Oldest Chinese 'celestial book' discovered

Pieces of the earliest known Ancient Chinese astronomical calendar in book form have been found in near perfect condition in a tomb in the Chongqing Municipality in southwest-central China. They represent a significant technical development in Chinese civilization. The cache comprises of 23 individual long, narrow strips of thin wood. Archaeologist Wang Meng told the Global Times: “We speculate that all those individual slips were all bound together.” Recognized as mudu, each slip bears handwritten characters painted in ink with a brush. Archaeologists were able to identify characters relating to the Chinese Tiangan Dizhi (‘Sexagenary Cycle’ or ‘Ten Heavenly Stems and Twelve Earthly Branches’). This ancient cyclical time-measuring system uses 22 characters: ten Chinese characters are used as ordinals and another twelve characters are used to divide a day into…

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Ancient History (Digital) - 1 Issue, AH 48

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