The Ancestral Landscape

This monograph presents insights of general historical and intellectual interest derived from the Shang oracle bone inscriptions from Anyang. The insights are integrated with data from other fields, including metereology, botany, zoology, astronomy, sociology, and archaeology. By presenting a relatively large number of inscriptions, Keightley hopes to give readers an almost tactile sense, not only of what it was like to be a Late Shang king and a Late Shang diviner, but also of what it is to be a scholar who works with these materials. And by translating, in context, more than a hundred and fifty of the inscriptions, he also hopes to introduce readers to the ways in which the earliest written documents yet found in China may be studied.