Scribes and Their Roles in Imperial Governance and Cultural Production in Early China and Egypt

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

In recent years, very large numbers of early Chinese texts and documents written on multiple types of media have been excavated using scientific archaeological methods with yet other looted materials being retrieved from the Hong Kong antiques market. This new material has generated a radical revision of almost all aspects of early Chinese history, law, philosophy, religion, and literature, among other disciplines. A huge academic industry has flowered in East Asia covering all aspects of this new information. Western scholars, however, have focused their efforts primarily on the philosophical texts and not on the hundreds of thousands of administrative documents which reveal how the new imperial administration actually functioned at the local level. This information is crucial for understanding how the early regimes of the Qin and Han were able to establish an imperial system that could last until the 20th century. This panel will focus on the latter type of document and on those who produced them, the scribes, bringing together for dialogue the research of junior scholars from Hong Kong and Russia studying in North America, and senior scholars from the USA and Canada, with a senior German discussant. Each of the panelists will focus on a different aspect of the textual production and from a different theoretical approach (history; political science and writing practice; law; comparative civilizations) to provide an in-depth analysis of the daily activity of running the administrative machine of the early empires and the culture of the scribes who produced and circulated the texts.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Robin D.S. Yates, McGill University

Chair

• Robin D.S. Yates, McGill University

Individual Presentations

• Scribes and Assistants in the Qin Administration: Excavated Evidence from Liye, Shuihudi, and Zhangjiashan - Tsang-wing Ben Ma, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Originals and Copies of Official Documents and Bureaucratic Politics in the Qin Empire - Maxim Korolkov, Columbia University

• Law and the Circulation of Documents by Scribes in the Early Chinese Empires - Robin D.S. Yates, McGill University

• The Tombs of Scribes in Early Imperial China and Ancient Egypt: A Comparative Perspective - Anthony Barbieri-Low, University of California, Santa Barbara

Discussant

• Enno Giele, University of Heidelberg