The writing of a late western Zhou bronze inscription

In January, 2003, a cache of twenty-seven inscribed bronze vessels was discovered at Yangjiacun, Meixian, Shaanxi. The vessels belonged to a single family, the Shan family, and most of them probably to a single individual, named Qiu, who held the official title of Warden. The vessels include three very long inscriptions, one on a pan with 373 characters, which provides a sketch narrative history of the Western Zhou dynasty, and two on ding with 281 and 316 characters, the latter two dated to the forty-second and forty-third years of a reign that is certainly that of Zhou Xuan Wang (r. 827-782 B.C.). The inscriptions provide evidence concerning numerous issues in late Western Zhou history. However, this paper focuses on how the inscriptions were composed. They were stimulated first by a (ming shu) written on bamboo strips in advance of a court investiture ceremony and issued therein by the king to the investee, in this case Qiu. The investee then quoted and/or paraphrased this command document in preparing the inscription to be cast into the bronze vessel, adding to it a dedicatory prayer. In the case of the lengthy Qiu pan inscription, he may also have referred to a saga or sagas of the Zhou kings and also textual materials in his own ancestral temple. By examining evidence of the compositional process, we can deduce something about the sorts of literary sources available at the time.