Table Of ContentThese Bones Shall
Rise Again
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A volume in the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
Roger T. Ames, editor
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These Bones Shall
Rise Again
Selected Writings on Early China
David N. Keightley
Edited and with an Introduction
by
Henry Rosemont Jr.
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Cover image courtesy of David N. Keightley
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic,
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, address State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles
Marketing by Kate Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keightley, David N. and Rosemont, Henry Jr.
These bones shall rise again: selected writings on early china
ISBN 978-1-4384-4747-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-4746-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014934475
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix
Introduction xi
Transcription Conversion Table xix
Part I: What Makes China Chinese?
1. Archaeology and Mentality: The Making of China 1
2. Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How it Became Chinese 37
3. What Did Make the Chinese “Chinese”? Some Geographical
Perspectives 75
Part II: Religion, Metaphysics, and Theology
4. The Religious Commitment: Shang Theology and the
Genesis of Chinese Political Culture 87
5. Late Shang Divination: The Magico-Religious Legacy 101
6. Shang Divination and Metaphysics 123
7. The Making of The Ancestors: Late Shang Religion and Its Legacy 155
Part III: On Writing and Inscriptions
8. Theology and the Writing of History: Truth and the Ancestors
in the Wu Ding Divination Records 207
9. Marks and Labels: Early Writing in Neolithic and Shang China 229
Part IV: Early China/Early Greece
10. Clean Hands and Shining Helmets: Heroic Action in
Early Chinese and Greek Culture 253
11. Epistemology in Cultural Context: Disguise and
Deception in Early China and Early Greece 283
Part V: A Lighter Touch
12. Notes and Comments: “There Was an Old Man of Chang’an…”:
Limericks and the Teaching of Early Chinese History 311
Bibliography of the Writings of David N. Keightley 315
Index 321
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David N. Keightley
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first thanks for assistance in putting this volume of David Keightley’s writings
together go to David himself, who assisted me in gathering materials for it and for
assistance in going through the galley proofs. I am pleased to have brought this
collection of his papers together for two reasons, first as a small but not, I hope,
insignificant service to the field of Chinese studies, and second as small recom-
pense for the pleasure of having had David as a friend for a third of a century.
Amanda Buster, Ph.D. student in history at Berkeley, saw to securing all necessary
permissions to reprint the articles included here, and I am grateful for her efforts.
Professor Emeritus Ken-ichi Takashima of the University of British Columbia was
of major assistance in making and copying fresh images of many of the illustra-
tions in this volume, for which I, electronically challenged to an extreme, am
particularly thankful. My greatest debt for helping me with this volume goes to
Professor Michael Nylan, cherished friend of mine, David’s successor at Berkeley,
Amanda’s mentor, and Professor Takashima’s friend. Her efforts with all three of
them on the West Coast, and with me in Newport, Rhode Island, were crucial for
getting this book into its present form, completed and published, and she did it
all efficiently, with grace and warmth to boot. I am deeply grateful to her, disap-
pointed only by her declining my entreaties to join me formally as co-editor of it.
At SUNY Press, I enjoyed working with Nancy Ellegate and Diane Ganeles, both
highly efficient, graceful and warm; I am especially indebted to them (and SUNY
Press) for accepting this work for publication without my having to redo every one
of the papers herein to conform to the stylesheet of the Press. Every editor should
be so fortunate to work with such a professional editor and production manager.
Finally, but without which not, I am pleased to acknowledge the original
publishers of these articles of David’s here listed seriatim in the order in which
they appear:
Photo of David Keightley by Grant Ward; courtesy of the San F rancisco Chron-
icle, 1986 (on the announcement of his MacArthur award).
“Archaeology and Mentality: The Making of China,” Representations 18, Spring
1987.
“Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How It Became Chinese,” in Heritage
of China, edited by Paul S. Ropp. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990.
“What Did Make the Chinese ‘Chinese?’: Musings of a Would-be Geographical
Determinist” first appeared in Lotus Leaves 3.2, Summer 2000, and was
reprinted in Education About Asia 9.2, Fall 2004.
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viii Acknowledgments
“The Religious Commitment: Shang Theology and the Genesis of Chinese Polit-
ical Culture.” History of Religions 17, 1978.
“Late Shang Divination: The Magico-Religious Legacy,” in Explorations in Early
Chinese Cosmology, edited by Henry Rosemont Jr. Chico, CA: Scholars
Press, 1984.
“Shang Divination and Metaphysics,” Philosophy East & West, 38.4, October
1988.
“The Making of the Ancestors: Late Shang Religion and Its Legacy,” in Chinese
Religion & Society: The Transformation of a Field, vol. 1, edited by John
Lagerway. Hong Kong: Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-orient and the Chinese
University of Hong Kong Press, 2004.
“Theology and the Writing of History: Truth and the Ancestors in the Wu Ding
Divination Records,” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 1.1–4, 1999.
“Marks and Labels: Early Writing in Neolithic and Shang China,” in Archaeology
of Asia, edited by Miriam T. Stark. London: Blackwell, 2006.
“Clean Hands and Shining Helmets: Heroic Action in Early Chinese and Greek
Culture,” in Religion and the Authority of the Past, edited by Tobin Siebers.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
“Epistemology in Cultural Context: Disguise and Deception in Early China and
Early Greece,” in Early China, Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Compari-
sons, edited by Steven Shankman and Stephen Durrant. Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 2001.
“ ‘There Was an Old Man of Changan…’ Limericks and the Teaching of Early
Chinese History,” The History Teacher 22.3, May 1989.
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PREFACE
Professor David N. Keightley was born in London in 1932 and spent the World
War II years there, coming to the United States in 1947. A graduate of Amherst
College (an English major and biochemistry minor) in 1953, he studied medieval
French at the University of Lille in northern France as a Fulbright student and
received his M.A. in modern European history at New York University in 1956.
After a number of years working as a fiction and nonfiction editor and freelance
writer in New York City, he entered Columbia University’s graduate school in
1962 and received his Ph.D. in East Asian history in 1969. During that time, he
spent two years in Taiwan and Japan in language training and research.
Convinced, when a freelance writer, that China was one of the frontiers of
our time, Keightley decided to learn Chinese in order to write about contempo-
rary Chinese society and culture. After three years of study, however, he realized
that some of the most fundamental issues that help explain the many differences
between Chinese and other societies lay far back in the past. Resisting both the
theories of Karl Wittfogel about “oriental despotism” and of Marxism about “slave
society,” Keightley’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Public Work in Ancient China: A Study
of Forced Labor in the Shang and Western Chou,” attempted to place the mobi-
lization and control of labor in its religious and social context.
A member of the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley from
1969 to 1998, and a specialist in China’s earliest historical documents, Professor
Keightley was the author of Sources of Shang History: The Oracle Bone Inscriptions
of Bronze Age China (1978) and The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Com-
munity in Late Shang China, ca. 1200–1045 B.C. (2000), and the editor of The
Origins of Chinese Civilization (1983). One of the founders and editors of the
journal, Early China, he published over seventy articles dealing with the religion
and history of the Chinese Neolithic and Bronze Ages. His work paid particular
attention to the cultural significance of early Chinese religion and divination (as
seen in the Shang dynasty oracle-bone inscriptions), to the Neolithic roots of
China’s bronze-age culture, and to comparative studies of “classical” literature and
“classical” role-models in bronze-age China and bronze-age Greece.
Keightley authored the articles on Chinese “Prehistory” and “The First
Historical Dynasty: The Shang” in The New Encyclopedia Britannica: Macro-
paedie (1987), a chapter, “The Shang: China’s First Historical Dynasty,” for the
Cambridge History of Ancient China, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L.
Shaughnessy (1999), and the entry for the “Shang Dynasty” in the Microsoft
Encarta Reference Library 2002. Given the difficulty of the oracle-bone inscrip-
tions, he also reviewed books—particularly in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic
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