Entombed Epigraphy and Commemorative Culture in Early Medieval China: A History of Early Muzhiming by Timothy M. Davis (review)

This volume provides readers with a good general overview of the complex history and development of tomb inscriptions (muzhiming 墓誌銘) from their origins up to the sixth century. The book is divided into six chapters, which begin by defining the characteristics of muzhiming (Introduction), and then move forward to analyze their social and religious functions (Chapters 1 and 2). The bulk of the book's chapters explain the various processes and phases these texts experienced over this course of historical time: "Mortuary Epigraphy Moves Underground," "Entombed Epigraphy in an Era of Political Instability," "Historiographical Biography and Commemorative Biography," and "The Rise of Muzhiming as a Literary Genre." The book makes for an excellent handbook in English, providing information on the key aspects of the development of muzhiming. It is clearly structured, translates many of the most important passages from sources on the topic, and introduces historians unfamiliar with the topic to the history of "entombed epigraphy." For the first time, the history of muzhiming has been narrated as a coherent story beginning with its origins in the Eastern Han dynasty and ending at a time when this genre received, I would say, a first "maturity" as a literary genre, adopting characteristics of private historiography that are atypical for a strictly religious document and rather reflect socio-political functions.

Very unfortunately, however, the analysis and argumentation completely neglect an entire body of research and publications carried out earlier by authors in languages other than English or Chinese.¹ In many respects, some European authors, writing mainly in German, have asked the same or similar questions and have come to the same, to similar, or slightly different answers, and they have discussed various aspects in much more detail than presented in this book, years or even decades ago. It is of course understandable that not everybody knows German. But in our modern times, I think, this is more an expression and reflection of the absent communication between scholars and scholarly communities based at different universities. Seeing that somebody has published somewhere on the topic of muzhiming, it would not be too difficult to find out if other publications exist, contact the authors or get the necessary language assistance, if necessary.

The earliest archaeological example of a stele placed inside a tomb was, according to our actual knowledge, the mubei 墓碑 of a certain Fei Zhi 肥 致, dated 169 CE. Although this was a stele, it was placed inside the tomb and possesses various biographical details of the deceased, a Daoist who allegedly reached an age of approximately one hundred years, in addition to its metaphysical-religious content.² The tradition of entombed epigraphy, according to the present state of evidence, consequently started in the Eastern Han dynasty (Davis is of course well aware of such archaeological biases; see p. 351). But of course we have to analyze the archaeological and textual traditions comparatively.

In Chapters 1 and 2, Davis analyses the social and religious functions of muzhiming, describing also how their originally stronger religious function, such as the aim to protect "the deceased from malevolent spiritual forces and . . . to settle him or her within the social settings of the underworld" (p. 151), gradually became weaker, while social and status questions became more important. For example, in Chapter 1 Davis introduces the earliest tomb inscription excavated so far (it was already unearthed during the Qing dynasty) that uses the term muzhiming in its title (p. 61), that of a certain Liu Huaimin 劉懷民 (411–463). Chinese written tradition, in contrast, traces the origins of muzhi (not yet muzhiming) back to the Wang Qiu muzhi 王球墓誌, an inscription composed by a literatus of the Liu Song 劉宋 dynasty (420–479), Yan Yanzhi 顏延之 (384–456), for a certain Wang Qiu 王球 (p. 6).³ As Davis explains in the introduction, this "indicates that...