title: Funerary Lists from Early Chinese Shaft Tombs
creator: Sun, Hui
subject: ddc-090
subject: 090 Manuscripts and rare books
subject: ddc-930
subject: 930 History of ancient world
subject: ddc-950
subject: 950 General history of Asia Far East
description: This dissertation presents a new approach to the whole corpus of funerary lists from early Chinese shaft tombs (dating from between the late 5th century BCE to the 1st century CE). While existing research almost exclusively interprets them as “tomb inventory lists” or “gift lists”, I provide an alternative interpretation. Combining codicological, philological and archaeological data with archaeological and ethno-sociological theories, I argue that the lists were created as tools for short-term administration of material components (sometimes also animals and personal resources) in certain actions before the entombment.  Chapter 1 introduces the Chinese funerary lists discovered to date and offers an overview of the scholarship on the creation and usage of the lists from the early shaft tombs. Chapter 2 guides the reader through the archaeological theory of “field of action”, which I apply for my analysis of the creation and usage of the early lists. The introduction of this theory is followed by the establishment of a hypothetical model of the early Chinese funerary cycle based on transmitted texts. Furthermore, a combination of this theory with the classic ethnological concept of rites de passage will clarify the motivation of the creation of those lists. Chapter 3 presents a detailed case study of the lists from tomb no. 1 at Leigudun, the tomb of the renowned Marquis Yi of Zeng (died ca. 433 BCE). Chapter 4 introduces the perspectives of the analytical device “field of action” for approaching the remaining lists. In addition, the two latter chapters indicate that the lists considerably complement the hypothetical model of the funerary cycle.  Finally, as a conclusion, the lists were no “tomb inventory lists”. Instead, they were created and used in short-term administration in frames of various fields of action. None of them describes the final organisational pattern of the tomb goods and most of them do not even describe the final organisational pattern of the resources in the reproduction of individual pre-entombment fields of action (including gift-giving). Their creation and usage were motivated by the wishes to smoothly transform the status of the deceased and the bereaved through various rites de passage. Therefore, my discoveries do not only contribute to the rational understanding of the funerary practices involving those lists, but also provide the basis for a fundamental and necessary reorientation in the philological and archaeological research of those lists.
date: 2025
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/37366/1/Dissertation_Hui%20Sun_2025.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00037366
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-373661
identifier:   Sun, Hui  (2025) Funerary Lists from Early Chinese Shaft Tombs.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/37366/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: Please see front page of the work (Sorry, Dublin Core plugin does not recognise license id)
language: eng