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.