Northern Dynasty Epitaph Literature

The Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs have very important literature value, high status and great significance in the field of Chinese classical bibliography research. It is an important and arduous mission for bibliographers and philologists to carry out an all-round systematic research on extant Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs. This paper tries to deeply carry through the bibliographical inspection and research in the history division style through philology and literature.Firstly, this paper sorts out the schools of theories of origins of the epitaph and correlative ramification, emphatically inspects the evolution of epitaph word and epitaph stone, and also it refers to the stages of Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs, the background of prosperity of Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs, the achievements and problems in exploring Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs, the significance and goal and method and so many aspects of the research of Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs. And it explores the formation of the Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs, and discusses the formation and information of Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs from three parts that is material and manufacture, form taken and hetero-type and the tomb tablet ranks.Secondly, this paper analyses the description and the research situation of the unearthed Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs. It makes a clear and all-round research of the geography distributing and correlative writings of the Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs and the research of important scholars in the time sequence, before Qing dynasty, Qing dynasty, the period of the Republic of China and after the foundation of the People Republic of China.Thirdly, this paper discusses the literary characteristics of the Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs from the aspects of epitaph writing style, language characteristic, authors' intention and literature concept. The epitaph is a special literary style, which is different from other literary styles. In some sense, the Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs have the representatives of Northern Dynasties' articles. The contents of the epitaph were various in forms in initial stage and it became standardized and in a certain pattern. The topic, the foreword, the biography, the verse and the end are four parts of its structure. Because of the biography and the verse located in different place in epitaph, the formation styles of Northern Dynasties' epitaph can be divided into the styles of "the front biography + the behind verse", "the front biography + the middle verse + the behind biography", "the biography" and "the verse". In that political, economical, social and especially literary environment, the Northern Dynasties' Epitaphs were written in the language of the middle ancient times, which was put the brand of time and also shows the charm of the literary language.Fourthly, this paper focuses on the historical value of the Northern Dynasties' epitaphs. It employs the dual evidence method of Wang Guowei, which is combining the historical documents with the unearthed inscriptions, and excavates further information on the epitaphs of the Northern Dynasties, and fills in the deficiency and blank space of the historical documents so as to testify to the history better and also to explain and rectify the history as well. The large amount of inscriptions on tomb tablet in the period of Northern Dynasties mainly accounts the authentic history facts. The persons who are inscribed on the tomb tablet fall into two categories: one is that there is biography in the authorized historical documents with full and accurate contents in the epitaph; the other one is that there is no biography in the authorized history, with only epitaph revealing its name and life story. Sorting out the relations among the dead persons through the epitaphs on the tomb tablet in the Northern Dynasties will help to fully and clearly show the family trees among the emperors and aristocrats of Northern Dynasties and senior officials of Han Dynasty. Besides, the epitaphs can rectify the mistakes of the recordings in "Book of Wei Dynasties" and "History of North Dynasties", which is conducive to making clear the truth or mistakes through making comparison between the different written records. Generally speaking, the epitaphs as original materials happen more early than "Book of Wei Dynasties" and "History of North Dynasties", and thus have smaller probability of making mistakes and play an important role in testifying the history, but not absolutely being true, with the conclusion to be obtained as a result of textual research with regard to complicated matters.Fifthly, the Northern Dynasties' epitaphs contain a large amount of social folk custom, have considerable significance in the aspect of social culture. For example, the life-span of that time indicated through dead person's age, the gender disparity in position through the gravestone's dimension, social norm through the social custom during the funeral period, and the national amalgamation situation through marriage choices etc. let's take the 671 tomb tablets in the Northern Dynasties as the statistical sample. The sample gravestone should contain 691 persons, among whom 494 has obvious male characteristics or male inclination, and 174 has obvious female characteristics or female inclination, and 23 has unclear sex inclination in addition, and 208 has unknown ages. In the whole process of the Northern Dynasties, from the sample investigation, the population average life-span is 47 years old, and the average life-span of male is 46, female being 50, with the female being a bit longer than male in average life-span. This average life-span situation can reflect that the social political, economical, cultural and technological development level is relatively very low at that time, and that the productivity power is correspondingly poor with a large majority of people being dead before entering old-age period. In addition, the dead persons with tomb tablets, most of who belong to the upper-class society, have higher living standard than the average level. Therefore we can infer from the above analysis that the average life span of that time might be shorter than the statistical figure at present, which is more in line with the development reality of that society.The epitaphs of the Northern Dynasties reflect the male and female's sex status. By comparing with different shape and size of the gravestones of the male and female official, the husbands and wives, the family members, we can discover that gravestones of queens, imperial concubines and female officials are smaller in size than male officials; comparing husbands and wives' gravestone, husbands' are bigger, wives' are smaller and the concubines' are even less smaller. The clan gravestones also abided by this system, which proved a social reality that women are treated as inferiors to men. Through the statistics of the gravestones on which have definite mark of persons death and bury in Northern Dynasties, we also can make a judgment that burying period of male grave hosts are longer than female grave hosts. In the Northern Dynasties, the burying period of most of the female grave hosts is within 3 months, which take 57.4% of whole female grave hosts. However, few of male grave hosts were buried within one month or lay at home for only one month after their deaths, and most of them were buried within 2 to 8 months after their deaths. The longest burying period of female grave host sample is no more than two years and only few individual cases are extra-long. But it is very popular for male grave hosts lay at home for two years after their deaths, besides someone even lay at home for over 6 years. Accounting for overall ratio, it takes 26.7% in the Northern Wei Dynasty, 25.4% in the Northern Qi Dynasty, 22.9% in The Eastern Wei Dynasty.The epitaphs on the memorial tablet within a tomb in the Northern Dynasties reflected the marriage situation in that era which consisted of marriage among a family, marriage between same-surname families, marriage between influential families and remarriage, etc. As to the actual marriage age in the Northern Dynasties, 14-year old was the marriageable age for girls, which we can get from the analysis to the marriage age of 33 mentioned in an inscription on the tomb tablet, but the average marriage age as a whole was 17-year old, from this, we can infer that the actual marriageable age of female in the Northern Dynasties should be around 17-year old, say, in the Northern Dynasties female's real marriage age was generally older than that fixed by social conventions. It's worth noticing that most of women got married before 14-year old were from royalty and aristocracy, while the marriage age of common people was elder than 14-year old.Sixthly, this paper investigates the evaluation and protection of the epitaphs of the Northern Dynasties from the perspective of document material, we can learn that tomb tablets were kept and disseminated, besides, human creatively adapt rubbings(Tapian) to keep and spread the epitaph which is favor for strengthening the dissemination of the original epitaphs and adding subordinate ingredients to them. But there were duplication, copy and forging epitaphs of the Northern Dynasties, so they needed to be distinguished and evaluated, and the precious epitaph stones needed to be protected and kept.The innovation and typical characteristics in the dissertation are reflected through several factors. Firstly, doing research thoroughly and comprehensively on the Northern Dynasties' epitaphs to build up the research system of the Northern Dynasties' epitaphs fills the omission of the Northern Dynasties' epitaphs in the field of ancient documents and extends the research content of the epitaphs. Secondly, combining the epitaphs and the history records, we do research systematically on the formation of the Northern Dynasties' tomb tablets, which includes choosing materials, making, finalizing the design, changing the design, carving the stone, keeping and protecting tomb tablets, testing and distinguishing inscriptions, especially making meticulous and real description on the origin, development and finalization of the epitaphs of the Northern Dynasties. Thirdly, making overall investigation on the Northern Dynasties' epitaphs literarily, historically and socially and analyzing the cultural information contained in the Northern Dynasties' epitaphs fill the omissions in such fields as the Northern Dynasties' literature, history and sociology. Fourthly, doing statistical analysis in categories on the epitaph resources in the Northern Dynasties by the method of mathematical statistics pioneers a new method of the measure philology in the field of epitaph researches.