The Epigraphic Archive of Early Japan: Kariya Ekisai’s Inscriptions of the Ancient Capital (1818) and Its 20th-Century Sequel

An archive of inscriptions on stone and metal from early Japan (7th and 8th centuries CE) was first established by the antiquarian and philologist Kariya Ekisai (1775‐1835), who edited an annotated compendium of such texts, Inscriptions of the Ancient Capital (Kokyō ibun), in 1818.  Coming at the tail end of a two-century-long renaissance in the study of Japanese antiquity, this work joined a number of proto-archaeological treatises by collectors and aficionados who had inaugurated serious scholarly consideration of the physical artifacts of the distant past.  As a philologist, Ekisai focused on the texts of the inscriptions in his commentaries, but he also considered the provenance and physical conditions of the objects that bore them: stelae, cinerary urns, Buddhist images, and so on.  Nearly a century later, in 1912, the linguist Yamada Yoshio (1875-1958) and the metalworker Katori Hotsuma (1874-1954) augmented this collection with their Inscriptions of the Ancient Capital Continued (Zoku kokyō ibun), printed along with an edition of Ekisai’s earlier work.  Taken together these two books remain, even today, the fundamental instantiation of the epigraphic archive of pre-Heian Japan, but they showcase radically different conceptions of scholarship and its audiences, and also contrasting technologies of reproduction (manuscript versus moveable type and lithography).  Permanence seems the quintessence of the epigraph, but several of Ekisai’s inscriptions are now lost, and in addition to collecting textual records of other non-extant inscriptions, Yamada and Katori have also been accused of forging one of the best known of their ‘discoveries.’  Through an examination of the tangled history of these collections, this paper considers the contingency and fragility of even the most ancient archives.