Academic forum opens page to ancient civilizations

The formation and development of early text in major ancient civilizations was highlighted at an academic forum that kicked off on the Suzhou Campus of Renmin University of China in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, on Wednesday.

Themed on "From Practices to Things: First Books in the Ancient World", the forum was part of RUC's China-Europe Civilization Forum mechanism, a high-level academic dialogue platform in collaboration with partner universities abroad.

The two-day event hosted participants from Princeton University, the University of Chicago and Columbia University in the United States, the University of Oxford and Durham University in the United Kingdom and Germany's Free University of Berlin, along with Chinese scholars from Fudan University, Nanjing University, Renmin University of China and Jingzhou Museum of Hubei province, among others.

The experts traced the origins of books from multiple ancient civilizations, such as Greece, Rome, Egypt, Sumeria and China, regarding the social and cultural atmosphere, knowledge practices, participants, materials and mediums that facilitated the formation of diverse textual cultures.

Sinologist Martin Kern, a professor at Princeton University and co-director of RUC's International Center for the Study of Ancient Text Cultures, pointed out in his report that the book culture of China dates back to the fifth century BC and emerged with social practices such as philosophical debate, poetry performances, historical anecdotes, royal speeches and political remonstrances.

These shorter texts were later compiled into larger anthologies of anonymous individual texts, giving rise to the country's earliest book culture which prioritized compilation and annotation over authorship, interpretation and commentary over the written text itself.

John Baines, professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Oxford, discussed how the initial writing system of ancient Egypt, as a method of display, marking and notation, evolved into continuous language and texts.

Glenn Most, a professor of Greek philology at Italy's Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, pointed out that ancient Greeks identified works of natural philosophy by Pherecydes and Anaximander as the earliest Greek books rather than poetic epics of Homer and Hesiod.