The Baoshan Tomb: Religious transitions in art, ritual, and text during the Warring States period (480--221 BCE) (China)

This dissertation explores historical transitions in funerary art, ritual, and text in their archaeological context by focusing on the tomb of a high-ranking Chu official, Shao Tuo (d. 316 BCE), discovered at Baoshan in Hubei Province. The Warring States transition has long been regarded as a process of rationalization and secularization, developing from the mystical, superstitious Shang and Zhou dynasties to the rational, bureaucratic Qin and Han empires. This contextual study problematizes this vision of antiquity, arguing that religious transitions played a vital role in shaping the intellectual and religious foundations of a unified empire.; Chapter 2 demonstrates that the tomb inventories and funerary gift-lists as ritual devices structured the communication between humans and spirits, and that tomb construction, modeled on the cosmos, expressed new conceptions of the afterlife that emerged during the Warring States period. Chapter 3 shows that the practice of burying mingqi (“spirit artifacts”) and personal belongings was a form of a tie-breaking ritual, the purpose of which was to ritualize the gradual separation between the deceased and the living. Chapter 4 shows that the new categories of burial furnishings, such as lamps and folding beds, were chosen to perform specific religious functions. The lamps in the Baoshan tomb were to facilitate the spirit journey to the increasingly alienated, gloomy, and dangerous underworld, a conception of the afterlife that emerged in the Warring States era.; Chapter 5 discusses the historical development of ancestral cults, changing from the use of living persons as impersonators to the concordant use of images. This transition led to the development of the burying of tomb figurines as substitutes of human servants, the use of spirit tablets, and a reinterpretation of the concept of wei (“position”) in early Chinese ritual art. The pictorial representation of the human figure originated in the context of rhetorical uses of works of art. Finally, the appendix reconsiders Karlgren's linguistic method of distinguishing “free” texts from “systematizing” texts, and draws connections between funerary texts and the genesis of ritual texts in Early China.