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Mesopotamia and China stand as the foundational sources of writing cultures in the West and East. This essay explores the formative characteristics of early Chinese textual traditions through the documentary heritage of Mesopotamia, which had already employed writing for nearly two millennia before China. It first surveys the major categories and subgenres of Sumerian and Akkadian literature as outlined in The Context of Scripture (3 vols., ed. William W. Hallo, 2003). It then examines the development of early Chinese texts—from oracle bone inscriptions to Chu bamboo manuscripts—applying Hallo’s Mesopotamian classification framework to the Chinese context. While recognizing the limits of this preliminary comparison, the study nonetheless draws several conclusions.

Writing in Mesopotamia and early China diverged significantly. The most striking difference lies in the near absence of the divine voice in China, where it was replaced by the voice of political power. This absence of anthropomorphic gods may reflect an early Chinese view of the divine as an unapproachable entity—one that could not be intertwined with human affairs, just as the supreme deity Di in oracle bone inscriptions could not be directly addressed. Conversely, if the pervasive divine voice in Mesopotamian texts was itself a projection of political authority, then its writing, too, can be understood as a writing of power. Yet precisely because the divine is silent in China, the god-saturated discourse of Mesopotamia stands out all the more vividly.

Another key difference concerns the emergence of the individual. In China, texts centered on personal experience appear only some eight to nine centuries after the establishment of narrative systems such as the oracle bone inscriptions. Even then, these “individuals” were typically elite figures at the apex of political hierarchy, subject to moral or ideological evaluation. During the Warring States period (453-211 BCE), intellectual energy was directed toward grand cosmological and ethical questions—how to govern the world and how to live well—leaving little room for introspective or everyday depictions of the self such as those found in Mesopotamian writings.

This contrast may stem from different political and cultural environments: the multi-polar order of the ancient Near East versus the largely centralized system that persisted in China until the Warring States. The absence of the individual may also be tied to material conditions. As Leo A. Oppenheim noted, Mesopotamian clay tablets were humanity’s most efficient and inexpensive writing medium, whereas Chinese oracle bones and bronze vessels—onto which text had to be carved or cast—posed spatial and technical limits on expression. Even if perishable materials such as bamboo or wood were used as early as the late Shang in the thirteenth century BCE, writing remained confined to court-controlled ritual inscriptions. The brevity and poetic compression characteristic of early Chinese texts—from oracle bones and bronzes to the Shijing, Shujing, and Yijing—may thus reflect these material constraints. The high cost of such media likely confined writing to the court by the end of the Spring and Autumn period (770-453 BCE). Even after literacy spread rapidly in the Warring States, perhaps due to the diffusion of cheaper bamboo slips (as Rens Krijgsman argues), it would have been difficult to escape the ritual continuity and “writing of great affairs” that had long defined textual production.

As a result, there was little incentive or opportunity to record mundane or unrefined stories, which likely persisted in oral form as popular memory. The 2015 publication of the Western Han bamboo manuscript Wangji 妄稽 in Peking University’s collection—the earliest known narrative of private life so far, depicting an ugly wife’s struggles against her husband’s concubine in a 2,700-character narrative poem—supports this inference.

Despite these sharp contrasts, both civilizations shared key features. Ritual and commemorative writing—such as royal inscriptions and bronze inscriptions—flourished for centuries, and omen or divination texts occupied central positions in their literary corpora. Just as Chinese writing from the outset was divided into the twin categories of shi (poetry) and shu (prose), Mesopotamian literature can likewise be broadly divided into poetry and prose. The canonization of the Shijing, Shujing, and Yijing laid the intellectual foundations of East Asian thought, whereas in the West, the Hebrew Bible—shaped by Mesopotamian literary traditions—was first designated as a canon in the fourth century CE, defining the spiritual framework of Western civilization.

In sum, this essay defines the textual current of early China—from the oracle bone inscriptions to the Chu bamboo manuscripts—as “the lofty writing of authority, devoid of the voices of gods and common people.” The mechanism behind this development, examined at the end of this article, may well be related to what Mark Lewis emphasizes as the institutional authority of writing in ancient China.

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기사명 저자명 페이지 원문 목차
동아시아 세계론과 동부유라시아론 = 东亚世界论与东部欧亚论 정병준 p. 1-30
고상한 권력의 글쓰기 = The lofty writing of authority : early Chinese texts through the lens of Mesopotamian literature : 메소포타미아의 텍스트를 통해 본 중국의 초기 텍스트 심재훈 p. 31-91
前漢時期 縣廷의 禁錢 회계처리와 그 특징 = 前汉时期县廷的禁钱会计处理程序及其特点 : 以长沙走马楼前汉简牍《长沙临湘少内禁钱计计误案》分析为中心 : 長沙走馬樓 前漢 簡牘 ｢長沙臨湘少內禁錢計計誤案｣ 분석을 중심으로 宋眞 p. 93-137
일상 공간의 제도적 변용 = 日常空间的制度变化 : 汉代“门下”的制度化 : 漢代 門下의 제도화 김종희 p. 139-185
北朝 시기 高句麗系 高賓의 가계와 활동 = 北朝时期高句丽系高宾的家族与活动 정해인 p. 187-218
唐 後期 國家祭祀의 정비 = 唐后期国家祭祀的整备 : 以《大唐郊祀录》的编纂为中心 : 『大唐郊祀錄』의 편찬을 중심으로 김정식 p. 219-243
唐末 藩鎭의 대외 문서로서의 ｢檄黃巢書｣ 試論 = A tentative study on the dispatch of external documents by late Tang regional military governorates : focusing on the case of the "Proclamation to Huang Chao" : 未發信 가능성 검토를 중심으로 조종성 p. 245-284

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