These are two volumes of the Festschrift honoring Sarah Allan 艾蘭 (née Meyers, b. 1945), who has exerted a considerable influence on Early China studies in the West as the author of voluminous publications, as a professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and at Dartmouth University, and as the long-serving editor of the journal Early China. Another volume, Metaphor and Meaning: Thinking Through Early China with Sarah Allan (likewise published by SUNY Press in 2024) has already been reviewed in this journal by Paul Fischer (doi:10.1017/jch.2024.33). The three volumes are unnumbered and may be read in any order. The titles give an approximate idea of their respective thematic emphases: Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo is predominantly devoted to epigraphy and art history, whereas Myth and the Making of History is poised at the interstice of religion, historical geography, historiography, and classical philology.

The Festschrift’s most remarkable feature is that approximately one-half of its chapters were contributed by Chinese academics—some of them very eminent—and painstakingly translated into English by the three editors (here the lion’s share of the credit goes to the indefatigable Constance A. Cook). Readers may appreciate these chapters for providing a snapshot of current thinking about Early China in the People’s Republic of China. But it is also evident that the contributors who are based in the West, while sometimes grinding their own Western methodological axes, are engaged in the same discourse as their Chinese colleagues. Beyond attesting to the depth of Allan’s network of academic friendships, the Festschrift thus stands as a monument to half a century of highly rewarding scholarly communication and cross-fertilization in the Early China field.

Let me highlight those chapters that will interest historians of China. To start with the early Bronze Age, Li Boqian 李伯謙 (Myth and the Making of History, chap. 4) summarizes the current thinking on the Xia 夏 dynasty (ca. 2100–ca.1600 BCE) in light of the government-sponsored multidisciplinary “Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project” of the 1990s. (I note that his findings do not entirely agree with the dedicatee’s published opinions on the subject.Footnote ¹) Next comes a wide-ranging study by Shen Jianhua 沈建華 (Myth and the Making of History, chap. 5), which demonstrates the long-term continuity—from prehistoric into imperial times—of the conception, traditionally ascribed to the Xia, of a royal realm concentrically subdivided into nine “isles” (jiuzhou 九州) or provinces. In a related vein, Qi Wenxin 齊文心, in her “Afterword” to Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo, reinterprets a character in the Shang 商-period (ca. 1600–1046 BCE) Oracle-Bone inscriptions that has traditionally been read as the name of the mountain deity yue 岳 as, more specifically, a pictograph representing China’s central holy mountain, Mt. Song 嵩山; this would likewise potentially indicate the early relevance of concentric spatial structures in the conception of royal power. Shang history is also the subject of the chapter by Zhu Fenghan 朱鳳瀚 (Myth and the Making of History, chap. 1), which, based on an extensive review of relevant Oracle-Bone inscriptions, establishes a new understanding of the historical role and the posthumous cult of Yi Yin 伊尹, the legendary sage advisor to the dynasty’s founder.Footnote ²

For the Zhou 周 period (ca. 1046–256 BCE), I find three chapters to be of particular interest to historians. Specialists in economic history will profit from Han Wei’s 韓巍 excellent study on the exploitation of the Xiechi 解池 salt lake in southern Shanxi, as documented by bronze inscriptions and related historical records (Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo, chap. 5). Scholars of social history will find Li Feng’s 李峰 magisterial explanation of Zhou marriage rules as documented in the bronze inscriptions to be instructive (Myth and the Making of History, chap. 7). And intellectual historians will admire Crispin Williams’s careful account of how the notion of de 徳 (“virtue”) changed from a divinely bestowed sacred power to an object of personal cultivation (as well as a philosophical concept), accompanying the emergence of the individual as a focus of social discourse (Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo, chap. 6). In building his argument, Williams communicates new insights based on his in-depth study of the still-incompletely-published covenant texts from Wen Xian (Henan) 河南溫縣 (ca. 400 BCE).

Many of the best minds in the current generation of Early China studies in China and elsewhere are devoting themselves to the decipherment and study of the manuscripts on strips of wood or bamboo that have been discovered in tombs from Warring States (Zhanguo 戰國, ca. 450–221 BCE), Qin 秦 (221–206 BCE), and Han 漢periods (206 BCE–CE 220). Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo contains two important chapters on the general characteristics of these materials: in chapter 7, Li Ling 李零 discusses the practical issues arising in preparing them for publication and lays out standards that should be followed in the editorial process; and in chapter 8, Zhao Ping’an 趙平安 and Wang Tingbin 王挺斌 explain the importance of these manuscripts in allowing us to reconstruct the processes of textual transmission during antiquity. Going into greater codicological detail, Christopher J. Foster (Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo, chap. 11) describes how early word lists for use in scribal training were written on prism-shaped pieces of wood (gu 觚). Several additional chapters focus on the study of individual bamboo-strip manuscript texts or make use of them in exploring wider historical or historiographic themes.

It is now common knowledge that, in Warring States- to Han-period China, short passages of text (zhang 章) circulated separately and could be combined like modules to form longer texts. In the process, the contents could change. The elasticity of textual practices is exemplified by Scott Cook (Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo, chap. 9), where the author compares a text entitled “The State of Lu Suffered a Great Draught” (Lubang dahan 魯邦大旱) from the corpus of manuscripts currently held by the Shanghai Museum with virtually identical accounts in transmitted texts that involve completely different protagonists from the Qi 齊 polity. Cui Xiaojiao 崔曉姣 (Myth and the Making of History, chap. 9) finds a similar situation in the “Zhou Instructions” (Zhouxun 周馴 [訓]) text among the corpus of manuscripts held by Peking University, where a narrative classically associated with one of the predynastic rulers of the Zhou dynasty is repurposed, using virtually identical formulations, to describe the actions of a king of Chu 楚 some six centuries later. Likewise, Andrew Meyer (Myth and the Making of History, chap. 8) diagnoses “fact-meaning bricolage” when juxtaposing what the “Battle Formations of Cao Mie” (Cao Mie zhi zhen 曹蔑之陣)Footnote ³ text in the Shanghai Museum manuscript corpus has to say concerning a particular courtier in Lu with accounts about the same person in transmitted texts. It becomes ever clearer that the factual accuracy of the historical information given in any given text—even a recently excavated text of indubitable authenticity—cannot be taken for granted. Here one may gesture to a forthcoming book by the late L. Scott Davis, where the author attempts to reveal the algorithm-like principles according to which the compilers of some of the Chinese classics strategically deployed certain themes and formulas to enhance the semantic consistency and structure of their texts.Footnote ⁴

Also in the Peking University corpus is a Qin-period rhymed didactic text called “Instructions for Daughters” (Jiaonü 教女), which Anne Behnke Kinney insightfully discusses, compares with other known texts of similar content, and translates in full (Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo, chap. 10). Moreover, Wang Jinfeng 王進鋒 (Myth and the Making of History, chap. 6) uses the text entitled “The Affairs of the Commonlord of Yue” (Yuegong qishi 越公其事) from the corpus of manuscripts in the collection of Tsinghua University for a reconstruction of regional government in the Yue 越 kingdom during its heyday about the middle of the first millennium BCE. Strikingly, none of the wooden and bamboo-strip manuscript texts foregrounded in either Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo or Myth and the Making of History were scientifically excavated: they were all looted and subsequently acquired on the antiques market. In Western Sinological circles, the ethics of using such unprovenanced materials in research have been controversially debated;Footnote ⁵ but clearly this issue is of no concern to Chinese colleagues, and the studies included in the two volumes under review, in highlighting the fluidity of the ancient texts, illustrate the desirability—even necessity—of making full use of all available sources in order to gain new insights.

Besides these engagements with recently discovered manuscripts, Myth and the Making of History also contains several chapters concerned with transmitted texts. In chapter 3, Wang Yunfei 王雲飛 juxtaposes two contrary interpretations, both prominently attested in the hermeneutical literature, of the famous episode of Confucius listening to the Shao 韶 music; in chapter 10, Paul Nicholas Vogt offers an interpretation of the preface of the Yi Zhou shu 逸周書 as a sort of biography of King Wen 文王 of the Zhou dynasty; and in chapter 11, Harold D. Roth presents the summa of his thinking on the Huainan zi 淮南子, a text he has spent a lifetime studying. Standing apart from the other contributions to Myth and the Making of History is chapter 2, by Robin D. S. Yates, which delivers a longue-durée account, from its possible prehistoric roots to the present day, of the popular cult to Cao’e 曹娥, a local water goddess of the Shaoxing region in northern Zhejiang 浙江紹興, which from medieval times onward enjoyed imperial patronage.

Several chapters in Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo concern art history and material culture. Wang Tao 汪濤 (chap. 1) analyses the owl motif in Shang visual art in light of Oracle-Bone inscriptions and its transformation during subsequent periods. Han Ding 韓鼎 (chap. 2) offers a convincing new interpretation of the decoration on an architectural element from the Middle Shang-period site of Xiaoshuangqiao, Zhengzhou (Henan) as depicting a human figure placed between a serpent and a tiger. Lu Liancheng 盧連成 (chap. 3) traces the rise and decline of ritual-vessel sets consisting of two you 卣 and one zun 尊 found in Early to Middle Western Zhou tombs. Colin Mackenzie (chap. 4) assesses the authenticity of an Early Western Zhou-period fangding 方鼎 vessel in Kansas City that is inscribed with the posthumous name of King Cheng 成王 (second half of eleventh century BCE). Finally, Charles Sanft (chap. 12) focuses on a unique assemblage of woodworking tools found in the tomb of a Han-period local official in Anhui, which he interprets —plausibly, in my opinion—as attesting the tomb occupant’s avocational interest in woodworking as a hobby.

Despite a considerable diversity of approaches, the scholarly quality is high overall. Problems concern mostly the translations from Chinese—all too understandably, given the extreme difficulties involved. In particular, many of the inscriptions and manuscript texts are obscure or incomplete, so that any attempt at translation can only yield an approximation. Throughout the volumes under review, the inclusion of the original Chinese texts presents many invitations to quibble. In the process, the reader will discover a large number of mistranscriptions, mistaken characters, and outright mistakes—not enough to detract fatally from the volumes, but too many to pass over in silence. To pick out just two random examples: the translator of Shen Jianhua’s chapter in Myth and the Making of History transcribed the ethnonym 肅慎 (recte Sushen) as “Xiaozhen” (106), and translated the character lü 鋁—which, in Zhou bronze inscriptions, designates a copper alloy—in its modern meaning of “aluminum” (a metal that was unknown in ancient China) (110–111). In Han Wei’s chapter (Bone, Bronze and Bamboo, chap. 5), kinship terminology is systematically mistranslated: read “lineage” every time the current text gives “clan.” Fortunately, most of the other authors get this right; Li Feng (Myth and the Making of History, 167n5) cogently explains the difference between clans and lineages.

All in all, these books offer much valuable information and may be warmly recommended to readers with a serious interest in Early China.