| The men and women of early medieval China were highly sensitive to the obligations they owed their dead. The various genres of pragmatic and commemorative epigraphy recovered from the tombs of this era provide insight into how living descendants imagined the relationship with their deceased ancestors. Pragmatic forms of entombed epigraphy---typified by burial plot purchase contracts, tomb-quelling writs, and grave inventories (specifically those inventories with attached letters to underworld authorities)---aim at protecting the deceased from malevolent spiritual forces and settling him or her within the social setting of the underworld. They also often seek to delimit the sacred space in which the dead were allowed to operate, and occasionally coerce the spirits into maintaining a proper distance from the living by threatening them with posthumous harm. Commemorative forms of entombed epigraphy, on the other hand, celebrate the moral development and meritorious achievements of the dead with the aim of preserving their name and legacy for posterity and, if fortunate, inscribing their accomplishments into the cultural memory of the larger community.;While many genres related to death and burial are discussed in this study, I have chosen to concentrate on the "entombed epitaph inscription" or muzhiming for the following reasons: First, excavations of medieval tombs have yielded several thousand entombed epitaph inscriptions in recent years. The sheer number of tomb-interred epitaphs discovered so far marks them as a significant cultural phenomenon and demands concentrated inquiry into their origins and development, their religious, social, and commemorative functions, and their literary and rhetorical features. And secondly, previous scholarship devoted to entombed epitaph inscriptions has tended to emphasize their inherent value as unaltered source material for studying the development of the Chinese script or for supplementing traditional accounts of political and institutional history to the neglect of their role in the memorial culture of early medieval China.;The first three chapters of this study are concerned with identifying the antecedents of entombed epitaph inscriptions and exploring their practical functions. Chapter one locates the origins of entombed epitaph inscriptions at the crossroads of two traditions: (1) the canonical inscription tradition of commemorative texts associated with ancestral sacrifice, including inscribed bronze vessels and commemorative stelae, and (2) the documents of the pragmatic, common mortuary practice that prevailed during the early medieval period as preserved in the archaeological record. Chapter two focuses on examples of subterranean epigraphy that had been inscribed upon the actual structural elements of the tomb and its role in securing a final resting place of a particular deceased individual. Chapter three concentrates on the conditions under which entombed epitaphs first appear. For example, they are regularly deployed in circumstances of exigent burial, such as in cases where war, unrest, or great distance necessitated temporary burial away from the lineage homelands ( waizang), or when reburial was necessary because the tomb had been damaged or required relocation to more auspicious environs (gaizang ).;Chapters four and five explore the role of entombed epitaph inscriptions in the memorial culture of early medieval China. Chapter four distinguishes between the historiographical mode of biography, as preserved in the dynastic histories, and the commemorative mode found in entombed epitaph inscriptions pointing out their different audiences and rhetorical strategies. Chapter five concentrates on the process by which the entombed epitaph inscription was elevated to an esteemed literary genre practiced by many of the most admired writers in the pre-modern literary tradition. |
