Lance Pursey; Junfu Wong
Lance Pursey
University of Birmingham Year 3 PhD Candidate in Medieval History
Who were the Necropolitan Elite?
Kinship Networks in Northeast Asia in the Long Eleventh Century (960-1125CE)
Archaeological discoveries have yielded an abundance of epigraphic material from the Liao period (907-1125CE). Many of these are muzhiming, epitaphs of elite persons that serve as rich sources of biographical information. For my PhD research I have compiled Liao epigraphy into a relational database that combines this biographical information with the archaeological and material contexts of the inscriptions. I use this to carry out a geospatial prosopographical analysis of the elites who invested in entombed epitaphs, a group I call the ‘necropolitan elite’.
This paper addresses head-on the question of who this corpus of epigraphic material represents. By examining not only the subjects of the epitaphs but also the kinship relations that the epitaphs mention I provide an account of how interconnected this portion of Liao elite society was and how, through marriage and kinship, political and social networks were formed locally and transregionally.
A diachronic analysis of these elites shows which families managed to retain power and influence throughout the Liao dynasty; while a spatial analysis based on the location these epitaphs were discovered reveals the power bases of certain families in Liao. Together these analyses destabilise the assumption that the reach of imperial power is even and homogeneous over time and space, showing instead the agency of elites in Liao society in competition and collaboration through the maintenance of kinship and social networks.
Junfu Wong
First Year MA candidate in Buddhist Studies, SOAS, University of London
Conveying not Chronicling: Symbolic Reinterpretation and Functional Transformation of Religious Stone Stelae in Medieval China (CE 386-535)
Beginning in the late fourth century, a new type of stone stelae appearedamong indigenous communities for religious purposes. Nevertheless, different from their preceding counterparts which recorded either governmental decrees or biographical sketches, these stelae, in terms of epigraphical sources, inscribed only a section of dedicatory prayers, informing us of the wishes of the lay patrons of stelae at that time. Such a transformation in functional context is significant in a way that it implied not only the zeitgeist of the time but also a heterogeneous interpretation of stone as a medium of representation, or more specifically, a rediscovery of stone as a functional medium in a religious framework. Despite the fact that the rationales behind the transformation are complicated in nature, this paper aspires to propose a new dimension to the discussion by referring directly to the stele inscriptions. In light of the fact that stone was no longer considered as a material documentary agent but a transparent narrative medium, through which patrons could convey their wishes directly, probably by means of chanting and praying, to celestial deities in accessing the divine realm. By adopting such an approach, this paper contends that the symbolic interpretation of stelae should be perceived as a crucial factor accounting for the functional transformation of the medium.