C. Williams

Chris Williams

Excavated Early Chinese Texts

Description of Research:

Since the late nineteenth century, the excavation of numerous early Chinese texts dating from the late Shang to the Han dynasties (13th century BC to 2nd century AD) has transformed the study of early China, leading to a complete reassessment of our understanding of the formative period of Chinese culture.

I was co-editor of the proceedings for the first international conference on the Guodian Laozi materials, an important set of bamboo-slip texts dating to the late 4th century BC. My main focus of research is now the Wenxian Covenant Texts.      

The Wenxian Covenant Texts, written on stone tablets using brush and ink, were excavated in their thousands in 1980-81 in Henan province, from pits dug into an earthen terrace outside an ancient walled settlement. Dating from the 5th century BC, they comprise of several different covenants, each repeated on many separate tablets, each tablet individualized with the name of a covenantor. They were produced by the Han 韓 lineage, one of several groups vying for power in the state of Jin 晉. The covenants are in the form of loyalty oaths, demanding loyalty to the Han leader, and stating specific requirements and prohibitions. By the end of the 5th century BC, the Han lineage had split from Jin and become an independent polity. I believe these covenants are a previously unknown part of the process which led to the formation of the Han state.

Due to various technical and practical factors, the Wenxian Covenant Texts have not been fully published. In 1998 I was invited by Susan R. Weld to join a US-China collaborative project to photograph, digitize, research and publish the texts. In 1999 we spent two months at the archaeological institute in Zhengzhou, Henan, where the covenants are housed, and photographed several thousand tablets. Since that time I have made many trips and spent many additional months at the institute working on this project. Publication is planned for the end of next year. I also conduct my own research on the materials and have published several articles (in both English and Chinese) discussing various philological and interpretative issues. After the full publication of the texts, I will work on an English monograph that will introduce these materials to a wider audience.