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Drawing on a vast array of scholarship, this pioneering text illustrates how profoundly astronomical phenomena shaped ancient Chinese civilization.
This book is an investigation on the prehistoric origins and early historic development of Chinese writing, with a focus on archaeological material.
Chinese, one of the oldest active languages, evolved over 5,000 years. As such, it makes for a fascinating case study in the development of language. This cultural history of Chinese demonstrates that the language grew and responded to its music and visual expression in a manner very similar to contemporary English and other Western languages. Within Chinese cultural history lie the answers to numerous questions that have haunted scholars for decades: How does language relate to worldview? What would happen to law after its language loses absolute binding power? How do music, visual, and theatrical images influence literature? By presenting Chinese not as a system of signs but as the history of a community, this study shows how language has expanded the scope of Chinese imagination and offers a glimpse into the future of younger languages throughout the world.
This richly illustrated book provides a glimpse into the belief system and the material wealth of the social elite in pre-Imperial China through a close analysis of tomb contents and excavated bamboo texts. The point of departure is the textual and material evidence found in one tomb of an elite man buried in 316 BCE near a once wealthy middle Yangzi River valley metropolis. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of cosmological symbolism and the nature of the spirit world. The author shows how illness and death were perceived as steps in a spiritual journey from one realm into another. Transmitted textual records are compared with excavated texts. The layout and contents of this multi-ch...
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a cornerstone technology, transforming how we interact with information and redefining the boundaries of artificial intelligence. LLMs offer an unprecedented ability to understand, generate, and interact with human language in an intuitive and insightful manner, leading to transformative applications across domains like content creation, chatbots, search engines, and research tools. While fascinating, the complex workings of LLMs -- their intricate architecture, underlying algorithms, and ethical considerations -- require thorough exploration, creating a need for a comprehensive book on this subject. This book provides an authoritative exploration...
A monumental illustrated survey of the architecture of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century China The Yuan dynasty endured for a century, leaving behind an architectural legacy without equal, from palaces, temples, and pagodas to pavilions, tombs, and stages. With a history enlivened by the likes of Khubilai Khan and Marco Polo, this spectacular empire spanned the breadth of China and far, far beyond, but its rulers were Mongols. Yuan presents the first comprehensive study in English of the architecture of China under Mongol rule. In this richly illustrated book, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt looks at cities such as the legendary Shangdu—inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu—as we...
A Companion to Chinese Archaeology is an unprecedented, new resource on the current state of archaeological research in one of the world’s oldest civilizations. It presents a collection of readings from leading archaeologists in China and elsewhere that provide diverse interpretations about social and economic organization during the Neolithic period and early Bronze Age. An unprecedented collection of original contributions from international scholars and collaborative archaeological teams conducting research on the Chinese mainland and Taiwan Makes available for the first time in English the work of leading archaeologists in China Provides a comprehensive view of research in key geographic regions of China Offers diverse methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding China’s past, beginning with the era of established agricultural villages from c. 7000 B.C. through to the end of the Shang dynastic period in c. 1045 B.C.
tionsalso,apartfromsignalprocessing,withother?eldssuchasstatisticsandarti?cial neuralnetworks. As long as we can ?nd a system that emits signals propagated through a mean, andthosesignalsarereceivedbyasetofsensorsandthereisaninterestinrecovering the originalsources,we have a potential?eld ofapplication forBSS and ICA. Inside thatwiderangeofapplicationswecan?nd,forinstance:noisereductionapplications, biomedicalapplications,audiosystems,telecommunications,andmanyothers. This volume comes out just 20 years after the ?rst contributionsin ICA and BSS 1 appeared . Thereinafter,the numberof research groupsworking in ICA and BSS has been constantly growing, so that nowadays we can estimate that far more than 100 groupsareresearchinginthese?elds. Asproofoftherecognitionamongthescienti?ccommunityofICAandBSSdev- opmentstherehavebeennumerousspecialsessionsandspecialissuesinseveralwell- 1 J.Herault, B.Ans,“Circuits neuronaux à synapses modi?ables: décodage de messages c- posites para apprentissage non supervise”, C.R. de l'Académie des Sciences, vol. 299, no. III-13,pp.525–528,1984.
Drawing on history of science and philosophy of knowledge, this wide-ranging collection of essays on varieties of diagram, schema, technical illustration and chart offers a challenging new interpretation of technical knowledge in Chinese thought and practice.