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CHINESE LANGUAGE AND WRITING
105
quickly." The inscriptions on pottery vessels (with characters usually single) and jade-one of them being inscribed with eleven charactersare rare. Probably no stone inscriptions are extant; the "Yü Tablet" (Fig. 53, 2), the supposed copy of a prehistoric Chinese inscription of the eighteenth century B.c., is according to Prof. W. Perceval Yetts "an undoubted forgery."
The famous inscribed "Stone Drums"-now in the gateway of the Confucian Temple of Peking-ten roughly chiselled mountain boulders or truncated pillars, one and a half to nearly three feet high, with an average circumference of seven feet) are commonly attributed to the reign of King Hsuan (827-782 B.c.) or even to the last century of the second millennium B.C. According to Prof. Yetts and other scholars, they belong to the third century B.c. It is commonly accepted that they are inscribed in ta chuan.
A great many of the Chinese bronzes are inscribed, but till the end of the Shang-Yin dynasty (1122 B.C.?) such inscriptions were usually very short, some containing only one or two characters indicating a name, or suggesting a sacrificial function, dedications or invocations to ancestors, for instance the inscription "For Father Ting." and so forth. On the other hand, some of the bronze inscriptions, especially those of later times, are quite lengthy. Many of them are very accurately dated, to the year, month, and day, but the dates recorded are of little help: some are of merely local importance; others add the specification "of the king' (which obviously was sufficient at the time), but omit the name of the king.
An epoch-making discovery was made in 1899. In the village Hsiaot'un (perhaps the ancient town of Ho Tan Chia), near An-yang, in northern Honan, there were excavated, in circumstances imperfectly known, several thousand fragments of bone and tortoiseshell engraved in ancient Chinese characters. They are in a surprisingly good state of preservation, and this is probably due to the protective properties of loess in which they were buried. Some of the fragments show an uncommon smoothness and finish. "The surfaces of some were polished until they gleamed like glass. Most of them had queer oval notches on their backs, and T-shaped cracks." (H. G. Creel.)
The exact date of these inscriptions is uncertain; some scholars attribute them to the latter part of the Shang-Yin dynasty, others think that the writing recorded was already obsolete in the period to which these bones are attributed. According to Prof. Creel, "we have a great many bones which unquestionably date from the reign of Wu Ting (1324-1266 B.C.). Whether some of our inscriptions go back to the time of Pan Kêng (1401-1374 B.C.) is a question which is still being debated."
The inscriptions are generally believed to be remains of archives
