Historical Materials No.63
THE WOODEN TABLETS FROM THE NARA PALACE SITE VI
English Summary
NARA, 2004
PUBLICATIONS ON HISTORICAL MATERIALS, VOLUME LXIII, SUPPLEMENTUM
English Summary
This report has been compiled as the sixth collection in a series, following Wooden Tablets from the Nara Palace, Volume 5. The current volume treats mokkan (wooden tablets) unearthed in the Supplementary Excavation of the 32nd Archaeological Investigation, conducted in 1966 in the southeast corner of the Nara palace site, those unearthed to the south and west of this area in the 155th Archaeological Investigation conducted at palace’s southern side in 1984, those unearthed in 1991 in the 222nd Investigation, bordering the 32nd Investigation’s Supplementary Excavation precinct’s western and the 155th precinct’s northern sides, and those from the 273rd Archaeological Investigation, conducted in 1996 in the region directly across the Kintetsu railway line on the north side of the 32nd Investigation’s Supplementary Excavation precinct.
1 Excavations and features yielding mokkan
The current volume completes the reports on mokkan unearthed from the 32nd Investigation’s Supplementary Excavation, following those already made in Wooden Tablets from the Nara Palace, Volumes 4-5. Of the mokkan from Ditch SD 4100, running east-west along the inner side of the southern segment of the Great Wall surrounding the palace, items from Sectors CJ67-69, representing the westernmost eight meters of the excavation precinct, are covered.
Mokkan were recovered from four features in the 155th Archaeological Investigation. First is the upstream portion of east-west Ditch SD 4100, extending west from where it was detected in the 32nd Investigation’s Supplementary Excavation. Second is the north-south Ditch SD 11640, which splits off from SD 4100 as an open ditch, cutting through a break in the southern segment of the Great Wall, and flows into the gutter on the north side of Second Street (SD 1250). The third feature is the Second Street northern gutter SD 1250, on the southern side of the palace. Mokkan recovered in the 32nd Investigation’s Supplementary Excavation from SD 1250 were taken up in Volume 3 of Wooden Tablets from the Nara Palace, and the current volume treats those items from the approximately ninety meters extending to the west. With regard to artifacts from the point of confluence of the southern end of SD 11640 with SD 1250, because their relations with SD 11640 are prominent, these items are introduced as deriving from the conjunction of the two ditches. The fourth feature is the main drainage Ditch SD 3410, flowing north-south along the western side of the eastern segment of the Great Wall. Regarding mokkan recovered from SD 3410, those unearthed in the 32nd Archaeological Investigation were taken up in Volume 3 of Wooden Tablets from the Nara Palace, those from the 32nd Investigation’s Supplementary Excavation in Volume 4, and the current volume treats those from the approximately six-meter section of the ditch lying between these two excavation precincts.
In the 222nd Archaeological Investigation, mokkan were recovered from the hole dug in order to remove the frame lining a well, SE 14690, belonging to the Ministry of Personnel Affairs (lower strata, Ministry of Personnel Affairs East Government Office Complex) in the first half of the Nara period.
In the 273rd Archaeological Investigation, mokkan were recovered from within the well shaft, and from the hole dug in removing the upper portion of the frame lining well SE 17505, and from the hole dug in order to remove the frame lining well SE 17488, in the East Precinct of the Council of Religious Affairs (upper strata, Ministry of Personnel Affairs East Government Office Complex).
2 Summary of the recovered mokkan
(1) Supplementary Excavation of the 32nd Archaeological Investigation
Ditch SD 4100. This is a cache of mokkan related to the tasks, conducted in the Ministry of Personnel Affairs, of personnel evaluation and selection for promotion. There are nearly one hundred items bearing dates, with the oldest being Wado 4 (711 AD, item No. 8522), Reiki 2 (716, No. 8625), and one thought to be Yoro 1 (717, No. 8522). As items united in terms of content there are tags for shokurosen (monetary payments made in lieu of actual bureaucratic service performed, to qualify the worker for personnel evaluation), dating from the Jinki era (724-729) and centering on Jinki 5 (Nos. 9058-9069), though items of this type are especially numerous in the Jingo Keiun era (767-770), with the latest from the first year of the Hoki era (770). For the mokkan from Sector CJ67 reported in this volume, however, while they are also comprised mainly of shavings from personnel evaluations connected with the Ministry of Personnel Affairs, there are striking differences from those found from Sectors CJ66 eastward, reported in Wooden Tablets from the Nara Palace. Volumes 4-5 (see section 4. below).
(2) 155th Archaeological Investigation
Ditch SD 4100. With the exception of one item from the ancient province of Awa under the gori (four-tiered administrative) system (No. 9071), all of the mokkan were unearthed from the western extremity of the excavation precinct at the conjunction with north-south Ditch SD 11620, flowing in from the north. They should probably be regarded as artifacts belonging to SD 11620, rather than SD 4100. While there are no mokkan bearing dates, among items worthy of note there are a summons (No. 8499) from the bureau supervising sanni (holders of Court ranks not serving any bureaucratic posts), a performance evaluation of a page in the Ministry of Military Affairs (No. 8616), catalogs of documents recording the results of work evaluations (Nos. 8524 and 8525), etc. Although SD 11620 was the eastern gutter to a road within the Nara palace, running between the Ministry of Personnel Affairs and its East Government Office Complex during the latter part of the Nara period, it was also the rain gutter on the western side of the earthen wall surrounding the Ministry of Personnel Affairs (lower strata, Ministry of Personnel Affairs East Government Office Complex) in the first part of the Nara period, and these items are regarded as artifacts related to the Ministry during the first part of the period.
Ditch SD 11640. This is a cache of mokkan related to the Ministry of Personnel Affairs in the first part of the Nara period. Dates seen in these items are Reiki 2 (716. No. 10146), Yoro 7 (723, No. 9884), Jinki 2 (725, Nos. 9887 and 10006), Jinki 4 (No. 10005), and Jinki 5 (Nos. 9883 and 9977), and include shipping labels made under the gori system. As mokkan worthy of note there are completely intact scroll axles, one each from the provinces of Dewa and Higo (Nos. 9883 and 9884), and tags for documents recording the results of work evaluations (Nos. 9886 and 9887), etc. Also, two tags for shokurosen payments were found (Nos. 10005 and 10006), both from the same Jinki era as the large number of similar tags unearthed together in Sector CJ67 of SD 4100.
The southeastern corner of the palace precinct is thought to have been a place where water collected in large volumes, and conduits frequently overflowed. For that reason, during the period of rebuilding the Ministry of Personnel Affairs, it is thought that the open conduit SD 11640 was made as a temporary bypass cutting through the Great Wall (the open conduit SD 17650 has been found in similar fashion on the eastern segment of the Great Wall), in order to reduce by however little the amount of water amassing in the palace’s southeastern corner. At the end of the reconstruction the open conduit was filled in. and the break in the Great Wall probably repaired.
Ditch SD 1250. Whereas one example bears a date from the Enryaku era (782-806), mokkan from this feature include items from under the ri (three-tiered administrative) system (No. 10243) as well as the later gori system (Nos. 10239, 10244. and 10247), and thus encompass artifacts from across the entire Nara period. Three shipping labels (Nos. 10240-10242) from the district of Katsuta in the province of Mimaska, under the gori system, for rice paid in lieu of corvee duty that were recovered together, and the recovery of a shaving from a mokkan written as registry of names (No. 10236), showing that not only the person’s name and age, but also height and household head’s name were also recorded, are noteworthy.
Ditch SD 3410. While there are no examples bearing dates, for the 32nd Archaeological Investigation’s precinct, which borders the 155th Investigation’s precinct to the south (downstream), mokkan were recovered from SD 3410 and from its point of confluence with SD 1250, and these were thought to belong to the end of the Nara period (Wooden Tablets from the Nara Palace, Volume 3). Among those were items mentioning food supplied in between regular meals (Nos. 3533 and 3538), and as similar examples were recovered in this investigation (Nos. 10265 and 10266), it is reasonable to regard the current finds as also part of a series of mokkan from the end of the Nara period.
(3) 222nd Archaeological Investigation
Well SE 14690. This well was located within the government office building precinct of the Ministry of Personnel Affairs in the first part of the Nara period, and yielded a cache of mokkan related to the conduct of work evaluations. As for items having clear dates, there are examples from the first year of the Tenpyo era (729, Nos. 10300-10303, 10793) and from the fifth month of Tenpyo 3 (No. 10569), and items recorded with the Jinki era name (Nos. 10794 and 10796). As mokkan indicating their age indirectly, there is one item naming “the late Imperial Princess Kibi” (d. 729, No. 10690), and another in which an administrative post (chinbushi) first established in the eleventh month of Tenpyo 3 is seen (No. 10641), suggesting the possibility that, along with the one mentioned above dating from the fifth month of the same year, it was a shaving related to the conduct of work evaluations in Tenpyo 4. Also, as there are mokkan bearing the names of Imperial Princes Toneri (No. 10691) and Niitabe (No. 10692), these may be regarded as not postdating the year in which they died, Tenpyo 7.
In terms of content, these are mokkan used in the process of conducting work evaluations and promotion decisions in the Ministry of Personnel Affairs for all government bureaucrats, with the bulk being shavings of evaluation and promotion mokkan for officials serving in numerous government offices. This may be called a cache of mokkan having the same content and time span as that recovered from Ditch SD 11640.
Other items worthy of note include a tag for documents recording the results of promotion decisions (No. 10299), an item appearing to be an excerpt from a section of the Taiho legal code pertaining to medical practice (No. 10906), and a shaving (No. 10902) containing the name of a literary work (“Seibo jinkoshu”) known from a Heian period bibliography (Nihonkokugenzaisho mokuroku ) but presumed to have been subsequently lost. But there is also a collection of items not thought to be directly related to the conduct of business in the Ministry of Personnel Affairs. These are shavings showing the names of buildings and the amounts of architectural members and building materials (Nos. 10850-10877), shavings in which numbers of effigies used in religious ceremonies are seen (Nos. 10878-10881), and shavings recording numbers of vases and pots, etc. (Nos. 10883-10885). Giving weight to the fact that these artifacts derive from features within the Ministry of Personnel Affairs East Government Office Complex, it is reasonable to assume they are directly related to the abandonment of the facilities found in the lower strata of that complex.
(4) 273rd Archaeological Investigation
Well SE 17505. While there are no mokkan having dates, an example on which religious offerings of food and drink are thought to have been written (No. 11262), and a shaving believed to have recorded a list of shrine names such as Hyozu shrine (No. 11263) were recovered from within the well shaft, substantiating the inference that this was the locus of the Council of Religious Affairs.
Well SE 17488. Mokkan were recovered from the hole dug in removing the well frame. As for the time period, this well is thought to belong to a government office complex of the Ministry of Personnel Affairs prior to the establishment of the Council of Religious Affairs, but there were no mokkan indicating the nature of this feature.
3 Unearthed mokkan and changes in government office complexes south of the Eastern Palace Sector’s Halls of State Compound
The area in which the mokkan contained in this volume were unearthed is the same area where a large cache of more than ten thousand items, and particularly one including large numbers of shavings, was recovered from the Nara palace site. As mokkan from Ditch SD 4100, which formed the bulk of those items, were work evaluation and promotion mokkan related to the Ministry of Personnel Affairs, it was inferred that the Ministry was located in the region of the palace’s southeastern corner. Later, two government office complexes of the latter part of the Nara period were found placed symmetrically east-west between Mibu gate and the Imperial Assembly Halls compound, and it became clear that the eastern one was the Ministry of Personnel Affairs and the western one the Ministry of Military Affairs, leading to the problem of the locus of recovery of the shavings related to the Ministry of Personnel Affairs not being the Ministry itself but a point south of the office complex adjacent to it on the east (the Ministry of Personnel Affairs East Government Office Complex). But with the recovery of mokkan from well SE 14690 in the eastern complex, it became clear that during the first part of the Nara period the Ministry of Personnel Affairs East Government Office Complex was in fact the Ministry of Personnel Affairs. Further, mokkan recovered from well SE 17505 revealed that after the Ministry moved to the eastern position just inside the Mibu gate, the Council of Religious Affairs was built on its former precinct. Through the progress of excavations conducted at government office complexes on the south side of the Eastern Palace Sector’s Halls of State Compound, as a result of the general picture becoming clear of these government offices which used and discarded the caches of mokkan, it became possible to reinterpret the features and the mokkan as a single entity.
But there are still a number of unresolved problems remaining. What has become clear up to this point includes the following: (1) in conjunction with the abandonment of well SE 14690 around Tenpyo 5 (733), reconstruction was undertaken at the Ministry of Personnel Affairs East Government Office Complex (based on the mokkan recovered from well SE 14690); (2) the Ministry of Personnel Affairs East Government Office Complex continued to be used for a time as an area for conducting the Ministry’s business, after which the Council for Religious Affairs was constructed on the site (mokkan from SD 4100, SE 17505); (3) in the latter half of the Nara period the Ministries of Personnel and Military Affairs were newly built, to the east and west just inside the Mibu gate, as structures standing atop foundation stones. Opinions divide, however, on the actual dates for developments (2) and (3) above. Based on documentary sources it is possible to see (1) and (3) as both occurring around Tenpyo 5, thereby linking all three developments, or taking in other words the Ministry of Personnel Affair’s relocation and the construction of the Council for Religious Affairs as occurring simultaneously and in parallel as the simplest supposition, but the possibilities that the establishment of twin Ministries of Personnel and Military Affairs, atop foundation stones inside the Mibu gate, postdates the Nara capital’s move in Tenpyo 17 (745), or that the construction of the Council for Religious Affairs occurred as late as around the first years of the Hoki era (770-781), may also be considered. These points are related to the problem of the date of the reconstruction work separating the lower and upper strata of the Eastern Palace Sector’s Halls of State Compound, which awaits further examination.
4 Characteristics of evaluation and promotion mokkan related to the Ministry of Personnel Affairs
Even though they were recovered from the same Ditch SD 4100, the mokkan from Sector CJ67 taken up in the current report are from the period extending from the Yoro (717-724) and Jinki (724-729) eras up to the first years of the Tenpyo era (which lasted from 729-749), differing temporally from the mokkan reported for Sector CJ66 and eastward in Wooden Tablets from the Nara Palace, Volumes 4-5, which spanned the Jingo Keiun years to the first year of the Hoki era (the period 767-770), and thus the current items are seen to be linked with the mokkan from Ditch SD 11640, also contained in this report. These Ministry of Personnel Affairs mokkan from the Yoro and Jinki years up to the Tenpyo era exhibit strong similarities in content and age with those recovered from well SE 14690 within the same Ministry, which very likely form part of a single group. Accordingly, in the discussion below the items from Sector CJ66 and eastward of Ditch SD 4100, spanning the Jingo Keiun years to the first year of the Hold era, are referred to as Group A, and those from Sector CJ67, and features SD 11640 and SE 14690, are all referred to as Group B.
Both Groups A and B are mokkan used in the conduct of business within the Ministry of Personnel Affairs, but whereas Group A items are related to personnel matters (evaluations and promotions) of bureaucrats of the Ministry of Personnel Affairs itself, there is a striking difference with Group B, which are mokkan related to personnel matters for the bureaucracy as a whole. This is plainly indicated by the inclusion in the former group of numerous evaluation and promotion mokkan for low-ranking bureaucrats under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Personnel Affairs, such as holders of shadow ranks and persons who have passed the qualifying examination but have yet to be assigned a post. In other words, whereas the items in Group A are related to the conduct of personnel matters within the Ministry itself, Group B comprises mokkan related to the processing of evaluation and promotion records for bureaucrats of the sixth rank and below, records produced by every government agency including the Ministry and then gathered at the Ministry of Personnel Affairs, so that even while both groups are Ministry mokkan related to personnel matters, it is believed that the two groups were used in entirely different situations. In contrast to the widespread production in government offices outside the Ministry of Personnel Affairs assumed for mokkan belonging to Group A, those of Group B accompanied the unique processing on the part of the Ministry of records of the results of evaluations and promotion decisions, assembled at the Ministry and predicated on the production of Group A items on the part of various government agencies.
In this manner it is presumed that mokkan Groups A and B, both related to personnel matters, differed not only in their ages but also in the situations in which they were used. It is expected that items like those of Group A were without question made at every government office (the promotion and evaluation mokkan among those of the Prince Nagaya Mansion cache being one example), and their recovery from government offices other than the Ministry of Personnel Affairs may be fully anticipated in the future. And with the increase in similar examples of this type, further examinations of their nature are awaited.
CONTENTS
page
Preface 3
Table of Contents 5
List of Illustrations and Tables 7
Index to Plates 8
Explanatory Notes 14
General Text
Chapter I Introduction 3
Chapter II Archaeological features yielding mokkan 10
1) Features discovered in the Supplementary Excavation of the 32nd Archaeological Investigation 10
2) Features discovered in the 155th Archaeological Investigation 15
3) Features discovered in the 222nd Archaeological Investigation 26
4) Features discovered in the 273rd Archaeological Investigation 35
Chapter III Unearthed mokkan and changes in government office complexes south of the Eastern Palace Sector’s Halls of State Compound 43
Chapter IV Characteristics of work evaluation mokkan related to the Ministry of Personnel Affairs 56
Transcriptions
Mokkan recovered from Ditch SD 4100 63
Mokkan recovered from Ditch SD 11640 280
Mokkan recovered from the conjunction of Ditches SD 11640 and SD 1250 340
Mokkan recovered from Ditch SD 1250 343
Mokkan recovered from Ditch SD 3410 353
Mokkan recovered from Well SE 14690 358
Mokkan recovered from Well SE 17505 506
Mokkan recovered from Well SE 17488 510
Mokkan of unknown provenance 510
Sectors of Ditch SD 4100 yielding mokkan xxxv
Index xxii
English summary iii
ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Mokkan recovery locations at the Nara Palace 6
2 Government office complexes south of the Eastern Palace Sector’s Halls of State Compound in the latter Nara period and archaeological excavation precincts 8
3 Features discovered in the Supplementary Excavation of the 32nd Archaeological Investigation 12
4 Mokkan discovery locations in the Supplementary Excavation of the 32nd Archaeological Investigation 12
5 Features discovered in the 155th Archaeological Investigation 16
6 Archaeological excavation precincts in the southeast corner of the Nara palace site 20
7 Ditch SD 11640 and mokkan recovery locations 23
8 Ditch SD 11640 in cross-section 23
9 Ditch SD 11640, photographic overview 23
10 Layout of facilities in the area south of the Eastern Palace Sector’s Halls of State Compound 27
11 Features discovered in the 222nd Archaeological Investigation 29
12 Well SE 14690 and mokkan recovery locations 33
13 Well SE 14690 in cross-section 33
14 Well SE 14690, photographic overview 33
15 Changes in features in the Ministry of Personnel Affairs East
二〇〇四年三月三十一日 発行
平城宮木簡六 解説
奈良文化財研究所史料第六十三冊
