The Stone Drums of Qin 秦石鼓: Aspects of one of Chinas most important Artifacts.
Hi everyone,
While we are preparing the upcoming parts of our comprehensive resource list, today we want to show you an interesting piece that bridges all aspects of Early China: material culture, paleography, and textual criticism: the famous Stone Drums of Qin 秦石鼓.
Originally they were discovered near Fengxiang 鳳翔 in Shaanxi 陝西 Province during the 7th Century in the Tang 唐 Dynasty (618-906 AD). The ten boulders each vary in height (from 73 cm to 87.5 cm) and in diameter (56 to 80.1 cm), but each of them weighs around 400 kg. Today they are housed at the Palace Museum 故宮博物院 in Beijing 北京.
On the Ten Boulders are inscribed 10 songs, totally numbering around 700 characters (however only 501 characters where visible during the Song 宋 Dynasty (960-1279 AD) and only 272 today). These songs are about royal hunting and fishing activities of the State of Qin 秦.
What is also interesting to note is the correspondence between the Poems on the drums and the poems in the Shijing 詩經 (this also has interesting implications for linguistic studies, as we will show later). Each of the poems on the Stone Drums is arranged in columns and each line contains four characters (called siyan 四言), thus matching the gushi古詩-sytle of Poetry often found in the Shijing. The greatest resemblance can be probably found in the Xiaoya 小雅 and Daya 大雅 sections. Therefore they are also often called shigushi 石鼓詩 "Poems on Stone Drums".
They have also have fascinated scholars ever since their discovery as is shown for example by the poem Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770 AD) wrote about them or that Jinshixue 金石學 - beginning in the Song Dynasty - was named that way because of the Stone Drums (as shi 石 means "Stone").
Modern Scholarhip on the Stone Drums relies heavily on Rubbings 拓本 of their inscriptions because of their now damaged state.
For over a millennium, they have fascinated, perplexed, and driven paleographers and scholars to think more about them and discover their secrets.
1. Script
The script on the boulders is also particularly noteworthy. It represents what the Shuowen Jiezi 说文解字 calls Zhouwen 籀文 or Dazhuan 大篆 script, which is (regarding script "evolution") one of the two branches coming out of Bronze Script 金文 (so Qin script vs Script of the six States 六国古文). Later this script provided the foundation for the standardization of writing (221 BC) under the Qin 秦 dynasty (221 BC - 206 BC), using the Small seal script 小篆. It must be noted however that the script on the drums themselves is often called shiguwen 石鼓文 "Writing on Stone Drums".
2. Dating
Dating the Stone Drums is a difficult topic. Because the texts do not name any specific historical rulers, dating them has been one of the most fiercely contested battlegrounds in the history of chinese epigraphy and palaeography:
- Scholars during the Tang Dynasty thought that the Stone Drums date to the Time of King Xuan of Zhou 周宣王 (827 - 782 BC) and point to the connection with the Scribe Zhou 史籀, who worked at his court according to the Shiji 史記 and traditional sources (for this see for example the earliest commentator on the Stones Su Xu 蘇勖 (fl. 642)). It became clear at the heyday of Jinshi Studies during the Song Dynasty for scholars like Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修(1007-1072), that the Stone Drums must date later to the early dukes of Qin.
- During the 20th-century, prominent paleographers like Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877-1927) and Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892-1978) systematically studied and focused the dating. By comparing them palaeographically to bronzes from the Chunqiu- and Zhanguo periods it became clear that they must date during the Eastern Zhou, most likely either late Spring and Autumn or Early Warring States, so 5th and 4th Century BC. Guo Moruos work is especially noteworthy as his 1936 Shiguwen yanjiu 石鼓文研究 was one of the greatest Studies in the 20th century on the topic of the Stone Drums.
- However even then scholarly opinions diverge. The most authoritative western Study on the Stone Drums of Qin is Gilbert Mattos 1988 monograph The Stone Drums of Ch'in. Mattos dates the Stone Drums to the 5th Century BC. However chinese palaeographer Chen Zhaorong 陳昭容 dates them to the 6th Century BC based on the similarities in palaeography between the Stone Drums and the Script on the Qin Gong Gui 秦公簋. As an additional reference she also cites a stone chime and the Gui as well as the chime can be dated to the reign of Duke Jing of Qin 秦景公 (576-537 BC).
3. Why they matter for Old Chinese Linguistics
For historical phonology the Stone Drums provide additional information on the rhyme categories 韻部 of Old Chinese besides the usually used Shijing, Xiesheng 諧聲-Series and literature on Middle Chinese because of it's great similarities with the Shijing and rhymed nature in general. Therefore it can help to take them into account and not focus solely on the "usual suspects" when working on Old Chinese phonology (which the good ones like Baxter/Sagart obviously do to enrich their research). It can be also interesting when researching the Qin dialect in particular, although reconstructing Old Chinese dialects is a daunting task, because we have the oldest dictionary recording spoken dialects only from the Han 漢 Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) (Yang Xiongs 楊雄 (53 BC - 18 AD) Fangyan 方言).
It is also interesting to observe just how much poetic expression has already set foot in China since its first appearance was in the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou (1045 - 771 BC) period, which the prominent German Linguist and Philologist Wolfgang Behr has studied intensively in his 1997 doctoral dissertation Reimende Bronzeinschriften und die Entstehung der chinesischen Endreimdichtung.
Let’s Discuss!
- Regarding the Chronology: Where do you stand on the dating of the Shigu? Do you align with the early Warring States hypothesis based on structural script simplification, or do you favor an late Spring and Autumn dating based on the Shijing-style vocabulary?
- Methodological Question: When working with highly eroded texts like the Shigu, how much weight do you place on northern Dazhuan variant-dictionaries (like the Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字) versus direct structural comparison with excavated Qin inscriptions (like the Qin Gong Zhong 秦公鐘)?
- What are your go-to reference editions for studying the Shigu? (e.g., Gilbert L. Mattos' (1988) monograph, or Guo Moruos studies?)
Looking forward to hearing your insights and paleographical perspectives!
Yours sincerely,
The r/EarlyChina-Mods