On the potential of corpus-based handwriting analysis: a refined analysis of the Zhangjiashan tomb library

International audienceIn this talk, I will present work conducted towards an analysis of the scribal hands appearing in the Zhangjiashan M247 corpus, attempting to refine previous work that I have already presented on the topic in the light of the workshop’s suggested readings. Corpus-based handwriting analysis, I believe, has the potential to reveal the hand of the tomb occupant, particularly as a single hand might appear in multiple texts found therewith and in the very documents thought to be the most personal—agendas, diaries, etc. If we can identify the hand of the tomb occupant, this, among other things, will provide us with the smoking gun needed to lay to rest lingering doubts about the ‘realness’ of tomb texts as mingqi 明器 specially produced by funerary workshops. The Zhangjiashan M247 corpus provides us with an ideal set of circumstances in this regard, considering the presence of similar orthographies in the calendar table and the back-and-forth seen in the mathematical manuscript Suanshushu 筭數術 (see Mo & Lin, 2016). In this talk, I will aim to press further on the problem of distinguishing hands from scripts so as to concretise this relationship and draw further connections across the M247 corpus

A Positive Case for the Visuality of Text in Warring States Manuscript Culture

International audienceThis talk explores the evidence for visual copying vs. oral transmission in duplicate Warring States manuscripts

What good's a text? Textuality, orality, and mathematical astronomy in early imperial China

Article submitted to Archives internationales d'histoire des sciencesInternational audienceThis paper examines a 226 ce debate on li 曆 mathematical astronomy at the Cao-Wei (226–265) court as a case study in the role of orality and person-to-person exchange in the transmission of astronomical knowledge in early imperial China. The li- and mathematics-related manuscripts to have come down to us from the early imperial period often suffer from textual corruption, the form that this corruption takes being rooted in a culture of manuscript transmission by visual copying. Where numbers are involved, such corruption can significantly affect a text’s readability, reliability, and utility, and it is hardly a surprise, I argue, that actors speak of learning li by any way but reading. In 226 ce, two men showed up to a debate with different versions of Liu Hong’s 劉洪 (fl. 167–206 ce) Supernal Icon li (Qianxiang li 乾象曆), the one—the assistant director of the astronomical bureau—trying to best it, and the other—Liu Hong’s disciple—trying to defend it. Reconstructing the tortuous route by which Liu Hong’s astronomy made it into each man’s hands via a transmission network spanning the Three Kingdoms, I argue that this debacle, and its conclusion, are to be expected from the mode of oral and written transmission particular to astronomy in this age

Mercury and the Case for Plural Planetary Traditions in Early Imperial China

International audienceA paper on the tension between the astral sciences tianwen 天文 'heavenly patterns' and li 曆 'sequencing' as concerns their respective treatments of planetary behaviour--a tension foregrounding others between epistemologies, genres, and authorial cultures

The Shaming of the Assistant Director: A Debacle in Third-century Chinese Mathematics Reconsidered in the light of Manuscript Culture, Biography, and the Historiography of Science

International audienceThis talk examines the case of the public shaming of Assistant Director to the Astronomical Bureau Han Yi 韓翊 upon the debate stage at the Cao-Wei court in 226 CE. In short, Han Yi makes it through rounds of testing, deliberation, and recommandation with his solution to the limits of the late Liu Hong's 劉洪 (fl. 167–206) Supernal Icon li (Qianxiang li 乾象曆), but, on the day of the debate, one of Liu Hong's disciples shows him up with better eclipse predictions from a different version of his master's astronomical system. To place the event in context, I offer an overview of what we understand about the transmission of technical knowledge in this manuscript culture, of the suspicion harboured towards the written word by contemporary experts, of the transmission history of the Supernal Icon li across the war-torn political divides of the Three Kingdoms (220–280), and of the reception of these events in the later histories of Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513) and Li Chunfeng 李淳風 (602–670)

也有輪著寫的：張家山漢簡《筭數書》寫手與篇序初探

International audienceThis paper examines the bamboo manuscript Suan shu shu 筭數術 (Writings on Mathematical Procedures) from Zhangjiashan 張家山 tomb 247 (sealed ≥ 186 BCE) for evidence of multiple scribal hands. The Suan shu shu presents a particularly interesting case study in this regard in that it is one of the few manuscripts from this period to feature the signatures of 'checkers' (chou 讎), the three of which were presumably responsible for the quality of textual (re)production. Presenting our methodology, we explain how we distinguished two separate hands operative in the body and section headings of the manuscript. From there, we present the peculiar case of the section 'Shao guang' 少廣 (Reduced Width), where we see the two hands alternate back and forth between question and answer, leading us, in the conclusion, to suggest the possibility that this manuscript is a teaching document reflecting a master–disciple exchange

The Planetary Visibility Tables in the Second-Century BC Manuscript Wu xing zhan 五星占

This article is a study of the planetary tables in the second century BC manuscript Wu xing zhan. Products of computation in this and later texts are compared to what we know about contemporary bodies ofplanetary knowledge to highlight discrepancies between theory and practice, as well as pluralities of tradition, within the early imperial astral sciences. In particular, this study focuses on such tables’ apparent use of a solar calendar (as distinct from the lunisolar civil calendar) for the purposes of planetary astronomy; it also attempts to explain anomalous features of the Wu xing zhan’s planetary tables in the context of early manuscript culture

Doors Open and Shut: the Bureaucratic Insulation of the Astral Sciences in Imperial China and the First Waves of Foreign Influence

International audienceIt was its closed, official nature that stood out about the practise of astronomy in China to early Western observers from Matteo Ricci to Joseph Needham—government control so strict, for example, as to have effectively segregated Chinese and Islamic traditions behind closed office doors for the better part of a millennium. Such was not always the case. In this paper, I will discuss how the culture of bureaucratic isolation emerged over the first millennium CE through public bans, institutional restructuring, and reforms in office education, testing and recruitment. What legendarily began as a hereditary office in pre-imperial times had become, by the second century BCE, a nexus of outside talent and public debate. From 104 BCE to 420 CE, for example, only 31 percent of office-holders named as contributing to state astronomical policy actually held a post in the Clerk’s Office, and those who did were usually the first in their family to do so; the history of the eighth-century office, by contrast, is one of family clans. For a time, the clans that ran this office were of foreign ancestry—the Indian Kāsyapa, Kumāra and Gautama, replaced by the Nestorian Li—but Indian and Persian technical knowledge ended up having little manifest influence on their Chinese colleagues’ practices. This paper will use the case of this first wave of foreign talent and transmission to examine how much the scientific and office culture of these centuries had changed since the Han, and how it adumbrated the conditions of later dynasties

Spreadsheets and First-millennium Chinese li Procedure Texts

International audienceIn 2005, Christopher Cullen published a three-page note, ‘Translating ancient Chinese astronomical systems with EXCEL’ (JHA 36.3: 336-38), and uploaded partial spreadsheet translations of Han-era (206 BCE – 220 CE) procedure texts on the Needham Research Institute website (here). While there has been talk about the use of computers in the past, Cullen’s stands as the first and only attempt to publicly detail the methodology and potential of automating li texts. In this talk, I will speak about my own experience with such translation and its pedagogical and research potential for first-millennium procedure texts. In 2011, I began my own series of spreadsheet-translations with the goal of exploring how we might gage the accuracy of these systems. The process of translating ancient Chinese into at once English and code, however, raised so many basic questions about what the texts are and are not saying that I was forced to set aside this goal indefinitely. In taking the audience through this morass of discovery, I will describe a number of important phenomena and ambiguities that such translation has revealed and offer ideas about how we might ultimately return to the discussion of accuracy