A LITTLE over fifty years ago, at the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the great majority of Chinese students of litera-
ture would have traced the earliest development of China's literary
tradition back to the middle of the third millennium before Christ.
They would have accepted an extensive array of supposedly early
prose and poetry which, upon critical examination, was oftentimes
but a projection of the imaginative minds of later ages into the
remote past. When Herbert A. Giles, Professor of Chinese at the
University of Cambridge, wrote in 1901 the first systematic history
of Chinese literature to be published "in any language, including
Chinese," he decided boldly but wisely to brush aside China's high
antiquity with a very brief summary, and begin his narrative with
Confucius. Writing at about the same time, Professor Wilhelm Grube
of Berlin, whose Geschichte der Chinesischen Literatur was pub-
lished in 1902, approached the subject with the same cautiousness,
and, venturing into what he called pre-Confucian literature, dared to
tread warily only as far back as Kuan Chung who had died in 645 B.C.,
scarcely more than a century before the birth of the Chinese sage in
551 B.C. These, and other scholars of kindred mind, knew enough to
realize that, to put it mildly, few literary documents before Confucius
were even approximately datable.

Benefiting from the critical scholarship of the last several decades,
and especially from the fruits of archaeological excavations, we have
access today to thousands of original written records actually pro-
duced between 1400 B.C. and 1100 B.C. If these records, incised on
bones and tortoise shells, like the records on bronzes of that period,
have preserved for us no soul-stirring literary gems from antiquity,
they have at least confronted us with a valuable body of authentic
specimens from an early phase in the development of China's written
language. The discovery of these records, an intriguing tale in itself,
deserves at least a brief review.

The inscribed bones and tortoise shells were first discovered, quite
accidentally, in 1899, slightly over two miles northwest of the walled

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