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

Abstract

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