The major museums in the country have their own treasures of the town hall, full of dazzling and exquisite products. This column will show you the story behind the cultural relics and uncover the unsolved mysteries.
More than 3,000 years ago, on the south bank of the Huan River in the northwest of present-day Anyang City, Henan Province, there was a huge palace complex.
From the 14th century BC, when the Shang king Pan Geng moved the capital from Yan (Qufu, Shandong) to Yin (Anyang, Henan), it was the capital of the Yin Shang Dynasty until 1046 BC, when the last monarch of the Shang Dynasty, Emperor Xin, was defeated by King Wu of Zhou, and the Capital of Yin was abandoned and became the "Ruins of Yin".
Fortunately, that glorious history of yin merchants has been left on the bones of tortoise shells and beasts by an ancient and peculiar text.
This font is small, strong, rigorously structured, dense and orderly text, and is called "oracle bone" and "deed" because it is engraved on the oracle bone; and because it comes from Yin Ruins, it is also known as "Yin Qi" or "Yin Ruins Script".
Why did the Shang Dynasty engrave words on the oracle bones? This also begins with the zhenbu ji fierce behavior that occupies an important position in the Yin Shang civilization.
Ancient ancestors lacked sufficient understanding of the development of things and could only use the signs of nature to guide action.
But the signs of nature are not common, and people artificially investigate and speculate. The use of tortoise shells and animal bones to prove the auspiciousness was the most popular kind of divination at that time.
In the Shang Dynasty, from the Shang kings to the nobles, from the major events of the state to the private life, such as sacrifice, conquest, hunting, climate, harvest, sick, childbirth, going out, etc., almost everything must be predicted. The imperial court also had special institutions and officials and zhenren.
Each time Zhenbu ends, it is inscribed on the oracle bone, covering all aspects of Shang society.
Therefore, these oracle bones inscribed with zhenbu words were finally used as national archives and piled up in the cellar to preserve.
After the fall of the Shang Dynasty, these tortoiseshell and beast bones that recorded the Yin Shang civilization were also "lost in the haze of the country", and were annihilated in the thick loess of the Yin Ruins with the torrent of history.
In the autumn of the twenty-fifth year of the Qing Dynasty (1899), Yi Rong, the king of guozijian, occasionally fell ill with malaria and sent someone to Buy back a piece of traditional Chinese medicine at Daren hall at the mouth of the vegetable market outside Xuanwu Gate.
He was surprised to find that the Chinese medicine named "dragon bone" was engraved with strange symbols.
The so-called "keel" is the skeleton fossil of ancient mammals, which is used in medicine because it has the effect of calming the mind, calming the liver and sun, and fixing astringent astringency.
How can there be such a complex depiction of fossilized bones? Wang Yirong, who had studied the Jinshi script, immediately realized that this was probably an ancient script.
In order to find more research material, he immediately ordered someone to go to the pharmacy and buy back all the keels engraved with written symbols.
Unfortunately, before Wang Yirong could do any further research, the Eight-Nation Alliance approached Beijing, and Empress Dowager Cixi led the imperial family to flee in a hurry, and as an official of the imperial court, he was reluctant to live secretly, so he and his daughter-in-law threw herself into the well and was martyred.
After that, Wang Yirong's collection of oracle bones was transferred to his former friend Liu Hu.
In 1903, Liu Hu printed the oracle bone collection into the book "Iron Cloud Hidden Turtle", and the oracle bone materials were published for the first time.
Oracle has caused a sensation in academia, and people have joined the ranks of collecting oracle bones. The keel, which was originally sold only as a Chinese medicinal material, suddenly became worth a hundred times.
However, in order to monopolize the source of money, antique dealers deliberately conceal the source. It was not until 1908 that people visited the area of Xiaotun Village, which was excavated in Anyang, Henan Province.
By this time, a large number of oracle bones had been dug up from the fields by local farmers, sold as keels for six yuan a catty to the local Zhangdefu Chinese medicine shop, and were transferred to the Chinese medicine distribution center in Qizhou (present-day Anguo City, Hebei Province) and flowed to the whole country.
As a result, countless Historical Materials of the Shang Dynasty were ground into medicinal powder and eaten into the stomach. This deplorable past has been called "the history of human swallowing business" by later generations.
Fortunately, the oracle bones left by Yin Shang are massive, and more oracle bones are constantly being excavated.
According to the statistics of the late oracle osteologist Hu Houxuan, since 1899, a total of more than 154,600 pieces of oracle bones have been excavated, and there are more than 4,500 words inscribed on these oracle bones, of which about 2,500 words have been interpreted.
These characters have the methods of "pictograms, meanings, sounds, pointing, transposition, and false borrowing", which fully demonstrate the unique charm of Chinese characters.
Nowadays, in the Yin Ruins Museum in Anyang, Henan, there are a number of such oracle bone cultural relics.
In 1973, the Anyang Task Force of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences excavated tens of thousands of pieces of Bujia and Bu bones in the excavation of the southern part of Xiaotun Village in Anyang, of which 5335 pieces of oracle bones were inscribed, which were collectively known as "Xiaotun Nandi Oracle Bones".
Most of these oracle bones are small pieces, and the "XiaotunNandi Oracle" numbered 2172 introduced in this issue is one of the most precious and large broken oracle bones, which is equivalent to about one-third of the area of the complete ox shoulder blade.
There are 93 inscriptions inscribed on this oracle bone, including a passage that is repeated 11 times- "Xin Ugly Bu Zhen Wang Qitian", which clearly records the divination story of such a Shang king before he went out hunting:
It was a day of ugly days in the Shang Dynasty, and the Shang King planned to go out hunting. The virgin in charge of divination, as was customary, immediately took action.
He first took a piece of beef bone from the warehouse that had been drilled and polished in advance, and then used a section of red-hot branches to roast it in the place where it had been drilled.
After a while, with a "crackling" sound, the surface of the cow bone cracked out a "Bu" shaped crack.
The Zhenren carefully judged the auspiciousness according to the sign of this auspicious sign, and then engraved the divination deed near the bu zhao on the bone of the cow, and filled the engraved text with paint.
The discovery of the oracle bone and the resulting excavation of the Yin Ruins are of epoch-making significance for Chinese archaeology, which has led historians on the mainland to shift from studying inscriptions and bronze inscriptions only in the study of books in the past to archaeological excavations in the field.
The oracle bone has become the earliest documentary record found in China, which has had a profound impact on the study of the history, philology and archaeology of Chinese civilization.
In 1979, this piece of Shang Dynasty ox shoulder blade oracle bone with clear text and beautiful appearance in the Yin Xu Museum was included in the history textbook of the middle school in the form of color pictures, so that countless young students witnessed the beauty and brilliance of the oracle bones and felt the profundity of the history of Chinese civilization for thousands of years.
Yin Xu Museum is located in an anyang City, Henan Province, Yin Xu Road North Section of Yin Xu Palace Ancestral Temple site, completed in 2005, focusing on the display of Yin Ruins excavated cultural relics, including Shang Dynasty pottery, bronze, jade, oracle bones and other nearly a thousand exhibits, is currently the only more professional, systematic display of Shang Dynasty cultural relics museum, with a high academic level.
Producer | First of all, Hongming
Edit | Yu Xin
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