| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 中國文學系所 === 105 === Stone relief of Han dynasty was a comprehensive way of expression, which not only reflected the social culture of Han, but also revealed a mythological world full of Han people’s imagination and desire. The subjects used in Han’s stone relief were all-inclusive, on which depicted Han people’s daily life, social manner, thought, custom and belief. The thriving and prosperous Han dynasty was able to recurrence on those stone and brick reliefs. Han people lived a joyful life, and wished to have an equally joyful afterlife; no matter alive or dead, they pursued hope and fantasy. Han dynasty lasted over four hundred years, everything such from social life, mythological belief to funeral custom under this feudal society structure were carved gloriously on reliefs that found inside the tombs. Bird was one of the mostly used symbols of stone relief, which repeatedly appeared in reliefs such as ” Yi Shot Down the Suns”, ” The bird fly with the sun”, ”The three-legs crow stands by the Queen Mother of the West ”, ” Chinese Phoenix”, etc. Among these reliefs, bird often came along with the sun; hence the main research focus of this thesis falls on the composition of sunbird. This thesis comprised three sections, which all in relation to sunbird mythology. The first section based on “Yi Shot Down the Suns”, and tried to exploit the meaning of “Yi Shot Down the Suns” of Han dynasty by investigating the composition arrangement of the tree, bird and shooter. The second section focused on the sunbird appeared with Xi-he and Fu-xi, by comparing the archaeological finds of the Neolithic Age, Qin and Han dynasty and the descriptions in classical literatures to analyze how did sunbird transit from the Warring States to Han dynasty. The last section focused on sunbird mythology of the “three-legged crow” that always came along with the Queen Mother of the West. Finding the connections among the Queen Mother of the West, bird messenger of Queen Mother of the West and three-legged bird from classical literatures, and investigated the composition arrangement of the Queen Mother of the West and three-legged crow and the sunbird mythology of Han that derived from three-legged crow. Literary anthropology leads the mainstream of contemporary mythology research, interpreting the original meanings of primitive art, such as paintings, carvings and antiquities by scientific methods and bringing broader research space for literature study. This thesis applied the investigation method of literary anthropology to study the images on those archaeological stone reliefs, and tried to reinterpret the meanings of sunbird from ancient times to Han dynasty by exploiting their composition arrangements in hopes of getting back the fragments of the long-forgotten sunbird mythology.
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