雲夢睡虎地出土秦律の性格をめぐって

Abstract

The bamboo slips discovered from tomb no. 11 in the Shuihudi 睡虎地 area, Yunmeng 雲夢 County (in Hubei 湖北 Province) have particularly drawn attention since their excavation, due to their incorporation of Qin 秦 laws. Two of those texts, with the present titles "Eighteen Kinds of Qin Laws" (Qinlu shibazhong 秦律十八種) and "Checks and Controls" (xiaolu 效律) are collections of statutes related to the administration system of the governmental offices, but it is still premature to say that the character of their content has been clarified. In the "Checks and Controls", regulations concerning the xiao 效 (material inspection) for the local and metropolitan officials (xian, duguan 縣, 都官), articles of the "Statutes on Granaries" (canglu 倉律) from the "Eighteen Kinds of Qin Laws "are almost incorporated in verbatim. From this fact one can suppose that the "Checks and Controls" were statutes for the xiao, common to all governmental offices, newly compiled after the formation of the canglu, which are statutes for a specific government office. Therefore we can conclude that there are at least two stages in the formation of Qin laws. Furthermore, judging from the incorporation of the law texts, we can conjecture that in the formation of Qin legislation established law texts were preserved without any change. The "Eighteen Kinds of Qin Laws" is a fragmentary compilation of eighteen kinds of laws, but observing the circumstances in which they were excavated, we can conclude that they are probably a compilation originally made for a specific purpose. If we examine the text of the articles, readjusting and classifying it from their administrative content, we find one coherent part which is a collection of administrative duties, and one can consider this part as a group of articles concerning the governmental duties completed within one governmental office. Furthermore, in the text are sections where it is clearly indicated that they are stipulations for local and metropolitan officials, and the same holds true for the regulations in the other, incoherent part. Consequently, both the "Eighteen Kinds of Qin Laws" and the "Checks and Controls" are probably books with excerpts from various laws concerning the administration by local and metropolitan officials. The two works mentioned above are books collected to be applied to the counties under the jurisdiction of the Nan 南 Commandery in Qin times, judging from their excavation site and the official record of the person buried with them. However, in these texts are often incorporated parts about the metropolitan officials who belonged to the Central Government, and the Counties of the Neishi 内史 (a kind of land peculiar to Qin), and it is implausible that these regulations applied without any change to local officials. I think that this point has some relationship to the way the Qin commanderies were established. In regional commanderies laws had to be applied as an ideal standard, and I am inclined to think that the Governors' right of decision-making was widely acknowledged.