8. Art Historical Issues Arising From the M5 Burial at Anyang

Abstract

This paper takes the position that the “late Wu Ting” or “Period II” dating for M5, now accepted by many scholars, cannot be reconciled with the advanced typological and stylistic qualities exhibited by so many of its bronze vessels, and that therefore the reading of the M5 bronze inscriptions as “Fu Hao” and the viewing of this as the name of a single individual woman, the consort of Wu Ting, constitute a methodology which must be rejected. Instead, the inscriptions could be read as “Fu Tzu,” with Tzu ( ) recognized as the feminization of the Shang surname Tzu ( ). Since this name would have been inherited by all daughters of the Tzu clan, there would have been at any one time a sizable number of royal women of various ages appropriately titled “Fu Tzu” ; and the necessity of identifying the Fu Tzu of the M5 inscriptions only with a woman named in the Wu Ting oracle bones can be eliminated. It is, moreover, likely that even in the Wu Ting oracle-bone inscriptions the references to “Fu Tzu” actually concerned several different ladies of the royal clan—daughters or aunts of the king, as well as consorts (the royal clan being endogamous).