The Evidence for Scribal Training at Anyang

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The divination workshops at Anyang are the only late second millennium B.C.E. institutions from which we have evidence of the routine and intensive use of writing. These workshops trained their own scribes, and the remains of that training process – including the so-called xike 習刻 (“practice engraving”) inscriptions – have been repeatedly found at Anyang since the earliest excavations. Several authors have concluded that the trainees were previously fully literate and were learning to engrave on bone. This paper surveys the evidence and concludes that this is unlikely to be correct: scribal trainees in the divination workshops were acquiring the rudiments of literacy for the first time. That conclusion is compatible with a model of late second millennium Chinese literacy that sees writing as largely confined to the activities of a small number of individuals in the immediate entourage of the Shang kings. Writing and Scribal Training at Anyang, and Their Mesopotamian Parallels Determining the functional, geographic and social range of literacy during the Anyang period (c. 1300-1050 B.C.E.) remains a difficult problem. The same could be said for literacy during the preceding five hundred years (if there was any at all) and subsequently during the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods. Evidence for late second millennium Chinese literacy is overwhelmingly dominated, numerically speaking, by records of divination from inside the moated elite enclosure at the Late Shang site complex at Anyang. Does this salience of the divination record among 1 The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Adam Schwartz, Ken-ichi Takashima, Crispin Williams and the organizers and participants of the Columbia Early China Seminar for their contributions to this paper. Research was supported by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, and a Henry Luce/ACLS East and Southeast Asian Archaeology and Early History Dissertation Fellowship (2006).