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‘writing’. The Greeks were fascinated by language, both their own and language in general. In the fourth century B.C.E. , Philitas of Cos—an Alexandrian Greek scholar and poet, famous in his day as an early type of the absent-minded professor—pulled together the Átaktoi glôssai , or “Miscellaneous Glosses,” and a few centuries later, Apollonius the Sophist compiled the Lexeis Homerikai , the first comprehensive dictionary of words found in Homer. Aristophanes of Byzantium, the librarian at Alexandria starting around 195 B.C.E. , created a major lexicon, and the fifth-century- C.E. lexicon by Hesychius is valuable for containing the only surviving evidence of some Greek words. 4

    Some of the most interesting early dictionaries, though, are not from Babylon or Greece but from China. A work called Shizhou existed as early as the ninth century B.C.E. , but it does not survive, and little is known of it beyond the title. The Erya or Erh-ya , though, written in China probably in the third century B.C.E. , is the oldest surviving dictionary of the Chinese language, containing glosses on just over 4,300 words drawn from early Chinese literature. The title means something like “approaching what is correct, proper, refined,” and it is sometimes called Approaching Elegance , sometimes The Ready Guide . Heming Yong and Jing Peng describe its “remarkable position in the history of philological and linguistic studies in China”:

    It is the first work of exegetic studies conducted on a systematic basis and the first thesaurus dictionary of an encyclopedic nature. It aims to explain the meaning of ancient words and a great variety of object names and serves as the starting point from which other classic works can be justifiably interpreted. That partly explains why [ Erya ] has always been placed into the category of ancient Chinese classics rather than ancient Chinese dictionaries. 5

    Its background is murky; the identity of the writer or writers is unknown, as is even the century in which he, she, or they worked. (Tradition says the author was the Duke of Zhou, but so many things are attributed to this semilegendary figure, including the I Ching and the earliest Chinese classical music, that we should be skeptical of all such attributions.) Most experts agree, though, that it was written by a Confucian scholar sometime between the eighth and second centuries B.C.E. 6
    The Erya set out to explain the words in old Chinese literature—old even when the dictionary was compiled. The Qin Dynasty, which began in 221 B.C.E. , was the first of the imperial dynasties in China. But the literature of the long Zhou Dynasty (1046 to 256 B.C.E. ), from before the unification of China, was of particular interest. In the Confucian bureaucracy, the way to climb through the ranks of both the government and the larger society was to pass examinations on classic works of literature. Aspiring civil servants knew that their promotion depended on access to good dictionaries. Dictionaries were classified among the hsiao-hsüeh ‘minor learning’ rather than ta-hsüeh ‘major learning’, and major learning, as they understood it, had moral implications. But even the minor learning, which covered more or less the same territory as the modern word “linguistics,” remained an essential step on the way to the better life. And so the Erya became an important work, sitting on the boundary between high culture and official culture.
    The Chinese language lacks an alphabet, and the logographical system does not have any obvious equivalent to alphabetical order. For a long time Chinese dictionaries have been ordered according to either the “radicals” (basic strokes) of the Chinese characters or the tones and final sounds of the spoken words. Around 100 C.E. , for instance,Xu Shen composed his Shuowen jiezi , a collection of 10,516 characters organized under 540 headers, one for each “radical” or basis to a written word. It deserves to