Kingly Crafts
Kingly Crafts

Author: Yung-ti Li

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-12-20

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0231549636

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The site of Anyang, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, dated to around 1200 to 1000 BCE, is one of the most important sources of knowledge about craft production in Bronze Age China. Excavations and research of the settlement over the past ninety years demonstrate both the advanced level of Shang craft workers and the scale and capacity of the craft industries of the time. However, materials unearthed in Anyang by different expeditions have since been stored separately in China and Taiwan, making a thorough study of this important aspect of life in Shang China challenging. Despite efforts to integrate the data based on published material, the physical evidence rarely has been considered as a single group. Through a systematic analysis of the archaeological materials available in both China and Taiwan, Yung-ti Li provides a detailed picture of craft production in Anyang and paves the way for a new understanding of how the Shang capital functioned as a metropolis. Focusing on craft-producing activities, including bronze casting, bone working, shell and marble inlay working, lithic working, and pottery production, Kingly Crafts examines the material remains, the technology, and the production organization of the craft industries. Although the level of Shang craftsmanship can be seen in the finished products, Li demonstrates that it is necessary to study workshop remains and their archaeological context to reconstruct the social and political contexts of craft production. Offering a comprehensive investigation of these remains, Kingly Crafts sheds new light on the relationships between craft industries and political authority in the late Shang period.

Craft and the Kingly Ideal
Craft and the Kingly Ideal

Author: Mary W. Helms

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2013-08-26

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0292758235

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In ancient Mediterranean cultures, diamonds were thought to endow their owners with invincibility. In contemporary United States culture, a foreign-made luxury car is believed to give its owner status and prestige. Where do these beliefs come from? In this study of craft production and long-distance trade in traditional, nonindustrial societies, Mary W. Helms explores the power attributed to objects that either are produced by skilled artisans and/or come from "afar." She argues that fine artisanship and long-distance trade, both of which are more available to powerful elites than to ordinary people, are means of creating or acquiring tangible objects that embody intangible powers and energies from the cosmological realms of gods, ancestors, or heroes. Through the objects, these qualities become available to human society and confer honor and power on their possessors. Helms’ novel approach equates trade with artistry and emphasizes acquisition rather than distribution. She rejects the classic Western separation between economics and aesthetics and offers a new paradigm for understanding traditional societies that will be of interest to all anthropologists and archaeologists.

The Political Writings
The Political Writings

Author: Alfarabi

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-05-12

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1501700316

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Alfarabi was among the first to explore the tensions between the philosophy of classical Greece and that of Islam, as well as of religion generally. His writings, extraordinary in their breadth and deep learning, have had a profound impact on Islamic and Jewish philosophy.This volume presents four of Alfarabi's most important texts, making his political thought available to classicists, medievalists, and scholars of religion and Byzantine and Middle Eastern studies. In a clear prose translation by Charles E. Butterworth, these treatises provide a valuable introduction to the teachings of Alfarabi and to the development of Islamic political philosophy. All of these texts are based on new Arabic editions. Two of the texts—Book of Religion and Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages: Plato the Divine and Aristotle—appear in English for the first time. The translations of the other two works—Selected Aphorisms and chapter five of the Enumeration of the Sciences—differ markedly from those previously known to English-language readers.Butterworth situates each essay in its historical, literary, and philosophical context. His notes help the reader follow Alfarabi's text and identify persons, places, and events. English-Arabic and Arabic-English glossaries of terms further assist the reader.

Spring and Autumn Historiography
Spring and Autumn Historiography

Author: Newell Ann Van Auken

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2023-03-14

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0231556519

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The Spring and Autumn is an annals text composed of brief records covering the period 722–479 BCE and written from the perspective of the ancient Chinese state of Lu. A long neglected part of the Chinese canon, it is traditionally ascribed to Confucius, who is said to have embedded his evaluations of events within the text. However, the formulaic and impersonal records do not resemble the repository of moral judgments that they are alleged to be. Driven by her discovery that the Spring and Autumn is governed by a system of rules, Newell Ann Van Auken argues that Lu record-keepers—not a later editor—produced the formally regular core of the text. She demonstrates that the Spring and Autumn employs formulaic phrasing and selective omission to encode the priorities of Lu and to communicate the relative importance of individuals, states, and events, and that many of its records are derived from diplomatic announcements received in Lu from regional states and the Zhou court. The Spring and Autumn is fundamentally a document designed to enhance the prestige of Lu, and its records reveal a profound concern with relative rank, displaying an idealized hierarchy that positions the state of Lu and its rulers at the apex. By establishing the Spring and Autumn as a genuine Bronze Age record, this book transforms our understanding of its significance and purpose, and also offers new approaches to the study of ancient annals in early China and elsewhere.

Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China
Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China

Author: Yegor Grebnev

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-07-12

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0231555032

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Scholarship on early China has traditionally focused on a core group of canonical texts. However, understudied sources have the potential to shift perspectives on fundamental aspects of Chinese intellectual, religious, and political history. Yegor Grebnev examines crucial noncanonical texts preserved in the Yi Zhou shu (Neglected Zhou Scriptures) and the Grand Duke traditions, which represent scriptural traditions influential during the Warring States period but sidelined in later history. He develops an innovative framework for the study and interpretation of these texts, focusing on their role in the mediation of royal legitimacy and their formative impact on early Daoism. Grebnev demonstrates the centrality of the Yi Zhou shu in Chinese intellectual history by highlighting its simultaneous connections to canonical traditions and esoteric Daoism. He also shows that the Daoist rituals of textual transmission embedded in the Grand Duke traditions bear an imprint of the courtly environment of the Warring States period, where early Daoists strove for prestige and power, offering legitimacy through texts ascribed to the mythical sage rulers. These rituals appear to have emerged at the same period as the core Daoist philosophical texts and not several centuries later as conventionally believed, which calls for a reassessment of the history of Daoism’s interrelated religious and philosophical strands. Offering a far-reaching reconsideration of early Chinese intellectual and religious history, Mediation of Legitimacy in Early China sheds new light on the foundations of the Chinese textual tradition.

The Great Reversal: How We Let Technology Take Control of the Planet
The Great Reversal: How We Let Technology Take Control of the Planet

Author: David Tabachnick

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0802094694

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Every day, we are presented with new technologies that can influence human thought and action, such as psychopharmaceuticals, new generation performance enhancing drugs, elective biotechnology, and gastric bypass surgery. Have we let technology go too far in this respect? In The Great Reversal, David Edward Tabachnick contends that this question may not be unique to contemporary society. Through an assessment of the great works of philosophy and politics, Tabachnick explores the largely unrecognized history of technology as an idea. The Great Reversal takes the reader back to Aristotle's ancient warning that humanity should never allow technical thinking to cloud our judgment about what makes for a good life. It then charts the path of how we began to relinquish our deeply rooted intellectual and practical capacities that used to allow us to understand and regulate the role of technologies in our lives. As the rise of technology threatens our very humanity, Tabachnick emphasizes that we still may have time to recover and develop these capacities – but we must first decide how far we want to allow technology to determine our existence and our future.

Modeling Peace
Modeling Peace

Author: Jie Shi

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 0231549202

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Among hundreds of thousands of ancient graves and tombs excavated to date in China, the Mancheng site stands out for its unparalleled complexity and richness. It features juxtaposed burials of the first king and queen of the Zhongshan kingdom (dated late second century BCE). The male tomb occupant, King Liu Sheng (d. 113 BCE), was sent by his father, Emperor Jing (r. 157–141 BCE), to rule the Zhongshan kingdom near the northern frontier of the Western Han Empire, neighboring the nomadic Xiongnu confederation. Modeling Peace interprets Western Han royal burial as a political ideology by closely reading the architecture and funerary content of this site and situating it in the historical context of imperialization in Western Han China. Through a study of both the archaeological materials and related received and excavated texts, Jie Shi demonstrates that the Mancheng site was planned and designed as a unity of religious, gender, and intercultural concerns. The site was built under the supervision of the future occupants of the royal tomb, who used these burials to assert their political ideology based on Huang-Lao and Confucian thought: a good ruler is one who pacifies himself, his family, and his country. This book is the first scholarly monograph on an undisturbed and fully excavated early Chinese royal burial site.