issues that arise for some, and a few sample graphic presentations that may be helpful to many. 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
Last in this section is a mixture of our own and others' Results:
15 Dec 2007 / Contact The Project / Exit to Home Page
