The Zhangjiashan Han bamboo texts are ancient

Han Dynasty The Han dynasty (, ; ) was an imperial dynasty of China (202 BC – 9 AD, 25–220 AD), established by Liu Bang (Emperor Gao) and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) and a warr ...

Chinese written works dated 196–186 BC. They were discovered in 1983 by archaeologists excavating tomb no. 247 at Mount Zhangjia () of

Jiangling County Jiangling () is a county in southern Hubei province, People's Republic of China. Administratively, it is under the jurisdiction of Jingzhou City. History The county name derived from the old name of Jingzhou. Liang dynasty Prince Xiao Yi 蕭繹 ( ...

Hubei Hubei (; ; alternately Hupeh) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, and is part of the Central China region. The name of the province means "north of the lake", referring to its position north of Dongting Lake. The prov ...

Province (near modern

Jingzhou Jingzhou () is a prefecture-level city in southern Hubei province, China, located on the banks of the Yangtze River. Its total residential population was 5,231,180 based on the 2020 census, 1,068,291 of whom resided in the built-up (''or metro' ...

). The tomb was built for an early Western Han era official who had died in 186 BC. The texts were written on traditional bamboo slips connected by cords into rolled scrolls. The written works included legal case precedents, literature on medicine including ''

Book on Vessels The ''Maishu'' (), translated into English as the ''Book on Vessels'', is an early Han dynasty medical text that discusses the vessels of the body. It was unearthed as part of the Zhangjiashan cache of texts in the 1980s.Anthony J. Barbieri-Low an ...

'',

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

military strategy Military strategy is a set of ideas implemented by military organizations to pursue desired strategic goals. Derived from the Greek word '' strategos'', the term strategy, when it appeared in use during the 18th century, was seen in its narrow s ...

, and a calendar with dates ranging from 202 BC to 186 BC. The mathematical work found within the tomb, the ''

Book on Numbers and Computation The ''Book on Numbers and Computation'' (), or the ''Writings on Reckoning'', is one of the earliest known Chinese mathematical treatises. It was written during the early Western Han dynasty, sometime between 202 BC and 186 BC.Liu et al. (2003), ...

'', rapidly advanced the state of the field of ancient Chinese mathematics studies, clarifying the obscure passages of ''

the Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art ''The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art'' () is a Chinese mathematics book, composed by several generations of scholars from the 10th–2nd century BCE, its latest stage being from the 2nd century CE. This book is one of the earliest sur ...

''. Although its date roughly corresponds with the tomb occupant's death, one of the legal cases discussed in the work on law was dated 246 BC, with some even older legal precedents of the

State of Qin Qin () was an ancient Chinese state during the Zhou dynasty. Traditionally dated to 897 BC, it took its origin in a reconquest of western lands previously lost to the Rong; its position at the western edge of Chinese civilization permitted ex ...

mixed in, according to Mark Csikszentmihalyi.Csikszentmihalyi (2006), p. 29. The most recent legal case in that work was dated 196 BC.

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References

* Csikszentmihalyi, Mark. (2006). ''Readings in Han Chinese Thought''. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. . Bamboo and wooden slips Archaeological artifacts of China Han dynasty texts Jingzhou {{China-stub

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