Excavated Documents and New Evidence on The Classic of Mountains and Seas

The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing) has a wide range of contents. A comparison with related excavated texts shows that The Classic of Mountains and Seas has a strong color of numeral art (shushu) and rich natural history content. It also inherits the tradition of “recording the strange.” It was originally accompanied by pictures and maps, so can be considered a comprehensive work containing a mixture of numeral art, natural history, “strange things and mythology.” The Classic of Mountains and Seas records “the cave of the bear,” “Ban’s invention of the bow and arrow,” “the country of Nie’er,” etc., which can be attested by excavated bamboo slips and texts on silk from Chu and bamboo slips from Qin. The work is thus of great historical value. In addition to examining the word usage and images, this paper compares the vocabulary of this work with excavated documents, and concludes that The Classic of Mountains (Shanjing), a part of the work, was produced no later than the Warring States Period; it was probably produced in the Chu area, and the author would have been a native of Chu. We can use the excavated documents to correct some of the characters in The Classic of Mountains and Seas.