The Shuihudi Qin bamboo texts () are early Chinese texts written on

bamboo slips Bamboo and wooden strips ( zh, s=简牍, t=簡牘, first=t, p=jiǎndú) are long, narrow strips of wood or bamboo, each typically holding a single column of several dozen brush-written characters. They were the main media for writing documents ...

, and are also sometimes called the Yúnmèng Qin bamboo texts. They were excavated in December 1975 from Tomb #11 at Shuìhǔdì () in

Yunmeng County Yunmeng County () is a county in eastern Hubei province, People's Republic of China. It is administered by Xiaogan City and is located just outside Xiaogan's urban area. History During the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history (770-476 ...

Hubei Hubei is a province of China, province in Central China. It has the List of Chinese provincial-level divisions by GDP, seventh-largest economy among Chinese provinces, the second-largest within Central China, and the third-largest among inland ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. The tomb belonged to a Qin administrator 217 BCE. Written in the

Qin dynasty The Qin dynasty ( ) was the first Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China. It is named for its progenitor state of Qin, a fief of the confederal Zhou dynasty (256 BC). Beginning in 230 BC, the Qin under King Ying Zheng enga ...

, the texts record Qin laws and public documents. Their contents have been published in the book 《睡虎地秦墓竹簡》 (''Shuìhǔdì Qínmù Zhújiǎn''). This cache of bamboo slips is of great importance for research into the government, economics, culture, law, military affairs, etc. of the late

Warring States The Warring States period in Chinese history (221 BC) comprises the final two and a half centuries of the Zhou dynasty (256 BC), which were characterized by frequent warfare, bureaucratic and military reforms, and struggles for gre ...

to the Qin period. While the Shuihudi cache is deemed to be among the most valuable epigraphic sources on the Qin history, the discoveries of the

Qin Slips of Liye The Liye Qin Slips () is a large collection of bamboo slips which were unearthed from Liye Ancient City in Longshan County, Hunan, China in 2002. It is one of China's most important archaeological discoveries of the 21st century.The archaeological ...

in 2002 and 2005 are regarded as being of equal, if not bigger, importance.

Yuri Pines Yuri Pines (Hebrew: יורי פינס; Russian: Юрий Анатольевич Пинес; born 1964) is a Ukrainian-born Israeli sinologist and the Michael W. Lipson Professor of Chinese Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Pin ...

, Gideon Shelach,

Lothar von Falkenhausen Lothar von Falkenhausen (born June 6, 1959) is a German-American archaeologist and art historian specializing in the Chinese Bronze Age. After receiving a PhD in anthropology at Harvard, he briefly taught at Stanford and the University of Califor ...

, Robin D. S. Yates (eds.). Birth of an Empire:The State of Qin Revisited, 2013:10.

References

Bibliography

* Hulsewé, A.F.P. ''Remnants of Ch'in Law: An Annotated Translation of the Ch'in Legal and Administrative Rules of the 3rd Century BC''. (Sinica Leidensia, No 17) Leiden: Brill, 1985. {{Excavated Chinese manuscripts Archaeological artifacts of China Bamboo and wooden slips History of Hubei Culture of the Qin dynasty 1975 archaeological discoveries Legal history of China 3rd-century BC texts Archaeological discoveries in China

See also

References

Bibliography