An Introdution to the Oracle Bones 甲骨文介绍 英语.doc

An Introduction to the Oracle Bones 前言Preface to The Written Word in Ancient China When the Royal Ontario Museum acquired获得 the Menzies人名 Collection收藏 in 1960, a fund基金 was established to enable study 研究学习and publication 发表of its most significant part, the approximately 4,700 in scribed oracle bones collected by the late James M. Menzies while he was working in China before the Second World War. Dr. Menzie is today acknowledged in China as the only westerner who made a fundamental contribution to the understanding of oracle bone script, the earliest body of Chinese writing to have survived, dating from the later Shang dynasy (ca. 14th-11th century BC). The Museum’s original plan was to bring Dr. Ch’u Wan-li, a renowned scholar of the Chinese classics, from Academica Sinica in Taiwan to undertake the publication project. Unfortunately, Dr. Ch’u experienced a period of ill health that made overseas travel impossible, and after taking local advice, he recommended one of his students, Hsu Chin-hsiung, for the project. James, as he became known to the Far Eastern Department, arrived in Toronto in December, 1968 to begin this work. Over the next few years he completed the preparation and publication of the Menzies oracle bones. When the first volume appeared in 1972, it revealed a major contribution to oracle bone periodization that he had developed, based on analysis not only of the script but of the chiselled hollows that were part of the bones’ preparation for divination. We in the Royal Ontario Museum like to think that it was at least partially as a result of his working in a museum environment, where he learned from the objects themselves, that he came to regard the importance of the entire bone, not just its inscription, as a subject for study. . . . After James Hsu received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1974, he was cross-appointed to the Department of East Asian Studies at the university, where he gradually assumed more teaching r