The Shuo-wen chieh-tzu : the dawn of studies of the ancient characters

Abstract

The Shuo-wen chieh-tzu is one of the immortal masterpieces of scholarship of ancient China. Long after Hsü Shen completed this work in Eastern Han Dynasty, the Shuowen chieh-tzu has been consulted, researched, glossed from one generation scholars to another, and throughout maintained a place in the history of Chinese culture. In the area of traditional studies, the Shuo-wen chieh-tzu may be regarded as the ancestor of hsiao-hsüeh, the traditional mode of the studies of Chinese characters, including the liushu (the study of character structures), the hsün-ku (the study of the meaning of characters) and the sheng-yün (phonology). The achievements of the scholars in 18th century may be regarded as the climax of the scholarship in this area of traditional research approaches. In my thesis, I propose, however, to take a new approach differed from the traditional one to investigate the Shuo-wen chieh-tzu, namely, to make a survey of the achievements of Shuo-wen chieh-tzu from the angle of ku-wen-tzu-hsileh, the study of ancient Chinese characters or "Chinese palaeography", which is a contemporary frontier science overlapping disciplines such as history, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology. I demonstrate the results of my research into the study of ancient characters of the Shuo-wen chieh-tzu with special reference to two aspects: Hsü Shen's hypothesis concerning the historical development and the formative mode of ancient characters, and Hsü Shen's invaluable collection of the forms of ancient characters. This is conducted on the basis of a synthesis of classic literary and archaeological sources. Particularly, I emphasize the importance of modem scientific archaeology has in regard to my study. This dissertation is based upon the processed data presented in the 15 tables in Volume II, which I have collected and systematized from the tremendous corpus of archaeological texts excavated over the last nine centuries.