Lost in Lualand

Posted by Victor Mair

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Talk in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania:

"The Calendarized Onomasticon and the Arrival of Birthday Celebration from the Ancient Near East to China", by Sanping Chen, author of Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages

Dr. Chen's talk will be Wednesday, February 25th from 12:00 – 2:00pm in the Wolf Humanities Conference Room (WILL 623).

Abstract

Today most Chinese celebrate the annual return of their birthday just like people elsewhere. However, this was not the case prior to the medieval era. There were insurmountable obstacles, both technical and ideological, to this practice in ancient China, some of which remains true to this day. We then discuss the religious and political elements of birthday celebration in the Ancient Near East starting with the Book of Genesis, especially the notion that it was an occasion to highlight the relationship to one’s guardian deity, and that it became an important part of royal cults, most prominently in the Roman Empire. As observed by Herodotus and Plato, the ancient Iranians had apparently inherited this tradition after their conquests in the ANE.

In the early medieval era, the old Chinese heartlands were conquered by various nomadic groups, culminating in the final domination of the Tuoba Northern dynasties and attracting a large number of “assistant conquerors,” mostly Iranian-speaking, from Central Asia and beyond. The new masters of northern China were quick to pick up birthday celebration in their royal cult. Meanwhile, the Chinese nomenclature underwent a process of “Iranization,” introducing heavy religious elements to an originally secular onomasticon. An important component of this transformation was the calendarization of personal names, which in the pre-Islamic, largely Zoroastrian, Iranian cultural world symbolized the religious importance of one’s birthday. These calendric onomastic data help reveal how the general Chinese population adopted the arguably ANE institution of birthday celebration. The Taoist notion of benming 本命, “natal destiny,” roughly the equivalent of the ancient Greek daemon and the Roman genius, was an associated outcome. The whole process was facilitated in no small scale by the loss of cultural dominance of the traditional Confucian elite under the Tuoba and their Sui and Tang heirs.

Selected readings

• "'Happy Birthday' melody formed from tones" (11/5/22)
• "Dunhuang mania nominum" (1/3/26)

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